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.
RLLauthor@outlook.com and @RLL_author GO TO AMAZON KINDLE STORE AND TYPE RLL. YOU WILL FIND MY BOOKS.
Monday, 1 April 2024
CRIME FICTION’S TEN COMMANDMENTS: A REPORT FROM A FUGITIVE.
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