Crime Stories and the Fiction Question

Mr. Robert F. Ashby's article in the Autumn number on the provision of fiction in libraries encourages us, as consumers who are not librarians, to make a suggestion about the criteria used in selecting from one kind of popular fiction, crime stories. The element of something more than a puzzle and a story has always intrigued us in these books, and our interest in them is now almost exclusively in their discussion of this other factor. So we read crime fiction at random, from the local library; and recently we took the first six thrillers which neither of us had read from the Latest Additions shelf so as deliberately to consider them from this point of view.