CRIME FICTION’S TEN COMMANDMENTS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.

Ronald Knox is the suspect. He gave us Ten Commandments for writing crime fiction.
   I have three commandments for writing crime fiction.
   One. THOU SHALT NOT place the word algorithm or any variation thereof in thine manuscript. For there will be a hundred days of darkness and a plague of locusts upon thee if thou fuckesteth this up.
   Two. THOU SHALT NOT place the word protocol or any variation thereof in thine manuscript. For thine bloodline shall be accursèd unto the seventh generation and long will be the wine-red shadows o’er thine tomb. Frederick Forsyth appears to be notably excused from this commandment.
   Three. THOU SHALT NOT permit any character to utter the phrase beginning Is this the part where. For if ye transgress against the Writing Gods themselves, woe be unto thee and thine and all others within a mile’s radius of the divine blast. Also, lice shall worry thee.
   Death by Algorithm on the Nile just ain’t gonna cut it. A brick wall will delay your protagonist. Or a hard and fast law. But placing a protocol in a murder mystery isn’t a barrier. You’ll only make it sound as though you just introduced a green yoghurt-ish health drink to the scene of the crime.
   Is this the part where I get to subvert the cliché by prefacing the cliché with the phrase IS THIS THE PART WHERE? Frankly I’d prefer it if you just hit us with the cliché minus the preamble. We’ve abolished the Edwardian Age and the string quartet prelude to taking a shit. It’s quicker just to go when you need to go.
   I was going to talk about the writing commandments set forth by Ronald Knox. And I planned to do that by dragging a few crime shows into the conversation. But I immediately realised that confirming or denying the existence of the breakage of these commandments in a show…well, that might spoil certain aspects of the mystery for you.
   So I’ll just have to talk around a few choice areas.
   A Murder at the End of the World.
   Death and Other Details.
   Two television shows aiming themselves at the Golden Age of murder mystery. Yes, the Golden Age of detective fiction is dead. However, its corpse is on permanent display in the kitchen freezer, and that is here to stay. For the body is trotted out at regular intervals as high technology allows us to revisit the case in search of suspects new.
   What was the Golden Age of the crime story? Very specifically, the detective story. You’ll be shocked to hear that this amazing period of untrammelled homicide is generally fixed Between the Wars. Loosely, we’ll take that to mean in the 1920s and the 1930s, though there were ripples from before 1914 and many aftershocks well beyond 1938.
   Does this exclude Doyle and his creation Holmes? Of course not. The Problem of Thor Bridge appeared in 1922. We don’t really exclude anyone writing after 1938, my dear Watson, given the building blocks of golden murder mysteries are so durable.
   A Murder at the End of the World and Death and Other Details both make use of an old foil: death in the isolated English country house. This house is ivy-clad and snow-bedecked. The telephone is cut off for at least some of the action. And the party? It’s a party of rich ne’er-do-wells and rapscallions. With a coat of computer technology daubed across the scene, to make things appear less ancient, you are in business.
   End of the World features a bright female detective and her bright male co-detective investigating murder in the past. We move through another story in which the same two detectives meet up years later after one walked out on the other. The venue is an English country house a Bond villain’s lair in an icy wasteland, and there are suspects aplenty when death occurs. Technology features heavily.
   That story shifts between past detection and current investigation. It’s a major feature of the tale. Two murder mysteries for the price of one.
   Other Details features a bright female detective and her bright male co-detective investigating murder in the past. We move through another story in which the same two detectives meet up years later after one walked out on the other. The venue is an English country house a cruise ship very much all at sea, and there are suspects aplenty when death occurs. Technology features heavily.
   That story shifts between past detection and current investigation. It’s a major feature of the tale. Two murder mysteries for the price of one.
   Both narratives showcase at least one scene that should be discussed heavily. Each scene isn’t. Therefore, each scene is instantly deeply important to the seasoned mystery reader. The cogs whir, and you reach a conclusion.
   Also, both shows feature security cameras. And then they both do backflips to neutralise the security in the name of allowing the murder mystery to continue. These aren’t spoilers. No. Massive building blocks are shuffled around to keep the episodes going.
   What are the Ten Commandments, provided by Knox? Well, he was a priest as well as a mystery writer. He provided guidance. The High Priestesses of the Golden Age were many, and their works are still known very well. Commandments exist to be broken. How many were broken in those two television shows? Here, I tread on thin eggs.
   One. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
   Veteran readers are always on the lookout for aliases, disguises, wordplay in names, servants in the background, distant relatives, shady tradesmen at the door on the night in question or two days beforehand, and all sorts of tricks. The warning about thoughts is about thoughts, musings, unreliable narration, outright lies, and so on. These are not facts. And murder mysteries rely on facts, not the murderer’s thoughts. Flashbacks by narrators, reliable or otherwise, are always suspect.
   Knox demanded that the mystery have a mystery. He wanted the mystery presented early. And the mystery had to grab the reader and make the reader care about the resolution. You needn’t care about the legion of unsympathetic suspects, detectives, or even victims, in these tales. But you should care about how it all ends.
