Rules of Mystery Novels

Hmmmm... interesting article. I think a clever mystery novel could get away with breaking several of these rules. A case in point is a Dorothy Sayer book I just read. I won't name it, because I'm about to completely give away the ending, but I will say that it breaks rule # 18 with a considerable degree of success.

(Originally published in the American Magazine (1928-sep),
and included in the Philo Vance investigates omnibus (1936).

by S.S. Van Dine
(pseud. for Willard Huntington Wright)

THE DETECTIVE story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws — unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience. To wit:

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.

5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

8. The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic se'ances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio.

9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his codeductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.

10. The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.

11. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion.

12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.

13. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.

14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.

15. The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent — provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face-that all the clues really pointed to the culprit — and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying.

16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.

18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.

19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect. (b) The bogus spiritualistic se'ance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar. (f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

The Nine Tailors

I recently bought a copy of this book at a used bookstore, partly because I collect Dorothy Sayers (and Agatha Christie) books compulsively, and partly because it was a remarkably nice edition. Having bought it, I felt it necessary to read the book. I started yesterday and have already finished it. Never once have I regretted momentarily dropping David McCullough's (excellent) biography of John Adams. This book is without a doubt one of the most brilliant mystery novels I've ever read. Not the most mystifying; one may guess at a rough outline of the solution about halfway through. But is certainly leaves enough questions about details - how, why, when, etc - nearly unsolvable until the last chapters. Nothing about the mystery struck me as less than satisfying, at any rate, even if it wasn't a pure "who-dun-it" right up until the final moment.

I'd also mention that the characterization here, and in the Peter Wimsey novels in general, makes it a worthwhile read even for those who aren't fans of the mystery genre. While only the rare mystery writer (in my limited experience) analyzes characters in the minute way a Dostoevsky or Tolstoy does, the characterization here is much more sophisticated than most. Entertaining and nigh-flawless, but also rather deeper than one finds in the pure "who-dun-it". Let me add that I was further convinced by this book that Lord Peter Wimsey is one of the most interesting sleuths in the genre.

The aspect of the book which I most enjoyed was the setting. Sayers conveys the small East Anglia town convincingly without reverting to any of the clichés that have grown up around English small town life. The plot centers around the Anglican church of the village, particularly around the bell tower of that church. The way bell-ringing in old churches works plays a crucial and surprisingly fascinating role in the story; the subject is so well presented that one may finish the novel feeling inclined to find a non-fiction book about the same.

And Then There Were None....

So, I've just finished listening to Agatha Christie's mystery And Then There Were None on cd. Quite an experience.

For one thing, it's fascinating to discover what an incredibly different "feel" AC's books have when you listen to them. The narrator was great (he's the guy who plays Captain Hastings on the Masterpiece Theater Christie adaptions). Although he gave a wonderful rendition, the story didn't seem nearly as chilling as I knew it would have if I'd been reading it myself. I don't know whether it was his matter-of-fact English voice which made the entire thing seem more grounded, or if it was simply the fact that my imagination wasn't as free to "go wild" - as, I admit, it usually does with AC.

The story itself is masterfully written. The atmosphere is well laid, and the characters, especially Judge Wargrave, are entirely convincing. The mystery itself was baffling. I suspected Judge Wargrave, and I'm usually good at guessing the real criminal in AC's books, simply because of the way she writes them. I'm dreadful at figuring out how
that person was able to commit the crime. But something happens in this book that for a while clears the Judge of all suspicion.

The solution - when it finally comes - almost seems unfair at first, the red herring is so unlikely. But looking back at the story, I should have noticed one thing in particular.......


Spoiler ahead, be warned!!!!






.........................................

I should have known something was wrong when Dr. Armstrong examined Judge Wargrave's body, but wouldn't let anyone else do so.

AC gives these clues to justify the ending:

1. Edward Seton's death was justified because the police knew that he was guilty. Therefore, Wargrave was the only guest who did not murder anyone (that is, before coming to the island).
2. The "red herring" line in the poem suggests the fact that Armstrong was tricked into his death.
3. The bullet would leave a red mark in Wargrave's forehead similar to the mark of Cain, the first murderer in the Old Testament.

............................................





So, I really should have been more on top of such fine details in the mystery. It wasn't quite an unfair solution after all.

Hats off to Agatha Christie, Queen of Mystery!

(Yes, of course I had to put that corny rhyme in there... who could resist?)

Fr. Brown

Once it passes 9:00 p.m., I consider the school day over. Any reading I do past that time is strictly extra-curricular. That is how I've had time in the past two weeks to finish an anthology of every Fr. Brown mystery written. (I really haven't been procrastinating on schoolwork - I swear!)

The "Father Brown" mysteries are some of GK Chesterton's most popular and well-known works of fiction. None of the stories are novel length. They all are short stories originally published as collections under such titles as "The Innocence of Father Brown" or "The Incredulity of Father Brown."

Father Brown is an interesting character. In my opinion he takes his rank right alongside classic detectives like Lord Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot, or Sherlock Holmes. Although I don't want to overstate the obvious, I'd better mention that he's different from each of the three in a very interesting sense. He's a priest. A priest, that is, who hears confessions daily; who is good and close to God, and so has an acute sense both of what is holy and what is unholy. He can see the emptiness of the most convincing guise of innocence and can see innocence where no one else will.

This is an advantage Lord Peter, Poirot, and Holmes must make up for with intuition,deduction, observation, and shrewd guessing as their relative styles require. Fr. Brown is clever in all of these ways as well. His intellect is described as one that "could once paraphrase an entire page of Aquinas in two or three sentences." A big difference is that all three of these secular detectives are also arrogant to one degree or another (not to disrespect any of those detectives, two of whom I genuinely like). But Fr. Brown's cleverness is humble, hidden beneath an almost "foolish" innocence and charity. In this respect he reminds me of another character - St. Thomas Aquinas - whom Chesterton admired and wrote about.

Fr. Brown is a perfect image for Pope Paul VI's description of the Church as "an expert in humanity". As a priest, his business is ministering to humans through acting in the person of Christ, who knows each person better than they know themselves. Of course, it helps that Fr. Brown as himself is fairly brilliant.