CRAZY RHYTHM

"And I gave Henry a subscription to the Book-of-the-Month Club, that tells you the book you have to read every month, to make your individuality stand out. And it really is remarkable, because it makes over 50,000 people read the same book every month." Thus spake Lorelei, in admiration for what she knew to be a Step Upward, and a long, free, women's stride toward Higher Things. Her simple admiration would be even greater had she known that the movement, toward selectivity in contemporary literature had only just begun. In 1927 there was no Crime Club.

The Crime Club is not a drink, a name for Tier 44 in the east wing at Leavenworth, or the latest headline symbolism for the first half of the Yankee batting order. The Crime Club is the Literary Guild idea, restricted, to the less aesthetic paths of murder, rape and arson. "A jury of mystery experts examines manuscripts--and from these the great ones are selected."

It must be all very discouraging. At times the Claw, or the Blue Pencil, or whoever the chief inquisitor is, must slump back in his chair and say: "After all, what is 'great'? It is fair to the members of the Crime Club, is it fair to posterity for me to sit here and select the 'great'? Man is fallible. What if some mute, inglorious, but potential Has Rohmer is smothered beneath my own relish of Mary Roberts Rinehart? When my last manuscript is read, and I meet the Great Judge of the manuscript of life, shall I have made no errors of omission." One of the bitterest things in the publishing business, it is said, is that one never Knows. Perhaps the crime publishing business is the innocent victim of this intellectual frustration.