to the Hebrews for food to eat.

Captain Ahab pursues Moby Dick throughout the world, determined to kill the whale as punishment for a past event in which a whale attacked and disabled Ahab, leaving him with only one leg. Captain Ahab’s pursuit of the whale is fuelled by a crazed moral indignation that ultimately leads to his own death. For Ahab, Moby Dick is the embodiment of evil, and he feels compelled to punish the whale by killing it. In Melville’s novel, Captain Ahab symbolizes man’s arrogance in trying to play God, to cast down judgment and mete out punishment for the sins of others.

In Detective Story, Joe compares McLeod to Captain Ahab in the sense that McLeod pursues criminals with a sort of crazed moral indignation that is ultimately self-destructive. Further, McLeod, like Captain Ahab, has the arrogance to believe that he has the right to play God, to cast down judgment and mete out punishment to the people whom he arrests.

In act 2 of Detective Story, Mr. Pritchett mentions a movie he once saw in which a man, Jean Valjean, steals a loaf of bread in order to feed his sister’s nine starving children. As a result, Jean Valjean is arrested for this petty theft and sent to prison for twenty years. Mr. Pritchett is here referring to a film adaptation of the French novel Les Miserables (1862), by Victor Hugo (1802–1885). The title Les Miserables may be translated as ‘‘the wretched,’’ but most English translations retain the French title. Mr. Pritchett would have seen the 1935 film adaptation of Les Miserables, which starred Frederick March and Charles Laughton. (Other film adaptations of Les Miserables were made in 1957, 1978, 1995, and 1998.)

Kingsley’s reference to Les Miserables is significant to the central themes of Detective Story. Les Miserables was written as an indictment of the legal system in France at the time, which Hugo saw as rigid and merciless. Such a rigid, merciless justice system is the type of legal system Kingsley feared for the future of the United States—if the principles of due process and the constitutional rights of the individual that underlie the American justice system are not upheld, protected, and enforced.

Les Miserables demonstrates the injustices of a legal system that so severely punishes a man who commits a petty crime in trying to do an act of good—helping to feed starving children. Mr. Pritchett explains that he was on Jean Valjean’s side in the story because Jean Valjean committed a crime only out of true desperation and a desire to do good. Mr. Pritchett points out, however, that Arthur did not steal because he was starving and needed to eat, but because he wanted to take a woman out on the town for a night. Arthur then says he is starving—not for food, but for love. ‘‘You can be hungry for other things besides bread,’’ he tells Mr. Pritchett.

The reference to Les Miserables is also signifi- cant in that the central antagonist is a detective, Inspector Javert, who devotes twenty-five years to the maniacal pursuit of Jean Valjean, after the latter escapes from prison and becomes an upstanding citizen. Javert adheres to a rigid concept of right and wrong and refuses to take into account the circumstances of Jean Valjean’s past poverty or present life of good works. McLeod in Detective Story, like Javert in Les Miserables, also adheres to a rigid, black-and-white concept of justice and refuses to take into account the circumstances of the lives of characters, such as Arthur, who have been arrested for petty crimes.

In the end of Les Miserables, Inspector Javert finally comes to the realization that he himself is the real criminal, in devoting his life to the pursuit and persecution of Jean Valjean and that Jean Valjean himself is innocent. With this realization, Javert chooses to sacrifice his own life and allow Jean Valjean to go free. Kingsley’s Detective Story echoes this earlier story, in that Detective McLeod, in the end realizing how wrong he has been, sacrifices his own life and allows Arthur, the young man he has arrested, to go free.

Like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick and Inspector Javert in Les Miserables, McLeod in Kingsley’s Detective Story maniacally pursues those whom he has judged with a sense of moral indignation that is ultimately inhumane and contrary to the practice of true, democratic justice. In the end, McLeod, like Captain Ahab and Detective Javert, finds that his determination to play God—to judge and punish others—leads to his own destruction—a sort of divine punishment for his sins in trying to play God.

However, Kingsley’s message in Detective Story, ‘‘Judge not, lest ye be judged,’’ though drawn from the Sermon on the Mount, is not necessarily one of religious doctrine. Rather, Kingsley conveys the idea that, as no one man has the right to judge or punish another, a fair and equitable legal system distributes the role of judgment among many individuals through the principles of due process in the functioning of a free and democratic society.

