Unit 1: Lecture

1.5 Civil and Criminal Codes

Rules for mystery fiction seem to me to fall into three categories. To illustrate these categories, I've included examples from the Detection Club Oath and from a set of 20 rules developed in 1920 by S.S. Van Dine (1928) (the pseudonym of American Willard Huntington Wright, creator of the Philo Vance stories, which were written in the 1920s and '30s very much in the classic scientific detective mode). You'll note similarities in Van Dine's strictures to some of those from the Detection Club Oath. I have taken the liberty of grouping the rules into my own categories.

Inscrutable Chinamen and Vietnam Vets

The first set of rules concerns elements of the plot that we might consider fashionable or gimmicky.


	The problem of the crime must be solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic seances, crystal-gazing and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio. A servant must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person -- one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion. Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance; but it is going too far to grant him a secret society to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds.

The references to "gangs, conspiracies, death rays, ghosts, hypnotism, trapdoors, Chinamen, super-criminals, and lunatics" concern conventions very specific to stories written in the 1920s and '30s. These are elements of the plot which no longer preoccupy us; they were the marks of popular fiction even lower on the aesthetic food chain than mysteries were in the first few decades of the twentieth century. Today's mysteries might substitute genetically engineered viruses for poisons, hacking into computers for secret passageways, and ninja warriors or Vietnam veterans with mystical martial art prowess for mysterious Chinamen.

I am sure you can think of several implausible but entertaining gimmicks from our time and culture.

Detection and Fair Play

The next category seems more serious and less ephemeral; it consists of rules about the game of detection. The concept of "fair play" and rational analysis (e.g., "Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance upon nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery Pokery, Coincidence, or any hitherto unknown Act of God?") amounted to almost an obsession with Golden Age mystery writers.


	The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader. . . . The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. . . The culprit must be determined by logical deductions -- not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession . . . There must be but one detective. . . . To bring the minds of three or four, or 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 of the reader. . . . It's like 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 role. . . . There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. . . . The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. . . . The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent -- provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. . . .

Rules like these, about the proper presentation and logic of clues, and legitimate murderers and victims, spell out implicit expectations about the competition presumed to exist between reader and detective or author. Since real life has no such limitations (the butler could really do it, after all), these rules enumerated by Van Dine function as an open admission of the unrealistic nature of this kind of fiction.

Do these rules appear to you inviolable? What about Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, for instance, which is in direct violation of Rule 12? Or police procedurals like Ed McBain's 87th Precinct novels (1956)

that use "the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives" and do so in a highly entertaining way?

Literary Elements of the Genre

This last group of rules seems the most serious to me, and most subject to disagreement, because as stylistic and generic considerations, they play out varying aesthetic tastes and agendas. The nature of the game itself, or what is at stake, is outlined in this set of rules; previous rules delineate how to play the game. Does the crime -- typically a murder -- represent at some level issues of life and death? Or is murder symbolic only as the capture of a piece in a game, meaning nothing more than a point scored or lost? These rules speak to the heart of the relationship of mystery fiction to more literary novels, on one hand, and our perception of reality, on the other.

Among Van Dine's rules, numbers 3, 6, 7, and 16 fit into this category.


	There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar. The detective story must have a detective in it. . . . There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. . . . A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.

Notice that Van Dine's hard line against literary flourishes and three-dimensional characterization dissolves when he waffles at the end of Rule 16: "To be sure, there must be sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude." What is "sufficient," after all? How does one tell the difference between "verisimilitude" and pointless meandering? Even Van Dine, himself a devoutly orthodox Golden Age author, has trouble promulgating rules that keep mystery a game entirely lacking psychological, social, or aesthetic development.

The history of religion is full of wars being fought over apparently small points of dogma. Van Dine's Rule 3, the interdiction against love interests, and Rule 16, the edict against "literary dallying," form the focal points of a remarkable reversal of mystery fiction orthodoxy. The controversy over these rules amounts to nothing less than a radical disagreement over the nature of the mystery novel during the period when it seemed the rules were clear and heresy unthinkable.