DETECTIVE STORY
Best of Chicago voting is live now. Vote for your favorites »
Detective Story is by no stretch of the imagination a daring or experimental work. For one thing, Sidney Kingsley’s work must have seemed staid and square even in 1949, when it opened on Broadway, compared to the work of young upstarts like Arthur Miller (whose Death of a Salesman opened the same year). Kingsley’s brand of half social realism, half soap opera–described by his fans as “documentary melodrama”–was already well accepted on Broadway. His plays Men in White and The Patriots won prizes (the 1934 Pulitzer and the 1943 New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award, respectively) and a third, Dead End, did so well it was turned into a movie (that in turn spawned what seemed like an infinite series of films starring the “Dead End Kids,” later called the “East End Kids,” and finally the “Bowery Boys”).
For another, despite Kingsley’s Zola-like insistence on thorough research (he is supposed to have spent countless hours visiting station houses), Detective Story just creaks its way through a thousand cliches: the wisecracking reporter, the slippery, golden-throated shyster, the procedure-bound cop who no longer knows right from wrong. Kingsley, as critics pointed out as early as the 1935 production of Dead End, always sacrificed his carefully documented realism to satisfy the audience’s desire for action, romance, and easily resolved stories.
