Word: whodunitism
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Gaveled Fingers. In both private and public life, he has what amounts to a phobia about letting decisions hang fire. (Once he starts a whodunit for relaxation, he cannot relax until he reads through to the end.) At the Statehouse he has tackled problems which have been gathering dust in pigeonholes for years. One of the most urgent economic problems concerns Massachusetts' migrating manufacturers. Herter is well aware that New England is in economic straits because much of her industry has been moving to other parts of the country. But he has not placed the blame entirely on immutable...
...Jury (United Artists), the whodunit by Mickey Spillane which has sold 3,500,000 copies in soft covers and put sadism within reach of the average pocketbook, has now been made into a movie which should reassure all readers who think that Spillane's brutal yarns are just a bloody bore. The film, the first to be made of a Spillane work, is so triumphantly bad as to foster the hope that it may be the last...
Actor Farrar in his quiet way preserves a sense of sane reality at the center of what might easily have been a silly whodunit. Nadia Gray is always credible, and lovely to look at in one or two heart-catching little love scenes. In short, at a game where overstatement is all too easy, the British tradition of playing it down is pretty good cinematic cricket...
Shoot First (Raymond Stress-United Artists) is the latest pedestrian movie to try a climb up John Buchan's Thirty-Nine Steps. Despite a slick script by British Whodunit Expert Eric Ambler, the film trips over its own footage...
What does Maugham do when he isn't writing about the Hares and the Sadie Thompsons of the world? Often, he admits in another essay, he curls up with a bad book, a whodunit. An outspoken fan of Raymond (The Big Sleep) Chandler, Maugham nonetheless argues that the detective story has been played out ever since readers wised up to, and writers exhausted, all possible plot gimmicks...