1. A very brief History of Detective Fiction

2. The first modern detective story
Detective fiction in the English-speaking world is considered to have begun in 1841 with the publication of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe. ( )
This story featured the first fictional detective, the eccentric and brilliant C. Auguste Dupin.
Poe devised a "plot formula that's been successful ever since, give or take a few shifting variables.”

3. When Dupin made his appearance 1841, the word detective did not even exist; the character’s name “Dupin” suggests the English word dupe, or deception, which Dupin utilizes in order to obtain the information he requires to solve a case.

4. C. Auguste Dupin Of good family, victim of financial loss
A great reader: “books were his sole luxuries”
Is extremely reclusive, nocturnal
Has a vast knowledge & imagination
Bi-part soul “creative & resolvent”
Lives in seclusion with the unnamed narrator
• feels that men have “windows in their bosoms”

5. Men have windows in their bosoms: “He is a very little fellow, that’s true and would do better for Théâtre des Variétés…”
Fruiterer bumps into narrator
Who nearly trips on paved roadway, hurts ankle
Keeps watching ground until arrives at alley with new block paving (stereotomy)
Thinks of “atomies” - Epicurus
Lifts his eyes to the sky- Orion

6. “He is a very little fellow…”
Remembers satiric review of actor Chantilly using a Latin line referring to Orion
Reflects upon diminutive size of actor Chantilly and stands more erectly

7. Ratiocination
Poe referred to his stories as tales of ratiocination- the action or process of reasoning, especially deductively using syllogisms.
In stories such as these, the primary concern of the plot is ascertaining truth, and the usual means of obtaining the truth is a complex and mysterious process combining intuitive logic, astute observation, and perspicacious inference.

8. “Murders in the Rue Morgue”
Victims: Mme & Mlle L’Espanaye What was heard: neighbors heard terrific shrieks coming from the 4th floor of an apartment in Rue Morgue at 3am after screams ended, 2 voices were heard

9. Murders in the Rue Morgue
What was seen:
Room locked from inside, extreme disorder, gray hairs pulled out by roots, on the floor small treasures & 4000 francs in gold, safe open with key in lock, letters inside

10. Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Murders:
Mlle L’s body found shoved up the chimney head down, face scratched, throttled- hand marks on neck
Mme L’s body found on paved yard below, head almost cut off, body mutilated

11. The witnesses name profession nationality info Pauline Dubourg
laundress
French
Women affectionate to one another; Mother tells fortunes; only 4th story furnished
Pierre Moreau
tobacconist
Women 6 yrs in house; Mme L owner; very reclusive; not fortune- teller
Isidore Muset
gendarme
20-30 people at gate; opened door with saber; heard 2 voices after screams stopped; 1st gruff Frenchman “diable” “sacre”; 2nd shrill, man or woman, Spanish

12. The witnesses name profession nationality info Jules Mignaud banker
French
Mme owned some property; opened account 8years ago; made small deposits; 3 days before death took 4000 francs in gold from bank
Adolphe LeBon
Bank clerk
3 days ago Accompanied Mme home from bank with 4000 francs; did not enter house

13. The witnesses name profession nationality info 2nd voice is..
William Bird
tailor
English
German
Alfonso Garcia
undertaker
Spanish
Alberto Montani
confectioner
Italian
Russian
Henri Duval
Neighbor/ silversmith
French
Odeheimer
restauranteur
Dutch

14. Police failure: Insolubility
Lack motive for murder
Lack motive for atrocity of murder
Irreconcilability of voices
Lack of means of egress (w/o being seen by ascending party)
Lack reason for wild disorder
Why? -Corpse thrust up chimney feet-first
Why?- Frightful mutilation of old lady

15. Dupin’s reaction to insolubility
“But it is in the deviations from the plane of the ordinary that reason feels its way, if at all, in its search for the true. …it should not be so much asked ‘what has occurred’ as ‘what has occurred that has never occurred before.’ ”

16. The clues: the voice
“how strangely unusual that voice must have been, about which such testimony could have been illicited.” Lack of agreement on the 2nd voice is evidence itself
Each nationality is sure that it is not of one of his countrymen
Harsh, rather than shrill
quick and unequal
No sounds resembling distinguishable words
Thus: not a human voice

