There was an interesting television series made in the US which was
broadcast here in the UK a few years back, about a detective in (presumably)
California who wore a dirty mackintosh raincoat and drove an unreliable old
Peugeot 404 (I think it was a Peugeot). The hallmark of the series was the
viewer was shown very early on who the murderer was, and we then watched how
the detective worked his way to getting a confession. Although this is the
exact opposite of most detective stories, it still maintained the viewers'
interest right the way through as we waited for 'divine retribution' in the
form of an arrest.


_____

From: SherlockHolmesSocietyofIndia@...
[mailto:SherlockHolmesSocietyofIndia@...] On Behalf Of
arun.pkumar@...
Sent: 26 July 2007 05:53
To: SherlockHolmesSocietyofIndia@...
Subject: RE: [sherlock holmes society of india] Rules of Detective Fiction



Majority of the novels in the Golden Age period struck to these rules
and the popular authors have been very successful in using these rules
and playing fair at the same time with the reader.

Sometimes, it gets too dull or banal to be using all the rules. So comes
a twist where in one of the rules is tweaked or completely ignored but
all the remaining rules are intact! Even though the critics scoff at
this deviation, my minor observation is that it's these books where a
rule or rules have been ignored which have gone on to attract a lot of
reader attention and have become more famous than the others. Agatha
Christie was a fitting example for it. She just loved to break the rules
and yet play fair. Trying to point out things without giving out the
solutions. For ex:
1. Agatha Christie's The Murder Of Roger Ackroyd - Where she does away
with the most basic precept of Detective fiction.
A lot of critics puh-hued the book but it's still considered her most
famous work?
2. The Murder on the Orinet Express - How many books have an ending of
that sort!
3. Hercule Piorot's Christmas - Again a break from the normal(Christie
claims that she did it to please her grand-daughter - to make it
impossible to guess the murderer) though the same has been tried in one
of the earlier classics - The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston
Leroux - this latter book being hailed by John Dickson Carr as the best
detective novel ever written.
4. To over come the rule of the crime HAVING to be a murder, she used
the ingenious idea of having 2 or 3 deaths and still having only 1
murderer(with or without an accomplice) and make 1 or even 2 deaths out
of the 3 as suicides or accidents. Taken at the flood and Death on the
Nile are two fitting examples of this if I remember correctly.

The list is endless as each author would at one time or the other be
tempted to break one of the traditional rules and make the book more
interesting. However, as Ellery Queen or JDC puts it, the single most
important rule which needs to be adhered to is the fact that the
denouement and the explanation given by the author should be such that
the things could've happened in only THAT ONE WAY and NO OTHER WAY and
prove beyond doubt that all the other redherrings & clues couldn't have
been construed in any other way to arrive at any different ending other
the one provided! If the author can render such an ending, then the job
has been done for me. It's always this question asked by the reader "AH!
Why couldn't it have happened this way?" (if it remains unanswered by
the author), that troubles the reader and encourages him to brand the
book as a not so good one!

It's this quality that is inherent in Sherlcok Holmes Stories - the
ending just can't happen in any other way as it's so lucidly explained
by SH in the end - every single time. This quality in a way overcomes
all the other trivial deviations of the golden rules - if any.

A very interesting topic for any detective fiction fan. Keep it up guys.

/Arun.

-----Original Message-----
From: SherlockHolmesSocie
<mailto:SherlockHolmesSocietyofIndia%40yahoogroups.co.in>
tyofIndia@...
[mailto:SherlockHolmesSocie
<mailto:SherlockHolmesSocietyofIndia%40yahoogroups.co.in>
tyofIndia@...] On Behalf Of
Nikhil Prasad Ojha
Sent: Thursday, July 26, 2007 8:47 AM
To: SherlockHolmesSocie
<mailto:SherlockHolmesSocietyofIndia%40yahoogroups.co.in>
tyofIndia@...
Subject: Re: [sherlock holmes society of india] Rules of Detective
Fiction

As illustrated by the events and denouement of my favourite story, many
of these 'rules' don't always work.

Nikhil

*"...[I]f it should ever strike you that I am getting a little
over-confident in my powers, or giving less pains to a case than it
deserves, kindly whisper 'Norbury' in my ear, and I shall be infinitely
obliged to you."
*

On 7/25/07, pinaki roy <monkaroy@yahoo. <mailto:monkaroy%40yahoo.com> com>
wrote:
>
> Dear Sherlockians,
>
>
> Having had read Arun's and Tim's letter regarding the detective
> fiction authors' not giving a clue to what is rally going to happen, I

> feel that here we may as well remember the Twenty Golden Rules of
> Detective Fiction that S.S.Van Dine proposed in 1928. Almost all of
> these were followed by Arthur Conan Doyle in his Sherlock Holmes
stories.
>
> Tzvetan Todorov
> thus sums up in "The Typology of Detective Fiction" (included in "The
> Murder of Roger Ackroyd: A Collection of Critical Essays". Ed.
> Nilanjana Gupta. New
> Delhi: Worldview, 2001. Pp. 50-1) the twenty rules of detective
> fiction
> writing:
>
>
> The novel must have at most one detective and one criminal, and at
> least one victim (a corpse)
> The culprit must not be a professional criminal, must not be the
> detective, and must kill for personal reasons
> Love has no place in detective fiction
> The culprit must have a certain importance - (a) in life: not be a
> butler or a chambermaid (b) in the book: must be one of the main
characters
> Everything must be explained rationally
> There is no place for detailed descriptions, nor for psychological
> analyses
> With regard to information about the story, the following homology
> must be observed - author: reader = criminal: detective
> Banal situations and solutions must be avoided.
>
> If an author adheres to the Golden Rules, s/he cannot reveal anything
> significant about the plot or identity of the criminal until at the
> end of the story.
>
> I am waiting to hear comments from other eminent Sherlockians
> regarding this.
>
>
> Thanking you,
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> (Pinaki Roy)
>
>
>
>
>

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