Rules for a Classic Mystery
We're starting the new Popcorn Dialogues mystery series with The Thin Man, and I'm still discovering my way through Liz's first murder mystery, so now is a good time to go back to the roots of Golden Age Mystery Fiction, classic mystery fiction, and see what the rules were. (We'll be doing other forms of mystery–noir, romantic suspense, supernatural, etc–but to begin with, we're looking at the classic form.) There are two classic rules lists, one by Ronald Knox in 1929 and the other by S.S. Van Dyne in 1928, and although times have changed and so has the mystery, there are still some keepers on there. From those lists I came up with five basic classic mystery rules:
Rule One: The protagonist of the classic mystery is the detective.
Rule Two: The antagonist of the classic mystery is the murderer.
Rule Three: The crime in the classic mystery is murder, and the conflict in the story is created by the detective's need to find the murderer and the murderer's need to escape; this conflict is played out in a puzzle plot.
Rule Four: The classic mystery plays fair, giving the reader all the information she or he needs to solve the puzzle.
Rule Five: The classic mystery is solved using intellect (not luck) at the end of the story (no loose ends).
To go into more detail . . .
Rule One: The protagonist of a classic mystery is the detective, who is present from the beginning.
Or as S. S. Van Dine put it:
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.
He also goes on to say that
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.
This is basic protagonist stuff. The character that the story centers on must be the driver of the plot, and his or her struggle with the antagonist creates the conflict or the fuel that drives the story. One protagonist, pushing back against the antagonist, for strong motives of his or her own.
Rule Two: The antagonist of the classic murder mystery is the murderer, who is present from the beginning.
Knox makes that point clear:
1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
Van Dine goes even farther:
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.
And of course, no teams of criminals; there can be minions, but only one Big Bad:
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.
This is basic antagonist stuff. The character who opposes the protagonist shapes the plot; his or her struggle with the protagonist creates the conflict or the fuel that drives the story. One antagonist (plus possible minions), pushing back against the protagonist, for strong motives of his or her own, which Van Dine also covered:
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.
Once again, it's always personal.
Rule Three: The crime in the classic mystery is murder, and the conflict in the story is created by the detective's need to find the murderer and the murderer's need to escape; this conflict is played out in a puzzle plot.
Van Dine puts it well:
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.
Rule Four: The classic murder mystery plays fair, giving the reader all the information she or he needs to solve the puzzle.
Both Knox and Van Dine are firm about this: no playing tricks on the reader.
From Van Dine:
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.
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.
From Knox:
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
Rule Five: The classic murder mystery is solved using intellect (not luck) at the end of the story (no loose ends).
From Van Dine:
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
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.
And Knox agrees:
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
It's also worth pointing out that the murder is solved no sooner than the end of the story, in the climactic scene, because the central question in a classic mystery is "Who murdered whom and why?" and when that's answered, the conflict is over, and your story is done.
I'd argue that Rules One, Two, Four, and Five are good for all storytelling:
One protagonist pursuing a goal.
One antagonist pursuing a goal that blocks the protagonist.
All the information that the protagonist knows on the page when she or he knows it.
A solution arrived at by hard work and harder thinking.
The original lists can be found at The Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction and a dozen other places on the net.
Bonus: The Oath of the British Detection Club as written by G. K. Chesterton:
"Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?"
January's Classic Mysteries:
Jan. 4: The Thin Man
Jan 11: Evil Under the Sun
Jan 18: Sherlock Holmes
Jan 25: Sherlock Holmes: A Study in Pink
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