17. The Clues: means of egress
A material escape! Not spiritual
No secret issues
Both doors locked, keys inside
Chimneys too narrow for escape
Thus: it must be the windows in the back room-
“apparent impossibilities” b/c sashes are fastened held fast by nails
Dupin finds spring mechanism & broken nail head

18. The Clues: mode of descent
Lightning rod- 5 ½ feet from window
Shutters ( ferrades) 3 ½ feet wide, would allow a swing into room through window
Would require “unusual degree of activity” to accomplish this “hazardous and difficult feat”
Also “extraordinary- almost praeternatural-character of agility”

19. Clues: Inside the room Bureau drawers rifled, very little lingerie
Small treasures on the floor
4000 francs in gold on floor
Safe open, key in safe, letters inside
Thus: the motive of theft is “a blundering idea…engendered in the brains of the police”
The murders occurring 3 days after the money was withdrawn is coincidence: “coincidences are great stumbling blocks”

20. En bref…. “odd disorder of the chamber” Astounding agility
Superhuman strength
Brutal ferocity
“Butchery without motive”
“Grotesquerie in horror alien to humanity”
Voice foreign in tone to men of many nations & devoid of intelligible syllabication

21. Forensics Hair- not human (color & texture)
Impressions of handprints on Mlle L’s throat- made by no human hand
The French voice “Mon Dieu” as “an expression of remonstrance or expostulation”
Thus: murderer not human! But an Ourang-Outang from the East Indian islands and his owner is “cognizant yet innocent of the murder”

22. The trap & the revelation
Newspaper article offering to return Ourang-outang found in Bois de Boulogne to owner
Sailor appears (poor & in need of expensive animal)
Dupin rationalizes that he is a Maltese sailor by greasy ribbon found below lightning rod
Sailor tells his tale in exchange for the return of his animal

23. Punishment/ Justice
The owner captured the Ourang-outang and received a very large sum at the “Jardin des Plantes”
Le Bon was released immediately
The prefect of police (Vidocq) “was fain to indulge in a sarcasm or two, about the propriety of every person minding his own business”
Dupin is “content to have defeated him in his own castle”

24. Dupin’s legacy the eccentric, but brilliant detective
a bumbling, unsympathetic police force which serves as a foil for the detective
the first-person narration by a close personal friend
The announcement of the solution and then explaining the reasoning which lead up to it.
A locked room mystery

25. Dupin’s legacy Using deductive prowess and observation to solve crimes
A detective with a vast knowledge base
(a great reader)
Using the newspaper (media) to learn about the crime and to communicate with the criminal
The detective searches for the truth, not justice or punishment

26. Vidocq’s influence on Poe
“[Vidocq] impaired his vision by holding the object too close. He might see, perhaps, one or two points with unusual clearness but in so doing he, necessarily, lost sight of the matter as a whole.”

27. Vidocq’s influence on Poe
Eugene Francois Vidocq, , was a French criminal and criminalist whose life story inspired several writers, including Victor Hugo, Edgar Allan Poe, and Honoré de Balzac.
The former criminal became the founder and first director of the Sûreté Nationale, the French crime-detection unit, as well as the head of the first known private detective agency.

28. Vidocq- father of modern criminology and of the French police department.
He introduced or significantly enhanced the following in police work:
Use of Ballistics
Undercover work
Record-keeping system for criminal investigations
Plaster casts of footprints
Anthropometric system still used
Psychology of the criminal

29. Poe’s detective legacy
Poe only published three Dupin stories: “Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1842) and “The Purloined Letter (1844). 
Other authors have used the character--who is now considered public domain (ie: The Murder of Edgar Allan Poe by George Egon Hatvary in 1997 and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Vol. 1 ?)
Universal films released adaptations of “Murders in the Rue Morgue” in 1932 and “The Mystery of Marie Roget” in 1942. 

30. Poe- the “father of detective fiction”
Poe wrote “Murders in the Rue Morgue” in Philadelphia (he lived there from )
He was born in Boston, reared in Richmond & died in Baltimore at age 40
He met Charles Dickens during his visit to Philadelphia in 1843
532 N. 7th Street, Philadelphia

31. Wilkie Collins
Dickens's protégé, Wilkie Collins(1824–1889)—sometimes referred to as the "grandfather of English detective fiction"—is credited with the first great mystery novel, The Woman in White (1859).
His novel The Moonstone (1868) has been called by T.S. Elliot "the first, the longest, and the best of modern English detective novels... in a genre invented by Collins and not by Poe,” and Dorothy Sayers called it "probably the very finest detective story ever written."

