DETECTIVE STORY WRITING

Timaru Herald, Volume CXLVIII, Issue 21575, 10 February 1940, Page 10

DETECTIVE STORY WRITING

Expert’s Advice Q S. Van Dine, who died recently, was acknowledged the world | over to be one of the ablest writers of detective fiction. In his last story recently published, The Winter Mur-\ der Case, he gives a list of rules lor | writers of detective stories. “The detective story is a kind of intellectual game,” writes Mr Van | Dine. “It is more—it is a sporting j event. And the author must play fair i with the reader. “The reader must have equal op-1 portunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be' plainly stated and described. “No wilful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than' those played legitimately by the I criminal on the detective himself, i There must be no love interest in the ’ story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. The busi-1 ness in hand is to bring a criminal to j the bar of justice, not to bring a love- ■ lorn couple to the hymeneal altar. i “The detective himself, or one of the ' official investigators, should never turn I out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery. It’s false pretences. The j culprit must be determined by logical i deductions —not by accident or coin-. cidence or unmotivated confession. . . . i 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 I person who did the dirty work in the first chapter. . . . “There simply must be a corpse m' a detective nv* el, and the deader the | corpse the better. No lesser crime than 1 murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much po|her for a | crime than murder. . . . “There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction. To bring the minds of three or four 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 f th' reader, who, at the outset, pits his mind against that of the detecive and proceeds to do mental battle. If there more than one detective the reader doesn’t know who his co-deductor i It’s lik 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. For a writer fasten the crime, in the final chapter, on a stranger or person ho has played a wholly unimno v tant pa t in the tale, is I to confess to his inability to match I wits with the reader. “Secret societies, cam arras, mafias, |

have no place in . detective story Here the author gets into adventure fiction and secret-service romance.

“The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. That is to say: pseudoscience and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated. For * •■•stance, the murder of a victim by a newly-found element —a super-radium. let us say—is not a legitimate problem. Nor may a rare and unknown drug, which has its existence only in the author’s imagination, be administered. . . . “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 re-read the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in tne 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. And one of my basic theories of detective fiction is that, if r. detective tory . fairly and legitimately constructed, it is impossible to keep the solution from all readers. There will inevitably be a certain number of them just as shrewd as the author. “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. If a book-buyer should demand his money back on the ground that the crime was a fake, any Court with a sense of justice would decide in his favour and add a stinging reprimand to the author who thus hoot viaked a trusting and kind-hearted reader.”