Ronald Knox's 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction comprise a famous example. They've mostly stood the test of time, and are only deliberately broken by authors trying to deconstruct the genre. Interesting that he forbids supernatural explanations when he was a Catholic priest, but not too surprising when you think about it. Murderers are neither God nor the Devil. Modern readers may look askance on the "no Chinaman" rule, but that has to be taken in context. The interbellum era was also the Golden Age of the yellow peril villain, Fu Manchu being the best remembered. So Knox wasn't being racist or―in the Kendian buzzword―anti-racist. He was just warning against lazy writing.
Then there are SS Van Dine's Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories. Van Dine's list overlaps with Knox's at some points, a fact of which I'm sure they were both aware. Some of his additions are good, such as forbidding the "butler did it" twist and accident/suicide as a solution, which has generally been frown on over the years. Other items, such as love stories and detective teams, were already in popular use and he was just saying he didn't like them, Old Man Yells At Cloud-style. Notably his last item is just a list of transgressions, most of them appearing in Sherlock Holmes stories. Think Doyle cared?
2 comments:
The only Philo Vance novel either of us has read recently was The Scarab Murder Case. S.S. Van Dine definitely follows the rules he and Knox set out to establish but I did have just a couple of additions to the guidelines:
1. Don't allow heavy Egyptian statues held up by a bit of pencil conveniently topple on your designed victim.
2. Don't expect a real police inspector to allow the amateur detective Philo Vance to run the case.
3. Don't make your detective too brilliant, charming and irritating.
4. On the other hand, try to make the rest of your small group of suspects be a bit less wooden.
5. Last and weirdest, Philo's Watson-like sidekick is never named or even noticed by anyone. Watson himself was preferable.
A year or two ago I watched a bit of The Gracie Allen Murder Case on the Internet Archive. It was fun as you'd imagine but the film quality left a lot of room for improvement - my fault, or at least the fault of blurry images giving me a headache.
No, I don't imagine Doyle would have cared. Sherlock Holmes is the original.
This list is, I admit, as much as I've read of S. S. Van Dine (or Willard Huntington Wright, as was apparently his real name) so far. So you have the advantage on me as far as the Philo Vance series itself goes. Sounds like they could be an entertaining read if you're in the right (forgiving?) frame of mind.
The additional guidelines sound pretty solid. It also sounds like somebody should have made a hardware store run before displaying their Egyptian statuary.
I do vaguely remember seeing a bit of William Powell playing Vance in a movie. Of course a detective played by Powell has to live in the shadow of Nick Charles. By The Gracie Allen Murder Case the part had been taken over by Warren William, who'd also played Perry Mason (small world) and played Julius Caesar in Cleopatra. Gracie Allen later played half of the Mr. and Mrs. North investigating team, one of the few times she didn't play herself. Well, not technically.
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