The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason

THE teller of strange tales is not the least among benefactors of men. His cup of Lethe is welcome at times even to the strongest, when the tædium vito of the commonplace is in its meridian. To the aching victim of evil fortune, it is ofttimes the divine anaesthetic.

To-day a bitter critic calls down to the storyteller, bidding him turn out with the hewers of wood and the drawers of water, for the reason that there is no new thing, and the pieces with which he seeks to build are ancient and well worn. "At best," he cries, "the great one among you can produce but combinations of the old, some quaint, some monstrous, and all weary." But the writer does not turn out, and the world swings merrily on.

Perhaps the critic forgets that if things are old, men are new; that while the grain field stands fast, the waves passing over it are not one like the other. The new child is the best answer.

The reader is a clever tyrant. He demands something more than people of mist. There must be tendons in the ghost hand, and hard bones in the phantom, else he feels that he has been cheated.

Perhaps, of all things, the human mind loves best the problem. Not the problem of the abacus, but the problem of the chess-board when the pieces are living; the problem with passion and peril in it; with the fresh air of the hills and the salt breath of the sea. It propounds this riddle to the writer: Create mind-children, O Magician, with red blood in their faces, who, by power inherited from you, are enabled to secure the fruits of drudgery, without the drudgery. Nor must the genius of Circumstance help. Make them do what we cannot do, good Magician, but make them of clay as we are. We know all the old methods so well, and we are weary of them. Give us new ones.

Exacting is this taskmaster. It demands that the problem builder cunningly join together the Fancy and the Fact, and thereby enchant and bewilder, but not deceive. It demands all the mighty motives of life in the problem. Thus it happens that the toiler has tramped and retramped the field of crime. Poe and the French writers constructed masterpieces in the early day. Later came the flood of "Detective Stories" until the stomach of the reader failed. Yesterday, Mr. Conan Doyle created Sherlock Holmes, and the public pricked up its ears and listened with interest.

It is significant that the general plan of this kind of tale has never once been changed to any degree. The writers, one and all, have labored, often with great genius, to construct problems in crime, where by acute deduction the criminal and his methods were determined; or, reversing it, they have sought to plan the crime so cunningly as to effectually conceal the criminal and his methods. The intent has always been to baffle the trailer, and when the identity of the criminal was finally revealed, the story ended.

The high ground of the field of crime has not been explored; it has not even been entered. The book-stalls have been filled to weariness with tales based upon plans whereby the detective, or ferreting power of the State might be baffled. But, prodigious marvel! no writer has attempted to construct tales based upon plans whereby the punishing power of the State might be baffled.

The distinction, if one pauses for a moment to consider it, is striking. It is possible, even easy, deliberately to plan crimes so that the criminal agent and the criminal agency cannot be detected. Is it possible to plan and execute wrongs in such a manner that they will have all the effect and all the resulting profit of desperate crimes and yet not be crimes before the law?