Thurber on Crime

Rating:
Summary: Macbeth Murder Mystery makes the whole thing worthwhile
Review: James Thurber, best remembered today as the creator of Walter Mitty, is one of the group of staff writers who earned The New Yorker its reputation as the "greatest magazine in the world, perhaps the best that ever was," as the old commercial used to inform us. There were several different types of writers in that group, the infamously long essays were turned out by folks like Joseph Mitchell and Berton Roueche (my two favorites), while shorter pieces, drawings, poems, etc., were the province of Thurber, Robert Benchley, E. B. White and several other polymaths. Considering the range of his duties, that he was writing for a weekly magazine, and the length of his career (the pieces in this collection span a period from 1929 to 1961), you could probably fill numerous volumes with Thurber's work and indeed there are plenty of collections of his varied output available, many published during his life but many others posthumous.

Though he would not be considered a crime writer, this book happens to be organized around the topic of crime, and that serves to give it a thematic coherence that a random anthology would lack. Included are drawings, stories, and articles that cover a whole range of topics, fiction and nonfiction. Plenty of folks only look at the cartoons in The New Yorker, and if you enjoy that style of humor, you'll enjoy Thurber's drawings. His artwork borders on the amateurish--and since he eventually went blind, it got worse as he went along--but it's certainly distinctive.

Most all of the stories are written with the wry wit for which Thurber was best known--in his Introduction, Donald E. Westlake calls it "gentle comedy." There's an especially good true tale about an employee who stole tens of thousands of dollars from Harold Ross, the magazine's publisher, before being caught. Though ostensibly an attempt to understand the thief, who ended up committing suicide, Thurber turns it into an opportunity to poke fun at Ross.

But far and away the best thing in the book, and one of the best stories I've ever read, is "The Macbeth Murder Mystery." An American woman visiting an English hotel accidentally grabs The Tragedy of Macbeth instead of one of the cheap mysteries she intended. Undaunted, she simply reads the play as a whodunit, and to the narrator's astonishment, decides that the Macbeths are not guilty. Her explanations, full of perfectly rational references to the traditions and conventions of the detective genre, eventually ensnare the narrator and the reader, and when, by the end of the story, he's offered his own solution to the mystery and is ready to take on Hamlet, we too are carried away by the demented logic of the tale.

The book's worth reading for that story alone; the rest is gravy.

GRADE : B+