32. Legacy of The Moonstone
The Moonstone contains a number of ideas that have established in the genre several classic features of the 20th century detective story:
An English country house robbery
An “inside job”
red herrings
A celebrated, skilled, professional investigator
Bungling local constabulary *
Detective inquiries
Large number of false suspects
The "least likely suspect”
A rudimentary “locked room” murder *
A reconstruction of the crime *
A final twist in the plot *
* Poe

33. *Influences on the development of detective fiction
The first Metropolitan Police Service was established in London on September 29, 1829 by Sir Robert Peel.
He was influenced by the social and legal philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who called for a strong and centralized, but politically neutral, police force for the maintenance of social order, for the protection of people from crime and to act as a visible deterrent to urban crime and disorder.
Peel decided to standardize the police force as an official paid profession, to organize it in a civilian fashion, and to make it answerable to the public. It was the first modern and professional police force in the world.

34. Influences on development of detective fiction
In 1888, Alphonse Bertillon was made Chief of the newly created Department of Judicial Identity in Paris, where he used anthropometry as the primary means of identification.
He later introduced Fingerprints, but relegated them to a secondary role in the category of special marks. 

35. Sherlock Holmes
In 1887, Arthur Conan Doyle ( ) created Sherlock Holmes, arguably the most famous of all fictional detectives.
Conan Doyle stated that the character of Holmes was inspired by Dr. Joseph Bell, for whom Doyle had worked as a clerk at the Edinburgh Royal Infirmary. Like Holmes, Bell was noted for drawing large conclusions from the smallest observations.
A brilliant London-based “consulting detective”, Holmes is famous for his intellectual prowess and is renowned for his skillful use of astute observation, deductive reasoning, and forensic skills to solve difficult cases.
Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, and all but four stories are narrated by Holmes’s friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr, John Watson.

36. The sidekick
One major difference between Doyle’s detective tales and Poe’s is Doyle’s inclusion of a sidekick character to assist Holmes. 
Dr. Watson, although steadfastly loyal to Holmes, stands in sharp contrast to him. 
His approaches to problem-solving are populist and simplistic while those of Holmes are complex and sophisticated. 
He sees the surface of the crime while Holmes tries to plunge into the psychological depths of the criminal.
He is emotional while Holmes is scientific.  
Yet it is overwhelmingly Watson who gives the Holmes stories their point of view, supplying narration for 53 of the short stories and all four of the novels. 
The interaction between Holmes and Watson and their differing methods of problem solving is just as enjoyable for the reader as the actual mystery to solve. 

37. The Golden Age of Detective Fiction
The period of the 1920s and 1930s is generally referred to as the Golden Age of Detective Fiction. Two British female writers of the Golden Age are considered the "Queens of Crime": Agatha Christie and Dorothy Sayers.

38. The Golden Age of Detective Fiction
In Golden Age detective stories, an outsider—sometimes a salaried investigator or a police officer, but often a gifted amateur—investigates a murder committed in a closed environment by one of a limited number of suspects.
Various conventions of the detective genre were standardized during the Golden Age, and in 1929 some of them were codified by writer Ronald Knox in his 'Decalogue' of rules for detective fiction.
Monsignor Ronald A. Knox ( ) was a British clergyman, editor, a literary critic, a humourist and a detective story writer himself who nicely laid out, with a gentle wit, the "ten rules" that guided detective fiction in its so-called Golden Age. They appeared in the preface to Best Detective Stories of , which Knox edited.

39. Knox’s 10 Rules
1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.
2. All supernaural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.
8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
9.The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10.Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

40. The Golden Age in the US
Meanwhile in the US, the whodunit was adopted and extended by Rex Stout and Ellery Queen, among others.
The emphasis on formal rules during the Golden Age produced a variety of reactions. Most writers were content to follow the rules slavishly, some flouted some or all of the conventions, and some exploited the conventions to produce new and startling results.

41. The Private Eye & Pulp Fiction
Martin Hewitt, created by British author Arthur Morrison in 1894, is perhaps the first example of the modern style of fictional private eye.
By the late 1920s, Al Capone and the Mob were inspiring not only fear, but piquing mainstream curiosity about the American underworld.
Popular pulp fiction magazines like Black Mask capitalized on this, as authors such as Carrol John Daly published violent stories that focused on the mayhem and injustice surrounding the criminals, not the circumstances behind the crime.
From within this literary environment emerged many stories and novels about private detectives.

