The Boy Detective by Roger Rosenblatt Page A

’s.
    Alfred Hitchcock used it as the title of an early film. Agatha Christie used it all the time— Murder on the Orient Express, Murder at a Gallop, Murder Most Foul. I have no idea how it became the collective noun for crows, but think of the image, that cloud of blackness. No word in English has its heart-freezing effect. Speak it, and one does not merely see death, but also the act of killing, and the killer, the weapon, the body, the blood. The better detective writers use it sparingly because of its dreaded power, because murder is the center of human evil, the worst someone can do to someone else.
    In Green for Danger, Alstair Sim plays the crafty and methodical police inspector, called in on the case after the nurse who pronounced the word at the dance party is murdered herself. Knowing who the murderer is, she runs from the party to the operating theater, to collect the evidence. She hears a noise. The doors to the operating room are flapping on their hinges. She looks up and sees in the limpid light a figure in a white operating gown and mask and cap, covering the face. The figure holds a gleaming knife.
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    B LOOD . B LOOD IN S YRIA, South Africa, in shopping malls. Blood on college greens. Green blood. Bang bang bang bang bang. When I stand at the epicenter of the century’s madness (this century or the last), I try not to be deceived by my own sanity. After all, what profiteth a man to be sane in a madhouse? On the other hand, why go crazy with the rest? I can always make it through by speaking of money, because money’s where the action is, here at the epicenter. Instead I’d rather listen to you tell me a tale of heroic peoples who did not underestimate their enemies, but understood that shame is real and can stink up a refrigerator, even a Sub-Zero, for a lifetime. On my walk, on anybody’s walk, lies the epicenter of the century’s madness. Epicenters are quiet places, though they represent the tumultuous.
    Thirty years ago, when I was writing for Time magazine, I flew over Hiroshima’s epicenter in a helicopter I had hired because I wanted to go where the Enola Gay had gone after it dropped the Bomb, at the same cruising altitude. A reckless notion. It taught me nothing. And the wind that morning was crazy, the chopper shaking up me and the pilot like a bird in a dog’s jaws. This was all in the interests of a cover I was writing on the forty-fifth anniversary of Hiroshima, which Time called “My God, What Have We Done.” The conventional question, or exclamation, or whatever. They might have called it “The Case of the Disappeared City,” though there wasn’t much mystery as to who done it.
    The difference between that epicenter and the one I tread right now? I’m not sure. Hiroshima’s was real, this one’s theoretical. But both are both. If you want to get ahead in this world, said my dad, first you have to know what it is you want. We wanted to bomb the shit out of the Japanese and we want to be rich. I ask you, pal: What’s so complicated about that?
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    I N ANY CASE, epicenters are uncomfortable. If I had to choose one place to make my stand, it would not be an epicenter of anything. It would not be a place at all, but rather the midway point between poetry and prose. That is where the best moments of our minds occur, between poetry and prose, our truest selves. Isn’t that so? The sweet, solid territory between the two main forms of writing allows for thoughts and feelings not available to each alone. A man may travel to the moon, and at the same time lie curled in his lover’s bed. So, at the midway point, we tell a tale of high adventure, and we sing it, too.
    By the world we are appalled, and we also sympathize with it. With the world we sympathize, and we also are appalled by it. When we are appalled, we write prose. When we sympathize, we write poetry. But when we wish to get at the truth of the matter, when we