T.S. Eliot liked detective fiction!

Here is a link to an article by Paul Grimstad in the newest New Yorker. I thought it might interest you since we have been talking a lot about detective fiction lately.


http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/what-makes-great-detective-fiction-according-to-t-s-eliot



And here is the first paragraph:

FEBRUARY 2, 2016

What Makes Great Detective Fiction, According to T. S. Eliot

In 1944 the literary critic Edmund Wilson wrote an exasperated essay in the pages of The New Yorker titled “Why Do People Read Detective Stories?” Wilson, who at the time was about to go abroad to cover the Allied bombing campaign on Germany, felt that he’d outgrown the detective genre by the age of twelve, by which time he’d read through the stories of the early masters, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Yet everyone he knew seemed to be addicted. His wife at the time, Mary McCarthy, was in the habit of recommending her favorite detective novels to their émigré pal Vladimir Nabokov; she lent him R. F. Heard’s beekeeper whodunit “Taste for Honey,” which the Russian author enjoyed while recovering from dental surgery. (After reading Wilson’s essay, Nabokov advised his friend not to dismiss the genre tout court until he’d tried some Dorothy Sayers.) Surrounded on all sides by detection connoisseurs, Wilson sounded genuinely perplexed when he wondered, “What, then, is the spell of the detective story that has been felt by T. S. Eliot and Paul Elmer More but which I seem to be unable to feel?”