S.S. Van Dine, Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories (American Magazine, Sept. 1928)
The detective story is a game. It is more--it is a sporting event. And
the author must play fair with the reader. He can no more resort to trickeries
and deceptions and still retain his honesty than if he cheated in a bridge
game. He must outwit the reader, and hold the reader's interest, through sheer
ingenuity. 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 of Credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of 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 wilful tricks or
deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately
by the criminal on the detective himself. |
3. |
There must be no love
interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely
intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. 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. Americans are
essentially humane, and therefore a tiptop murder arouses their sense of
vengeance and horror. They wish to bring the perpetrator to justice; and when
"murder most foul, as in the best it is," has been committed, the
chase is on with all the righteous enthusiasm of which the thrice gentle
reader is capable. |
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 sČances,
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 machine. 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, who, at the outset, pits his mind against that of the detective and
proceeds to do mental battle. If there is more than one detective the reader
doesn't know who his co-deductor 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. For a writer to fasten the crime, in the final chapter, on a
stranger or person who has played a wholly unimportant part in the tale, is
to confess to his inability to match wits with the reader. |
11. |
Servants--such as
butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like--must not be
chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is
a too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory, and makes the reader feel that his
time has been wasted. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person--one
that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion; for if the crime was the
sordid work of a menial, the author would have had no business to embalm it
in book-form. |
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. Here the author
gets into adventure fiction and secret-service romance. 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 (with
its ubiquitous havens, mass protection, etc.) to fall back on. No high-class,
self-respecting murderer would want such odds in his jousting-bout with the
police. |
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. For instance,
the murder of a victim by a newly found element--a super-radium,
let us say--is not a legitimate problem. Nor may a rare and unknown drug,
which has its existence only in the author's imagination, be administered. A
detective-story writer must limit himself, toxicologically speaking, to the
pharmacopoeia. 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 one
of my basic theories of detective fiction is that, if a detective story is
fairly and legitimately constructed, it is impossible to keep the solution
from all readers. There will inevitably be a certain number of them just as
shrewd as the author; and if the author has shown the proper sportsmanship
and honesty in his statement and projection of the crime and its clues, these
perspicacious readers will be able, by analysis, elimination and logic, to
put their finger on the culprit as soon as the detective does. And herein lies the zest of the game. Herein we have an explanation
for the fact that readers who would spurn the ordinary "popular"
novel will read detective stories unblushingly. |
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; but when an author of a detective story has reached that
literary point where he has created a gripping sense of reality and enlisted
the reader's interest and sympathy in the characters and the problem, he has
gone as far in the purely "literary" technique as is legitimate and
compatible with the needs of a criminal-problem document. A detective story
is a grim business, and the reader goes to it, not for literary furbelows and
style and beautiful descriptions and the projection of moods, but for mental
stimulation and intellectual activity--just as he goes to a ball game or to a
cross-word puzzle. Lectures between innings at the Polo Grounds on the
beauties of nature would scarcely enhance the interest in the struggle
between two contesting baseball nines; and dissertations on etymology and
orthography interspersed in the definitions of a cross-word puzzle would tend
only to irritate the solver bent on making the words interlock correctly. |
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 the police
department--not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. Such crimes
belong to the routine work of the Homicide Bureaus. 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 play an unpardonable trick on the
reader. If a book-buyer should demand his two dollars back on the ground that
the crime was a fake, any court with a sense of justice would decide in his
favor and add a stinging reprimand to the author who thus hoodwinked a
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 gem¸tlich, 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.
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