42. The American private eye
In the 1930s, the private eye genre was adopted wholeheartedly by American writers. The tough, stylish detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Jonathan Latimer, Erle Stanley Gardner and others explored the "mean streets" and corrupt underbelly of the United States.
Their style of crime fiction came to be known as “hardboiled”- which encompasses stories with similar attitudes concentrating not on detectives but gangsters, crooks, and other committers or victims of crimes.

43. The “hard-boiled” private eye
He works alone.
He is between 35 and 45 years or so, and both a loner and a tough guy.
His usual diet consists of fried eggs, black coffee, and cigarettes.
He hangs out at shady all-night bars. He is a heavy drinker but always aware of his surroundings and able to fight back when attacked.
He always "wears" a gun. He shoots criminals or takes a beating if it helps him solve a case.
He is always poor.
Cases that at first seem straightforward often turn out to be quite complicated, forcing him to embark on an odyssey through the urban landscape.
He is involved with organized crime and other lowlifes on the "mean streets" of, preferably, LA, San Francisco, New York, or Chicago.
A hard-boiled private eye has an ambivalent attitude towards the police.
It is his ambition to save America and rid it of its mean elements all by himself.

44. The “hard-boiled” private eye
Ian Ousby writes in Bloodhounds of Heaven: The Detective in English Fiction from Godwin to Doyle
Hard-boiled fiction would have happened anyway, even if Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers [...] had not written the way they did or Knox had not formulated his rules. The impetus came from the conditions of American life and the opportunities available to the American writer in the 1920s. The economic boom following the First World War combined with the introduction of Prohibition in 1920 to encourage the rise of the gangster. The familiar issues of law and lawlessness in a society determined to judge itself by the most ideal standards took on a new urgency. At the same time, the pulp magazines were already exploiting a ready market for adventure stories—what Ronald Knox would have called "shockers"—which made heroes of cowboys, soldiers, explorers and masked avengers. It took no great leap of imagination for them to tackle modern crime and detection, fresh from the newspaper headlines of the day, and create heroes with the same vigour [...].

45. Film Noir
Film Noir is a style or genre of cinematographic film marked by a mood of pessimism, fatalism, and menace. The term was originally applied (by a group of French critics) to American thriller or detective films made in the period 1944–54 and to the work of directors such as Orson Welles, Fritz Lang, and Billy Wilder.

46. The "whodunit" versus the "inverted detective story"
A majority of detective stories follow the "whodunit" format. The events of the crime and the subsequent events of the investigation are presented so that the reader is only provided clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced. The solution is not revealed until the final pages of the book.
In an inverted detective story, the commission of the crime, and usually also the identity of the perpetrator, is shown or described at the beginning. The remainder of the story then describes the subsequent investigation. Instead, the "puzzle" presented to the reader is discovering the clues and evidence that the perpetrator left behind.

47. The Inverted Detective Story
R. Austin Freeman claimed to have created the inverted detective story in his 1912 collection of short stories The Singing Bone.
Other examples of this sub-genre include:
Malice Aforethought, 1931, by Francis Iles
The 12:30 from Croydon, 1934, by Freeman Wills
Croft
Dial M for Murder , 1952, by Frederick Knott
(in 1954 a Hitchcock film in 1954)

48. More Inverted Mysteries
The Dorothy Sayers’ novels Unnatural Death & Strong Poison are almost inverted mysteries.
There is only one viable suspect almost from the beginning of each of these Lord Peter Wimsey novels. The suspects’ guilt is more or less taken for granted, and are, in fact, guilty. The story comes from determining the how & why.

49. “Howcatchem”
The term “howcatchem” was coined in the 1970’s for the series Colombo, which popularized this format.
Other TV shows continued to use this format (often when showcasing a big name guest star): ex: Diagnosis Murder, Monk, Criminal Minds, and Law & Order: Criminal Intent.

50. Police procedural
Many detective novels have police officers as the main characters. These stories may take a variety of forms, but many authors try to realistically depict the routine activities of a group of police officers who are frequently working on more than one case simultaneously.
Some of these stories are whodunits; in others the criminal is well known, and it is a case of getting enough evidence.