Source: Liz Brent, Critical Essay on Detective Story, in Drama for Students, Gale, 2004.

Detective Story, produced by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, was directed by Kingsley himself. Set in a detective squad room of a police precinct populated by the amazing variety of people Kingsley found in real life, the play deals with issues of theft, paranoia, illegal abortion, and personal obsession. Foreshadowing Darkness at Noon, Detective Story warns against the abuse of power, whether by the individual or the state. In preparation for this play, Kingsley again immersed himself in on-site research, attaching himself to a New York police precinct for study.

The play takes place in that milieu, pulling many small stories together in support of the main story—Detective McLeod’s unrelenting pursuit of an illegal abortionist who, unbeknownst to McLeod, had aborted his wife Mary’s illegitimate child before they met and married. Finally, caught between his love for Mary and his inability to accept her past, McLeod is forced to recognize the truths she hurls at him: ‘‘You think you’re on the side of the angels? You’re not! You haven’t even a drop of ordinary human forgiveness in your whole nature. . . . You’re everything you’ve always said you hated in your own father.’’ Having lost Mary and his chance at humanity, McLeod loses his life during an escape attempt by the burglar Charley.

That Kingsley again succeeded in creating a real-life situation, intriguing because of that reality, is clear from the enthusiastic critical response. Interestingly, a few of the critics, as former police-beat reporters, were well qualified to review the play as an accurate representation of a police station squad room as well as a successful theatre work. Having been on the police beat, John Chapman and Robert Coleman vouched for the play’s authenticity; Chapman called Kingsley’s invented 21st Precinct station ‘‘typical of them all,’’ acknowledging at the same time that the play had ‘‘a deceptive naturalness which conceals the know-how of an experienced and intelligent dramatist.’’ Coleman praised the playwright/director, producers, and cast for a play with ‘‘heart, thrills and humanity.’’ In agreement, George Jean Nathan, having had ‘‘the honor of knowing more or less intimately all kinds of detectives,’’ felt that Kingsley’s squad room was full of ‘‘the genuine article caught from the flesh: the hard, direct, and inexorable type; the tough- fibred but genial; the plodding but restless and impatient; the calmly dutiful.’’ In fact, the play was so realistic that Chapman was impelled to inform readers that the playwright was not a detective, as Burns Mantle in 1933 had been obliged to let them know that Kingsley was not a doctor.

Of the critics who had never had (or did not own up to having had) police-beat experience, the response was also enthusiastic. Richard Watts found that Kingsley’s ‘‘pungent and fascinating detail, . . . interesting, dramatic and thoughtful narrative, . . . and racy and colorful characters’’ made up ‘‘one of the season’s most triumphant combinations of a good show and a good play.’’ In a season that included Death of a Salesman, Anne of the Thousand Days, Summer and Smoke, Life with Mother, Kiss Me, Kate, and South Pacific, this was indeed no small praise. Robert Garland found Kingsley’s police detectives ‘‘as blood-filled and believable as were his bad guys in Dead End and his good guys in Men in White,’’ men who ‘‘in turn, deal believably with us all-too-human beings.’’

Among the few less-than-enthusiastic reviews, Brooks Atkinson compared Kingsley with Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, concluding that Kingsley was unable to ‘‘express ideas so deeply and forcefully [as Williams and Miller] because he is imprisoned by his method [naturalism].’’ However, he did admit that, ‘‘beginning with Ibsen, it is nevertheless a method that has resulted in some trenchant pieces of work, and Detecive Story is one of the best.’’ Several critics, including Ward Morehouse (the Sun), John Chapman (this time for the Daily News), and Wolcott Gibbs (the New Yorker) noted a kinship to Hecht and MacArthur’s The Front Page: a similarity in ‘‘uproar and raucousness,’’ ‘‘clatter, clutter and impudence,’’ and ‘‘much the same place spiritually.’’

A study of theatre criticism by writer/reporters for the popular media is interesting both theatrically and socially because it provides us directly with their views of the play and its production elements, but also indirectly with the barometer of issues that may be acceptably addressed in a widely distributed print forum. In contrast to the reviewers of 1933’s Men in White, by 1949 virtually all the writers used the words ‘‘abortion’’ and ‘‘abortionist’’ in their coverage of Detective Story, without apology or circumlocution.

