Detective Fiction: basic guidelines

This is what I posted on the Facebook group The Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which I created and made myself Grand Panjandram of. I am, at the moment, the sole member, but if you agree with what follows, you could always join. It will be a very benign dictatorship. Until you disagree with me. Then things will get ugly.


Some general principles:

The classic detective story is a battle of wits between criminal and detective in which the criminal or at least the means of his having committed the crime remain unknown until he (or it) is unmasked by the detective by means of evidence which has been fairly presented to the reader.

No such evidence should be concealed from the reader. In a good detective story it is positively dangled before the reader (the missing item in The Five Red Herrings, by Sayers, or the corpse's clothes being on back to front in The Chinese Orange Mystery, by Ellery Queen, are good examples).

The plot should be soundly constructed, without loose ends. We care who killed the chauffeur, even if Chandler doesn't.

Al the characters should act according to their circumstances and plausible motives: if everyone at the country house party is waltzing through the library where the baronet's body lies with the Egyptian paperknife in his neck as if it were Grand Central Station, each of them shedding physical evidence on all sides, they should at least have a reason to be there.

The investigation of the crime (fingerprints, physical evidence, witness statements) is of no intrinsic interest except in presenting the puzzle. There is nothing wrong with the police procedural, but it is not a detective story.

The crime should not be solved by killing everyone else until the killer is the only one left. There is nothing wrong with the thriller or the hardboiled private eye novel, but it is not a detective story.

The killer should not be the detective, or (except exceptionally) a servant, or anyone whose thoughts we have been privy to.

The crime should ideally be the work of one person. Confederates are tolerable, but unsatisfactory. Murder on the Orient Express (Christie) is a swizz. Other characters may confound the crime, however, as in Death at the President's Lodging (Innes), so long as they act with motives which are comprehensible, and don't just shamble about messing things up for no reason.

The revelation of the murderer's identity, or his method, should ideally produce in the reader the response "Of course!" It should come as a surprise, but not a further mystification.

The best conclusion of a detective story is one which produces an effect similar to that of a cryptic crossword clue which has had you stumped for ages, and which you finally see. Wit and ingenuity are the most satisfactory results.

Plausibility and realism are important only within the terms of the novel's world. It is not plausible that people should be murdered in hermetically sealed rooms, but the solution must be workable, not necessarily very likely.

Any one of these guidelines may be broken if it is broken with sufficient elan.

train/car

Of course, I didn’t make the Easter vigil, but I did go to the morning service before going to work. Because it is Easter Sunday, when Railtrack, or Jarvis, or Network Rail, or somebody, or all of them celebrate Our Lord’s victory over death by moving sleepers around, I had to drive.

I prefer the train to driving because you can read, do the crossword, stare out of the window at more interesting things than the man in the next car picking his nose while stuck on Kilburn High Street and, above all, have no responsibility for anything other than buying your ticket, getting on and getting off. Alas, you can no longer smoke, but you can still drink. You can still drink, I can’t. I wish we had more trains like this nice one I was in the other day which had those compartments of six seats and a sliding door. But it goes between Vienna and Bratislava, which is of limited use if you want to go between Huntingdon and London.

I prefer driving (on my own) to the train because you have the car to yourself and you make the decisions about where it goes. You can listen to music quite loudly (I don’t have an iPod, because I can’t really listen and read at the same time). You can smoke all the time. But mostly, the only thing to like about driving – motorway driving, I mean - is that you can go very nearly too fast. Not too fast, of course, that would be silly. But as fast as you can while still retaining full control of the vehicle. That is if, like me, you are an excellent driver and drive very fast indeed, changing gears the while and never straying from your lane as you move round corners as if you were in one of those tilting trains, except without the coming off the rails bit, and always indicating and being in the correct lane, unlike those slower gits in front of you who are clearly in the wrong lane, but never being caught by speed cameras. For legal reasons I should point out that that is not because the very nearly superhuman reflexes and superior awareness of your surroundings characteristic of the excellent driver (such as I myself am) enable you to see them and respond appropriately, double-declutching your way out of trouble in the nick of time (brakes are for the inept), only to move back up to warp speed seconds later, but because you haven’t broken the speed limit. Obviously. And especially not by factors of 50 per cent and up.

I don’t know my own mind. Train, I think. Or car.

sf: A Better Mantrap, Bob Shaw
crime: The Judas Window, Carter Dickson (who is John Dickson Carr, of course, so you may get it under either name). A Locked Room tour de force.
If you don’t know it: Five Letters From an Eastern Empire, Alasdair Gray (in Unlikely Stories, Mostly)
Today’s music: Well-Tempered Clavier, Bach; Two Against Nature, Steely Dan; The Hissing of Summer Lawns, Joni Mitchell; Early Concepts, Stan Kenton. In a car, you see.
Chicken Yakisoba for lunch; Roast Lamb for dinner.

Off to bed now, with a head full of quandary and (many points to anyone who can complete the line correctly)