Death at the Principal's Lodging

From the very beginning, as Appleby was later to remark, the affair had contrived to have had about it a distinctly odd smell. The odour, in fact, could readily be identified, and not only by the Junior Dean's joking remark.
"When I saw the Principal lying there with his head - as I believe the facetious term has it - "all over the shop" (and I suppose it is to be thought that the Senior Common Room is a kind of "shop"), or that at any rate what is spoken within it might be characterised by the historians of contemporary slang as "shop", I thought not so much in terms of what I saw, but of saws in general and their inventor in particular. And it was quite a different sense which engaged that process of what might be called thought, though I should say now that it was idling merely." The Junior Dean snuffled into his snuff hankerchief with what might have been amusement, or distaste.
Appleby received this tiresome circumlocution with patience, or what might have passed for it amidst what were clearly regarded in these quarters as the lower orders, and took the opportunity to relight his pipe.
"But if we leave aside for a moment your reflexions on the legend of Perdix - for such I take them to be - you are referring, I am to take it, to a distinctive odour, and not some other phenomenal event." He felt he had returned serve.
"Quite so." The Junior Dean looked, or might have been said more precisely to have looked, as he sipped his port, as if he were not entirely gratified by this indication that Appleby, though he undoubtedly resembled a better-dressed member of the professional (not to mention educated) upper-middle-class rather than a man from the Metropolitan police, had followed his less than transparent observation. The Junior Dean's jokes were not designed for other people to "get", as the current term had it, or so his his younger colleagues amongst the academic linguisticians had assured him was the case.
"If I may be candid, Sir John," his voice dropped to a whisper, as if he were debating internally whether Appleby could in fact be entitled to that particular prefix, "it smelt fishy. Or rather, only metaphorically piscatorial. Indeed, in point of fact, one would have to describe it as avian. Distinctly so. It was, in short, the smell of roast partridge."
"Yes," said Appleby. "I had gathered as much. And you concluded - "
"Why, that the poor Principal had succumbed to food poisoning."
"You did not consider that food poisoning does not generally result in a man having his head severed from his shoulders and placed in the punchbowl of the Senior Common Room of one of the colleges of our ancient universities, the doors of which have previously been nailed shut from the inside?"
"My dear sir," protested the Junior Dean, "I have no medical training at all. My field is epigraphy. You might want to take a look at the Bursar, if that is the aspect of the matter which interests you."
"Hullo, what's all this?" said a hearty young man in tweeds and a notably grubby academic gown. "Old Beaky's had his head cut off?"
"Ah, Bursar, we were just thinking of you," said the Junior Dean. "You will excuse me, my dear Sir John, will you not, but I needs must quit this spot, though every prospect pleases."
Appleby completed the quotation for himself and turned to the young man.
"What is all this nonsense, then?"

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.