Ironically, Paramount, as with the rest of the film industry under its censorship code, had to change the abortion issue in Detective Story. Instead of being an abortionist, in the film Schneider becomes a doctor who delivers illegitimate or unwanted babies. While this alteration does not hold up on a contemporary viewing of the film, it seems to have been perfectly acceptable and comprehensible to film reviewers in 1951. Presumably, the moviegoing public also understood the euphemism for abortion. Certainly, lines from the film such as McLeod’s comments on Schneider’s ‘‘baby farm grist mill,’’ his biting statement that Schneider would ‘‘take care of both mother and child for a fee,’’ and Tami Giacoppetti’s ‘‘the baby was born dead’’ suggest strongly a situation more sinister than the provision of obstetrical care for unwed mothers. In any event, the film followed the play’s popularity and was selected as one of the top ten films of the year by the New York Film Critics.

As usual by this time for Kingsley, Detective Story’s audiences and supporters again included a population who were probably not regular theatregoers—large numbers of police, the same ones who had been the trainers for Kingsley during his research period and later for Ralph Bellamy in his research for the role of McLeod. For the tryout in Philadelphia, the police of that city provided authentic supplies, such as fingerprint paper, for the production. The chief of police went so far as to check, after the play had transferred to New York, to see if they needed anything.

For a play with a large cast, almost all the actors received remarkable notices, a number of the critics apologizing for not being able to single out every outstanding performance. Ralph Bellamy as McLeod was praised widely by the critics, more than one identifying this role as his best to date, calling it a performance with ‘‘stature and dignity, evoking pity as well as terror, . . . a personal triumph’’; ‘‘magnificently played’’; an ‘‘unswerving portrayal [that] never fails the script.’’ In fact, the role of McLeod was a significant one for Bellamy and a major change from his usual lightweight parts in romantic comedy films. Bellamy seemed to recognize the importance of this role to his career because he viewed Jim McLeod as a multifaceted character whose successful portrayal would challenge him more than his other roles, especially his film roles in which he played many ‘‘amiable, dull, slightly ridiculous gentlemen who were invariably fated to lose Irene Dunne to Cary Grant.’’ Wearing his director’s hat, Kingsley found working with Bellamy a very satisfying experience, both professionally and personally.

The role of Mary McLeod was one of the few areas of disagreement among the critics, some of whom found the script to be the problem, and others simply recognizing that the role was intended to be a secondary one. Intended or not, the part is underwritten in comparison to the other major roles in the play. The audience sees only one side of Mary McLeod: the wife who has tried to make herself into the woman she thinks her husband wants. From Schneider and Giacoppetti, it hears of another, younger, perhaps carefree and careless Mary. But Mary is seen only in relation to others—the playwright does not develop her character through dialogue, and, unlike other characters in the play, she is not onstage enough to show the audience through action who she is.

Of all the actors in Detective Story, Meg Mundy as Mary McLeod fared the least well, receiving mixed reviews—one kinder critic citing her for ‘‘exciting moments,’’ others contenting themselves with objective descriptions of her role rather than qualitative comments on her performance, and still others, with Ward Morehouse, finding her ‘‘never too convincing.’’ George Jean Nathan tried to explain why this actress who, from all accounts, had been excellent in The Respectful Prostitute, had failed in a company whose performances were uniformly good. Basing his opinion on information received from an anonymous, reliable source, he wrote that Mundy had pretended during rehearsals to follow Kingsley’s direction, but when performances began she ‘‘elected to forget it and to go it on her own,’’ which ‘‘was not good enough.’’

Lee Grant as the Shoplifter, Horace McMahon as Lieutenant Monoghan, Joseph Wiseman as the First Burglar (Charles Gennini), Michael Strong as the Second Burglar (Lewis Abbott), and James Maloney as Mr. Pritchett all received outstanding notices for these roles, which they later re-created successfully in the film.