51. Police Procedural
Police procedures Included in these stories typically include:
Forensics
Autopsies
Gathering of evidence
Use of search warrants
Interrogation

52. Police Procedural
Can be traced to Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1880’s)
V as in Victim, 1945, by Lawrence Treat is often cited as the first “true” police procedural (by Anthony Boucher, NY Times Book Review)
Other early examples include: Last Seen Wearing…, 1952, by Hillary Waugh; The Borrowed Shield, 1925, by Richard Enright; Homicide, 1937 by Leslie T. White, etc.

53. “Semi-documentary” films
Procedural novels became more prominent after WWII, it is thought, because of the popularity of a number of American films which dramatized actual crimes.
Examples include: The Naked City, 1948; The Street with No Name, 1948; He Walked by Night, 1948; Border Incident, 1949.
The series Dragnet, on radio in 1949 & TV in 1951 has been called “the most famous procedural of all time” by mystery novelists DeAndrea, Forrest & Collins.

54. Procedural authors create detective fiction sub-genre
Ed McBain (Evan Hunter)- 87th Precinct series,
John Creasey (JJ Marric)- 40+ Inspector West novels (London Metropolitan Police) , starting with 1940’s Inspector West Takes Charge
Sjowall and Wahloo- Martin Beck series (1960’S & -70’S), set in Sweden
Georges Simenon’s Inspector Maigret novels (?)
Joseph Wambaugh & Tony Hillerman

55. Contemporary Crime Novel
Starting with writers like Francis Iles, (Anthony Berkeley Cox, ) who has been described as "the father of the psychological suspense novel as we know it today," more and more authors laid the emphasis on character rather than plot.

56. Contemporary Crime Novel
Alex Barclay's top 10 psychological thrillers
1. The Killer Inside Me by Jim Thompson
2. Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
3. Mr Clarinet by Nick Stone
4. The Straw Men by Michael Marshall
5. Every Dead Thing by John Connolly
6. The Silence of the Lambs by Thomas Harris
7. The Ice Harvest by Scott Phillips
8. Brighton Rock by Graham Greene
10. Shutter Island by Dennis Lehane

57. Contemporary Detective Fiction
“Cozy mysteries” began in the late 20th century as a reinvention of the Golden Age whodunit; these novels generally shy away from violence and suspense and frequently feature female amateur detectives. Modern cozy mysteries are frequently, though not necessarily in either case, humorous and thematic (animals, hobbies, culinary, vacation (exotic locales), paranormal, profession-oriented, period novels,religion, etc)

58. Contemporary Detective Fiction
Another subgenre of detective fiction is the serial
killer mystery-an outcropping of the police procedural. There are early mystery novels in which a police force attempts to contend with the type of criminal known in the 1920s as a homicidal maniac, such as a few of the early novels of Philip Macdonald and Ellery Queen’s Cat of Many Tails. However, this sort of story became much more popular after the coining of the phrase "serial killer" in the 1970s and the publication of The Silence of the Lambs in 1988.
These stories frequently show the activities of many members of a police force or government agency in their efforts to apprehend a killer who is selecting victims on some obscure basis. They are also often much more violent and suspenseful than other mysteries.

59. Contemporary Detective Fiction
The legal thriller or courtroom novel is also related to detective fiction. Erle Stanley Gardner popularized the courtroom novel in the 20th century with his Perry Mason series. Contemporary authors of legal thrillers include Michael Connelly, Linda Fairstein, John Grisham, John Lescroat, Paul Levine, Lisa Scottoline, and Scott Turow.

60. Discussion Time Introduce yourself
How long have you been a member of CLR?
What’s your favorite kind of mystery?
Have you travelled to Europe? What’s your favorite city/country? Where would you still like to visit?

61. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
Several authors have attempted to set forth a sort of list of “Detective Commandments” for prospective authors of the genre.
According to "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories," by Van Dine in 1928: "The detective story is a kind of intellectual game. It is more—it is a sporting event. And for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws—unwritten, perhaps, but nonetheless binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them. Herewith, then, is a sort of credo, based partly on the practice of all the great writers of detective stories, and partly on the promptings of the honest author's inner conscience." Ronald Knox wrote a set of Ten Commandments or Decalogue in 1929.

62. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.
   2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.
   3. 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.
   4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering someone a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.

63. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
   5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.
   6. 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 person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

64. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.
   8. 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 séances, 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.   

65. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
   9. There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. 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. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his codeductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.
   10. 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.   

66. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
  11. 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.
   12. There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.
   13. 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.

67. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
   14. The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.
   15. 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 reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the 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.

68. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
      16. 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 a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.
  17. A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by housebreakers and bandits are the province of the police departments — not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.
   18. 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 hoodwink the trusting and kind-hearted reader.

69. "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories"
      19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction — in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.
20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's ineptitude and lack of originality. (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect. (b) The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away. (c) Forged fingerprints. (d) The dummy-figure alibi. (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar. (f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person. (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops. (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in. (i) The word association test for guilt. (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.

70. Why Do We Enjoy Mysteries So Much
Why Do We Enjoy Mysteries So Much? – Melissa Bourbon Ramirez, best-selling author
Reading great mysteries, just like reading any other magnificent book, reality falls away and we become part of this fictional world that’s captivated our imagination.  It’s magical!  When we regret coming to the end of a story because we will miss the world or the characters we’ve become close with, we’ve truly experienced something magical.
In mysteries, there are puzzles to solve.  The reader must piece together the clues, and if you do this one step ahead of the detective, booyah!!  You puff up with pride.  Smarter than Hercule Poirot is smart, indeed.

71. Why Do We Enjoy Mysteries So Much
Why Do We Enjoy Mysteries So Much? – Melissa Bourbon Ramirez, best-selling author
They are a safe thrill, kind of like roller coasters when you’re a kid.  They’re a safe adventure, as well.  Just as in any other type of book, we get to visit exotic or interesting places.  You can see the dark side of people, but you know that justice will prevail.  Good will overcome evil.
Readers respond to books because they can relate to one of the characters.   With a sleuth, or amateur detective, we respond because we can become part of the solution.  We’re on the winning team, capturing villains, killers, and righting wrongs.
On a more basic level, we read mysteries for the same reasons we read romance or women’s fiction or sci fi.  We love to escape into brilliant prose and fascinating stories.  We find ourselves instantly involved in the characters’ lives, and being there with them, feeling what they feel, seeing what they see, experiencing their emotional journey.  What happens is that our view of the world grows.  It fills up our loneliness and helps us figure out how to connect in the world.  We learn about how others live and see the world, opening up our perspective and experiences.

72. Why Do We Enjoy Mysteries So Much
Why Do We Enjoy Mysteries So Much? – Melissa Bourbon Ramirez, best-selling author
More than the puzzle, though, mysteries help us cope with the psychological and emotional concept of death and our own mortality.  There’s an old joke that says there are only two things we can all be sure of: taxes and death.
You can actually evade taxes, but you can never evade death.  It will come, one way or another.  In real life, we’re never prepared for death.  It is never rational and never easily accepted.  Ah, but in a mystery, death makes perfect sense–or at least it does by the time the sleuth has solved the crime and brought the killer to justice.  He or she uses brain power (grey cells, if you’re Hercule Poirot) to deduce the truth behind the facade the killer has created.
Which brings us full circle to the idea of justice.  In a mystery, death is explained through reasoning.  A truth is discovered.  For just a while, death, the one thing we cannot escape and can never understand, makes sense and we can accept it.

73. Why do People Read Detective Stories
Why do People Read Detective Stories? Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker, Oct.14, 1944
“The world during those years (between WWI & WWII) was ridden by an all-pervasive feeling of guilt and by a fear of impending disaster which it seemed hopeless to try to avert because it never seemed conclusively possible to pin down the responsibility. Who had committed the original crime and who was going to commit the next one?...Everybody is suspected in turn, and the streets are full of lurking agents whose allegiances we cannot know. Nobody seems guiltless, nobody seems safe; and then, suddenly, the murderer is spotted, and –relief!- he is not, after all, a person like you or me. He is a villain- known to the trade as George Gruesome- and he has been caught be an infallible Power, the supercilious and omniscient detective, who knows exactly how to fix the guilt.”

74. Easy Writers- Arthur Krystal, The New Yorker, May 28, 2012
In a mystery, “certain expectations should be met, since it’s the formulaic nature of genre writing (variations serve to underscore such expectations) that keeps us coming back…. Neither (of the mystery-reading famous people) was after startling revelations about nature or society; they simply wanted the comfort of a familiar voice recounting a story that they hadn’t quite heard before.”

75. La Fin!