DETECTIVE FICTION

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXII, Issue 22226, 28 September 1935, Page 9 (Supplement)

DETECTIVE FICTION

ART OF CONSTRUCTION "Aristotle's Poetics is the finest guide to the making; of detective stories for pleasuro and profit that coidd possibly bo put into the hands of a young writer," Miss Dorothy Sayers declared when she discoursed to a meeting of the English Association in the Conway Hall on Aristotle and detective fiction, reports the Manchester Guardian. "Miss Sayers quoted many of his exhortations. The story should be serious in subject, complete in action, and capable of arousing pity and fear and so purifying those emotions. It should have a beginning, for example, the murder, a middle (the following-up of the clues), and an end, the discovery of the criminal. It should not be so Ion;* that .the reader forgot the clues, and if it had purple patches they must bo relevant to the plot. "Aristotle sums up," Miss Sayers added, "the detective writer's whole craft in one word—paralogism, or the art of falso reasoning—a word that should be written in letters of gold in the study of every writer of mystery stories. It is the art of framing lies in the right way. From beginning to end of your story you lead the reader up the garden, but you framo the lie in the right way, that is, by telling the truth in such a manner that the reader is led into telling a lie himself. "Miss Savers declared that nothing in a detectivo story could be assumed to be true unless the author said so. The book might say, 'Tht* grandfather clock was striking ten when Jones reached home,' but there was 110 need to accept the evidence of the clock. One need not believe the employer who said he had always found the butler honest, but if the author wrote, 'No one could doubt that the butler was telling tlie truth' his truthfulness must be accepted. "She concluded with a final passage from Aristotle that tho climax was the most difficult part of the story. 'Aristotle had the root of the matter in him, she said, 'and every writer who tries to make a detectivo story a thing of art will do well to write it in such a way that Aristotle would have enjoyed and approved it.' "