Regardless of their views on the play, the critics uniformly credited Kingsley with an excellent job of directing Detective Story. With a cast of thirtyfour actors, many of whom were onstage at the same time, and a script with multiple dovetailing stories, the play had a potential for disaster if the stage movement and timing were less than precise. Richard Watts praised Kingsley as ‘‘one of the stage’s most brilliant directors,’’ specifically, as having ‘‘done a superb job in keeping his narrative moving with smoothness and dispatch.’’ While criticizing Kingsley’s writing style as ‘‘dated,’’ Brooks Atkinson joined his fellow critics in finding much to praise in his directing: ‘‘[H]e has directed an honest performance that is always interesting and becomes exciting and shattering in the last act,’’ and ‘‘Kingsley has organized a pungent and meticulous performance.’’

While following Kingsley’s established patterns of extensive research and realistic staging, Detective Story differs from the playwright’s earlier works. His underlying message about the dangers of a police state, while not entirely lost on the critics and audiences, was not so clearly and emphatically presented as were the statements in Men in White, Dead End, and The Patriots on abortion, the evils of slum life, and the nature of democracy, respectively. And critical and popular response to Detective Story was overwhelmingly to the exciting, action-packed stage, rather than to the message the action was intended to convey. Again, unlike the earlier plays whose messages either found specific audiences (health care professionals) or had a broad audience appeal (to all citizens regarding the problems of slum housing and juvenile delinquency; to all U.S. patriots during a war effort), Detective Story did not have that same kind of built-in constituency. Indeed, it is an irony that the police—the professional group responding to Detective Story—were, in fact, those who could have been most offended had the police state message been explicit.

Source: Nena Couch, ‘‘An Introduction,’’ in Sidney Kingsley: Five Prizewinning Plays, edited by Nena Couch, Ohio State University Press, 1995, pp. xxvi–xxx.

While researching Men in White, I met two New York detectives who invited me to visit their precinct. I was intrigued by their life and I realized that though the police station had been exploited perhaps more than any other background in literature— in thousands of whodunits—there had never been a completely honest picture. I suddenly recognized the locale for my next play. I saw that the measure of a free society can be taken right there in a police station, in the relation of police activity to constitutional law.

I was privileged to do most of my research on Detective Story at New York City’s 17th Precinct. The detectives I met there were themselves a varied group, each one interesting in his own way and all of them kind of special. In discussing Detective Story, I have to confess that some of the same saucy toughness that I had as a young man, I found waiting for me in the detective squad room.

And then there were the criminals. I met at the precinct the two burglars I used as models for Detective Story. There was, particularly in the relationship between the police and the criminals, a strange manner not dissimilar to the manner of the reporters in The Front Page. If a criminals was whinning, there was one detective who would say to him, ‘‘Come on. You wanted to be a thief? OK, you’re a thief, so be a good one. You knew sooner or later you’d get dropped, so be a good thief. You’ll meet all your friends in jail.’’

Much of my research did not end up in the play. In particular I remember some of the kidding around, clowning, and amusing situations. For instance, a burglar who had been picked up was complaining because the elevator man had crept up behind him as he broke into an apartment and hit him on the head with a flashlight. The burglar felt that was unfair.

One, more serious, situation occurred down the block from where I lived on 58th Street while I was doing research. Walking by one day, I saw a crowd gathered round and discovered there had been a holdup with shooting, in the course of which the holdup man had been shot dead. Later, over at the station house, the detective who had done the shooting was standing by talking, and the captain muttered to me, ‘‘Look at his face, watch him.’’ Slowly, the man’s face began to turn pale and greenish. The captain looked at his watch and said, ‘‘In about ten minutes!’’ And sure enough, in about ten minutes the detective was very sick and could hardly stand. According to the captain, this usually happened when a detective shot and killed someone—there was a delayed reaction and then, in about an hour or an hour and a half, it would get to the detective, and he would always get a little sick. I did not use this Playbill cover from the 1949 stage production of Detective Story, performed at the Hudson Theatre particular item in the play, but I have never forgotten it. Such gravity and anguish were reality and were the elements with which the play dealt.

In doing my research, visiting police stations, the district attorney’s office, and accompanying detectives on their rounds, I filled thirty notebooks. Then I decided it was time to quit, get away somewhere and boil it down. I spent almost a year on my farm near Oakland, where I tried to capture a new kind of violent rhythm in the play. I believe this play moves faster than other plays contemporary with it.

