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Crime!

 

In 1928 the detective writer S S Van Dine made the following 20 points about crime fiction.  They're worth considering even if you don't agree with them all.

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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 … 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. A tiptop murder arouses … vengeance and horror… When "murder most foul…" has been committed, the chase is on with all the righteous enthusiasm of which the … 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 séances, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo.

9. There must be but one detective... 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... 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, [not] a stranger or a person who has played a wholly unimportant part in the tale.

11. Servants - such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like - must not be … the culprit… The culprit must be a … person … that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion...

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, 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…

14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. No … rare and unknown drug which has its existence only in the author's imagination may be administered. … 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…

16. A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no ... 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...

17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. … 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.

19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction - secret-service tales, for instance. A murder story … must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

20. And … I herewith list a few of the devices [that] have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime…

    1. ​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.

    2. The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.

    3. Forged finger-prints.

    4. A look-alike alibi.

    5. The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.