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"If there's a book that you want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it" - Toni Morrison
Originally published in the American Magazine
(1928)
The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective
for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and
described.
No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader
other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the
detective himself.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly
naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as
slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic
se'ances, 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.
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
codeductor is. It’s like making the reader run a race with a relay
team.
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.
A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit.
This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The
culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person — one that
wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion.
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.
Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no
place in a detective story. 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 to
fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want
such odds.
The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be
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.
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.
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.
A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the
guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers
and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of
authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating
crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted
for her charities.
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 hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted
reader.
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 gemütlich,
so to speak. It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and
give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.
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. b) The bogus spiritualistic
se'ance 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 the 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.
