{"id":10909,"date":"2024-03-22T07:00:00","date_gmt":"2024-03-22T11:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10909"},"modified":"2024-05-08T08:05:56","modified_gmt":"2024-05-08T12:05:56","slug":"rules-made-to-be-broken","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/?p=10909","title":{"rendered":"Rules Made to be Broken"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Only recently did I hear about Ronald Knox\u2019s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction, penned about a century ago. How much times have changed! Knox was undoubtedly attracted to the \u201c10 Commandments\u201d idea because he was a Catholic priest, but he also was a mystery writer who clubbed with notable mystery writers of his day. Below are his rules, and for many of them, I\u2014and you, too\u2014can think of entertaining exceptions! (Mine in parentheses.) <\/p>\n\n\n\n

In contrast with the man pictured at left, who may feel his interpretation of the rules brooks no disagreement, we can see a lot of room for nuance here!<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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  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. (This leaves out the whole multiple point-of-view serial killer subgenre, but I will confess that, while multiple points of view don\u2019t bother me, I don\u2019t enjoy it when one of those viewpoints belongs to a predatory character. Creeps me out.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course. (So much for another whole category of thriller that agents and publishers today say they\u2019re looking for, and books like Stephen King\u2019s Mr. Mercedes. <\/em>Someone forgot to tell Edgar Allan Poe, Bram Stoker, and Shirley Jackson about this, for three.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. (Hmm.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end. (Agree. Sounds like cheating and very possibly boring.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  5. No Chinaman must figure in the story. (Yet one of my favorite detective quotes comes from Charlie Chan: \u201cTheory like mist on eyeglasses. Obscures vision.\u201d And this leaves out my all-time favorite detective, Judge Dee Goong An, in the novels by Robert Van Gulik. And S.J. Rozan!) The rule probably came about because a “Chinaman” had been overused as a sinister character, Fu Manchu moustache and all. <\/li>\n\n\n\n
  6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he (!) ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right. (This rule lives on in objections to plot coincidences. They are annoying.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  7. The detective must not himself commit the crime. (Omitting a whole category of cops-gone-wrong and unreliable narrators. Tricky.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader. (Did you ever have a \u201cwhat just happened?\u201d moment while reading? That\u2019s sometimes because you didn\u2019t see\u2014or weren\u2019t shown\u2014the clue. Agree, it\u2019s bad when this occurs.)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  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. (I object! Nigel Bruce\u2019s characterization of Watson in the old movies was bumbling, but Watson is far from stupid. And what does that say about the \u201caverage reader\u201d?)<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  10. Twin brothers (what about twin sisters, huh?), and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them. (Twins are a problem. But can move beyond clich\u00e9d mix-ups into unexpected territory, as in award-winning Japanese novelist Riku Onda\u2019s fascinating mystery, Fish Swimming in Dappled Sunlight<\/em><\/a>).<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Only recently did I hear about Ronald Knox\u2019s 10 Commandments of Detective Fiction, penned about a century ago. How much times have changed! Knox was undoubtedly attracted to the \u201c10 Commandments\u201d idea because he was a Catholic priest, but he … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[174,29],"tags":[2167,414],"class_list":["post-10909","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-first-draft-blog","category-writing","tag-first-draft-blog","tag-writing"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2NkiT-2PX","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10909","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=10909"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10909\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10911,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10909\/revisions\/10911"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=10909"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=10909"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/vweisfeld.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=10909"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}