The Rules

When doing public interviews, we've repeatedly talked about the supposed 'rules' of Golden Age detective stories. Until I read Nade Pedersen's interesting article about the 'butler did it' trope, I hadn't realized that the rules really existed, that they had been written down, that there are twenty of them. But they were, by S.S. Van Dine, and you can find them here. 

Some of the rules have certain period flavour. Rule eleven, for example: 'A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit...' because he or she 'must be a decidedly worth-while person - one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion.'

Some are sensible enough. Rule eight: 'The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic seances, crystal-gazine, and the like are taboo.' The important truth here is that whatever kind of artist you are, whether you are Samuel Beckett or Antonioni or Agatha Christie, you have to establish the rules of your own fictional world. It would be just as disappointing to discover the murderer at the end of Blow-Up as it would be not to discover the murderer at the end of And Then There Were None (as we now have to call it. I first read the book under its original title, and with the original name for the island on which it was set, and was shocked even as a ten year old).

Some rules are just a bit depressing. Rule sixteen: 'A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations...'

What mainly strikes me is how grossly every whodunnit I can think of violates the rules, and I don't just mean the ones about 'literary dallying'. As is well known, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd almost had Agatha Christie burned at the stake for its blatant violation of one of the most important rules. But And Then There Were None violates an important rule (no detective) and Murder on the Orient Express violates several of them. And of course every one of the rules is not just stamped on but danced and then, having been danced on, fed through a mincer and then danced on again, in the great stories of Poe, Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle, G.K.Chesterton. 

In fact, there's only one rule, it's what you do so that the reader gets to the end, says 'That was good' and does that most wonderful thing that any reader can do: recommends it to someone else.