   Two. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
   If you tell a tale of a ghostly dog and then present evidence concerning the footprints of a gigantic hound, you’d best follow up with a declaration or two against the supernatural. To his credit, Holmes, through Doyle, does so.
   We are, therefore, going to rule out vampires, demons, the forces of darkness, Christmas in July, and all other nonsense. Since the commandments were written, people have gone on to write vampire murder mysteries – but even those come with their own particular logical or vampirological frameworks, guides, rules, regulations, and commandments.
   Three. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
   If a passage of text is written in invisible ink, does that count as a secret passage? I’ve always liked the idea of a secret door leading to a secret passage that has another secret door inside it. You’re meant to miss this door on the left, on the way to the more obvious secret room ahead.
   In electronic murder mysteries, we’ve reached the point of no return. Secret passages are conjured from nothingness when the security cameras fail. This is the only way for a murderer to bypass all that surveillance. The mystery writer creates a secret passage through the field of vision. It’s all done with mirrors.
   So secret passages aren’t only to be found in ancient castles. They may exist in ancient castles with security cameras all over the place. I like a good secret passage myself, though your taste may suffer an allergic reaction. Is there such a thing as a secret passage? Or are we really speaking of the hidden door? Have as many of those as you like, I say.
   Caution. The more secret doors, passages, and rooms you add, the greater the chance of turning your detective story into a comedy. Perhaps that was what Knox had in mind, when warning us off.
   Four. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
   At least Knox leaves scope for long scientific explanations in the middle of the story. Brand new untraceable poisons are right out, it must be emphasised. If the victim dies from a heart attack and science goes on to prove this, then you’ve written a story about someone who died of a heart attack. Don’t slap a murder mystery label on that one.
   Five. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
   That’s extreme. What Knox is attempting to say is that he was bored. He’d had enough of racist depictions of Chinese characters popping up as instant suspects in murder mysteries on the basis that they were being Chinese in a built-up area or being Chinese in the English countryside – both crimes once punishable by hanging and possibly flogging.
   Spoiler alert for Death and Other Details. Part of the plot involves a merger with a Chinese company. So Chinese characters are in the show aplenty, and they are suspects. They are played by Chinese actors. This was not always the case. Did Peter Ustinov really need the money?
   Here’s a spoiler alert for A Murder at the End of the World. The cast includes Joan Chen. Now I’m wondering if Knox would have objected to a Chinese woman featuring in the story. A Chinese murder mystery set in China with an all-Chinese list of detectives, victims, and suspects…could, at least, include one unsympathetic chinless wonder of a toffee-nosed English public schoolmaster, surely.
   This isn’t just about Chinese murderers/suspects/victims or detectives. You may take it that racist depictions of all types must be excluded from murder mysteries. Unless the murderer is racist.
   Six. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
   Note that Knox doesn’t rule out accidents which hinder the detective, or intuition which proves to be wrong.
   Seven. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
   This goes without saying, but Knox said it. I’m reminded of publishing advice when it came to putting the book in front of someone in the business.
   When dealing with publishers, in your summary of the story you must never describe how the mystery ends. There was another piece of advice to go with that. When dealing with publishers, in your summary of the story you must always describe how the mystery ends.
   Anyway, I think Knox is hinting, strongly, that the detective’s sidekick should also be included in this particular commandment. We’ll return to sidekicks shortly.
   Eight. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
   I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Murder mystery stories depend on the steady drip-drip-drip of information to the readers. Overwhelm your audience with clues. Many people have gotten it into their heads that a mystery must, by definition, be mysterious – and they write books in which clues are jealously withheld in favour of padding. Padding won’t lead to a conviction at the Old Bailey, not unless the murderer smothered the victim with an exotic brand of cushion.
   Are there variations on this one? Absolutely. The detective may draw attention to a detail that is not recognised as a clue at the time. But the avid reader makes note of this. Clues may be presented in a jumbled order. All the better to disguise the timeline of events, my dear. The detective won’t last long in a series of books by pocketing clues and declaring that those will all be explained later. This simply will not do.
   Nine. The sidekick of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
   It’s a roundabout way of saying that the sidekick mustn’t remain silent. The detective can always do with someone to talk to. Musing aloud lets the detective dangle herrings – red or otherwise – in front of the reader. Meanwhile, musing silently tells the readers eff-all.
   Ten. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
   This applies just as well to twin suitcases, near-identical cars, similar doors, and clones. If clones are to feature in your murder mystery, put clones in the title. You’ll save a lot of bother later.
   There’s an alternative list of twenty acid barbs, fired off from the waspish pen of S.S. Van Dine – who sounds as though he might’ve been torpedoed off the coast of Newfoundland by the Germans back in 1917. We needn’t concern ourselves overmuch with those. I’d find myself having to avoid spoilers all over again.
   One non-spoiler to finish on. A Murder at the End of the World features Harris Dickinson as one of the detectives. You can catch his performance in See How They Run. He plays Dickie Attenborough in a murder mystery set around the performance of an Agatha Christie play. And I daren’t say anything about that.
   I’d leave to write The Algorithm Protocol, with the opening line Is this the part where…
   But I fear murder most foul would be committed.