A while back I posted the 10 British
rules of writing a mystery. I thought that was a lot, until I discovered that there were 20 American Rules which a writer named S.S. Van
Dine came up with 1928. You know us Americans, we have to do everything
BIGGER. The fact that he also repeats the 10 rules laid down by the British helps
makes his list really, really long, so I won’t comment on every rule because it
would make this post really, really long, which it is going to be anyway (sorry). So I'll just comment on the ones I can’t resist.
Rule #1: The reader must have equal
opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be
plainly stated and described.
Commentary: What? No red herrings?
There goes most of the mysteries in the past, I don’t know, FOREVER!
Rule #2: No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed
on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the
detective himself.
Rules #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.
Commentary:
I don’t think this one went over really well with writers, seeing as everyone
mostly ignored it.
Rules #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 someone a bright penny for a
five-dollar gold piece. It’s false pretenses.
Rule #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.
Rule #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
conclusion through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved the
problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the
arithmetic.
Commentary: It wouldn’t be much of a
mystery if it didn’t have a detective, in fact would it be a mystery at all?
Rule #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.
Commentary: Well there goes every
mystery where somebody didn’t die.
Rule #8: 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-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.
Rule #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 co-dedutcor is. It’s like making the
reader run a race with a relay team.
Commentary: This guy sure likes
Latin doesn’t he?
Rule #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.
Rule #11: A servant must not be
chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is
too easy a solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person – one
that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.
Commentary: A worth-while murderer? Now there's a concept.
Rule #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.
Commentary: There is room for only
one evil genius at the top.
Rule #13: Secret societies,
camorras, mafias, et al. have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and
truly beautiful murder is irredeemably spoiled by any such wholesome
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.
Commentary: A beautiful murder? Uh…okay.
Rule #14: The method of murder, and
the means of detecting it, must 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.
Rule #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.
Rule #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.
Commentary: Unlike this paragraph
you mean?
Rule #17: A professional criminal
must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes
by house-breakers and bandits are the province of police departments – not of
authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime in one
committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.
Rule #18: A crime in a detective
story must never turn out to be an accident of a suicide. To end an odyssey of
sleuthing with such and anti-climax is to hoodwink the trusting and
kind-hearted reader.
Rule #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 gemuetlich, so to speak. It must
reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for
his own repressed desires and emotions.
Commentary: What’s a gemuetlich?
Rule #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 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 the suspect.
(b) The bogus spiritualistic seance
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
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.
Commentary: So not only did this writer make the
rules, he’s kindly going to tell you how to write your book!
That’s the American rules, can you spoke where he
stole…I mean repeated the British rules? And which ones don't you don’t follow
you rule breakers you?
Mystery writer C.L. Ragsdale is the author of The Reboot Files a
Christian Mystery Series. A California native, she loves to "surf"
the web to research plot details for her fun, quirky stories with just a bit of
whopper in them. She has a degree in Theatre Arts which greatly influenced her
writing style. Working in various fields as a secretary has allowed her to both
master her writing skills and acquire valuable technical knowledge which she
uses liberally in her plots. She loves to embroider and knit and is a big fan
of the old Scooby Doo cartoons.
Current
E-Books
THE REBOOT FILES: The Mystery of Hurtleberry House, The Island of
Living Trees, The Harbinger of Retribution, and The Wrong Ghost.
When I wrote my first cozy mystery, Fudge-Laced Felonies, formerly titled Buried Beneath the Midnight Blue, I had no idea what a cozy mystery was. A friend of mine dared me to write one and to submit it to Barbour Publishing's new cozy mystery line. So, I researched what one was, entered it into a contest, won first place in the inspirational category of said contest, and required an agent. What a whirlwind! I've been hooked ever since. But, I digress.
6 - Once I have my characters and the whys of their being a part of the story, I come up with my red herrings, or false clues. Again CAUTION: don't mislead your reader to the point where they close the book and go, "Huh?". Instead, you want them to go, "Oh, yeah! I remember when that clue happened." It's a fine line, really, but loads of fun.