On the surface, Detective Story is an exciting melodrama about cops, dealing with the events of four hours in the detective squad rooms of a New York police station. Actually, however, it’s an attempt to investigate a basic problem, the case of the tough and violent perfectionist, the ‘‘good’’ fascist on the side of the angels who divides everything into good and bad and wants to destroy everything he considers bad. In 1949 I believed that a new form of society would emerge, that by the turn of the century man would be evolving a new government, a single world government, but what kind of a single world government? The world is changing rapidly, and it is imperative that some of our present institutions be preserved—constitutional protection of the freedom of the individual, for instance. Men like McLeod constitute a serious threat, for such men may well rule the world state of the future.

In writing Detective Story, I was influenced by General George C. Marshall’s speeches in 1947 in which he used the phrase ‘‘the police state.’’ Thinking of the police state, I felt convinced that we must eventually have a single world government. What will its principles be? Will it be a free or an ant society? My feeling is that there can be happiness for the people of the world only if a firm protection for human rights is incorporated in the world government. Police power is a symbol, a measuring rod, of freedom in a society. When the police power answers to a democratic code of human rights, you have a free society.

When I started this play I was in a searching mood. I wanted to do a play that expressed the fears and tensions we were experiencing. I felt a moral responsibility to help alleviate the awful tedium of our time and, in doing so, excite and stimulate the audience. This was the first level of my play.

The second level, which may not be apparent to audiences, went much deeper. I took as my premise ‘‘Judge not, but ye be judged’’ from the Sermon on the Mount, and I used the classic form with the unities of time, place, and action. The action is within four hours. The central figure is of heroic proportions, though a slightly romantic one. He is a moralist, wanting to bolster a collapsing civilization by turning back the clock.

The first act of the play does not state a problem, but gives people an emotional undercurrent that something is going to happen. From first to last, I attempted to give the audience an impression of looking at a slice of life—tragic and comic, brainless and thoughtful, ribald and innocent, all the aspects of life seen in a police station. From that, I hope, I have evoked in audiences a feeling and understanding of the very great need to keep police power out of the hands of dangerous men.

I gave the audience a chance to sit behind the scenes of a detective squad room. It was the first authentic picture of routine life of a police station. No big murders take place, nothing spectacular, nothing in the traditionally romantic sense. I tried to make a virtue out of the trivial cases rather than the extraordinary. I tried, of course, to evoke that germinal idea. But I wanted to evoke the idea, rather than state it.

Everything in the play is so integrated, like a symphony. All the action takes place on one big set, the inside of the police station. Several stories are being told at once. An episode of one story is presented, then part of another. Actors are quiet on one side of the stage while action is taking place on the other side. A fine job of ensemble acting is required in Detective Story.

Professor Alexander Drummond, with whom I studied directing at Cornell, always emphasized the importance of Edward Gordon Craig’s theories and the elements of movement. Certainly, in this play I experimented with movement. It requires split-second timing. It is like a ballet—a challenge with 30+ characters. The challenge to a director is that he is using a wide-angle lens. The theatre is based on a narrow focus, and the modern tendency has been to narrow it more to produce a hypnotic effect. Directorially, Detective Story was a much more creative job than anything else I have ever done.

I believe that artists help to shape events—for example, Dead End figured in the debates over slum clearance. So in Detective Story, I tried to write a play that would stir people to feel the necessity for keeping public control over police power. When I named my police station the Twenty-first Precinct, I hoped some of the audience might ask themselves whether we will be living in a police state in the twenty-first century, or whether we will be getting the protection of the police in accord with the rules of a free society. My rough cop, McLeod, thinks democracy is not efficient in its war against evildoers. He wants to achieve efficiency by taking the law into his own hands, by making people abide by right as he sees it, or by personally bringing them to account if they do not. Of course, the inefficiency comes from our checks and balances, so that no man is to be trusted with absolute power. The answer to McLeod is that the inefficiency of humankind is a really a higher efficiency, since it permits the human spirit to breathe.

Source: Sidney Kingsley, ‘‘Detective Story,’’ in Sidney Kingsley: Five Prizewinning Plays, edited by Nena Couch, Ohio State University Press, 1995, pp. 241–44.