Today, I read two selections from Alfred Hitchock’s curated collection, My Favorites in Suspense. The two illustrate the opposed content of suspense stories. “A Sentence of Death” by Thomas Walsh finds suspense in a cop seeking to correct injustice. Mann Rubin’s “A Nice Touch” finds tension in making the story’s protagonist even more unjust than the reader initially supposes.
Both stories feature a moment of recognition where a character recognizes a crucial fact about the world. The cop at the center of “Sentence” discovers he’s done his job poorly. The man at the center of “Touch” finds a way to keep sinning. “Sentence” ends with justice secured for the moment but our faith in justice shaken. The cops aren’t corrupt. They’re just incompetent. “Touch” ends with the main character unpunished. As a reader, I wasn’t happy about it. The character hasn’t escaped my judgment, and I’ve got a feeling Rubin wants to test my judgment as much as his character’s.
These stories are specifically designed to entertain, yet their value as entertainment would be non-existent if the reader had no moral conscience.
Experiments in Criticism 