Twenty Rules of Mysteries
A hundred years ago, S. S. Van Dine was one of the most famous and successful mystery writers in America. Today, you’ve probably never heard of him.
Van Dine (a pseudonym) wrote the Philo Vance series of novels between 1926 and his death in 1939. Philo Vance inspired the authors of the Ellery Queen novels, but Van Dine’s books are now considered stilted and dated. He was largely overtaken by the noir mystery at the time, and never retained the fandom of authors like Agatha Christie.
Still, Philo Vance sold in the millions and was made into a series of movies, to the chagrin of the author who merely wrote them for money and long wished to have success in a more acceptable arena than mystery books.
Van Dine’s fame was wide enough for him to publish a series of rules about mystery writing. These rules were called Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories, and they were published in 1928 by The American Magazine.
The interesting question for us is whether these rules stand the test of time, and whether they could be applied to the cozy mystery genre.
We thought we’d read through the Twenty Rules and see how they stand up today.
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.
This is a plain and simple rule, which still definitely applies. We read any mystery to try and solve it.
2.
No willful tricks or deceptions may be played on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.
This rule also applies. There is nothing more irritating than to be reading a mystery and to find out the sleuth knew something the reader didn’t. I’m sorry to say that even Agatha Christie herself broke this rule a couple of times, having her detective read a note but not letting the reader be privy to the contents.
3.
There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. 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 hymeneal altar? Wow. You can tell this was written a long time ago.
I’m not completely sold on this rule. Yes, the focus of a mystery is to solve the puzzle, but many stories have been improved by a relationship. In cozy mystery terms, we’re not looking for the details, but things can still happen. Many cozies show the growth of feeling between our sleuth and the local police officer, for example. Relationships will certainly develop over the course of several books (or not – just ask Hannah Swenson).
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 some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It’s false pretenses.
Yes, this is absolutely true. This type of story is a genre by itself (see for example the television show Dexter), but it is not mystery. Every now and then a story pops up purporting to be a cozy mystery, but when you get to the part of the description where the protagonist is killing for revenge, you know it’s neither cozy nor mystery.
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.
The worst kind of mystery is the one where a coincidence solves the puzzle. Perhaps the protagonist turns a corner and discovers the suspect standing over a dead body. Anything which isn’t really thought through is simply a crutch for the author. Again, you do get cozies which do it, but they don’t tend to be very successful.
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.
Here we are parting ways with the premise of these rules. It is true that a detective novel must have a detective in it. It is not true that a mystery must. If you change most of this rule to refer to cozy mysteries, you can get close to what we are talking about. Just pretend that where he writes detective, we think amateur sleuth.
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 bother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader’s trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded. Americans are essentially humane, and therefore a tiptop murder arouses their sense of vengeance and horror. They wish to bring the perpetrator to justice; and when “murder most foul, as in the best it is,” has been committed, the chase is on with all the righteous enthusiasm of which the thrice gentle reader is capable.
I have had this argument before. I strongly believe a cozy mystery should be about a murder (or two), but others say no. There is a small percentage of cozies where the crime is something other than murder, perhaps burglary or a missing item (maybe we should make a theme about it). If I guessed it was even five percent that number might be too high. So I completely agree with everything this rule says.
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.
In general I would agree with this, but all our paranormal readers would complain. I guess I would say for a typical cozy mystery this is true, and you would not want that kind of interference, but in a paranormal this would be de rigueur (if he can use Latin I can use French).
9.
There must be but one detective–that is, but one protagonist of deduction–one deus ex machine. 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, who, at the outset, pits his mind against that of the detective and proceeds to do mental battle. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn’t know who his co-deductor is. It’s like making the reader run a race with a relay team.
One of our bright lines on being a cozy mystery is for the book to be from a single perspective, that of the amateur sleuth. If there is more than one perspective, it’s not cozy. You might say there are always exceptions, and there are, but it takes a lot of skill from the author to pull it off, and frankly not too many people have done it successfully. The Wimsey and Vane stories are one example of an author doing a pair of sleuths well, perhaps in part because they are presented as complementary, not antagonistic.
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. For a writer to fasten the crime, in the final chapter, on a stranger or person who has played a wholly unimportant part in the tale, is to confess to his inability to match wits with the reader.
I’m going to throw an author under the bus here by saying that the first book in the Cat Who… series does exactly this. Without spoiling it any further, I don’t exactly remember if the murderer had even appeared earlier in the book, or if they had just been alluded to. This caused me to be very disappointed in the ending.
Having said that, I’m also torn by how prominent a role the murderer must have. Do they necessarily have to be one of the core suspects, or can they be someone with a more peripheral role? If they have just appeared once or twice, or if they were just someone we ran across in the course of the investigation, that’s probably not good writing. On the other hand, they don’t have to have appeared in every single chapter, either.
11.
Servants–such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like–must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory, and makes the reader feel that his time has been wasted. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person–one that wouldn’t ordinarily come under suspicion; for if the crime was the sordid work of a menial, the author would have had no business to embalm it in book-form.
I guess this rules out the idea of the butler did it! Mostly I agree with this sentiment, but there would certainly be times when the person in Van Dine’s list could very well be the murderer and a good story could come from it.
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.
Have to agree with this. In general it is a complication when more than one murderer is involved, and difficult to pull off. You might find the book having a split personality at that point.
13.
Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. Here the author gets into adventure fiction and secret-service romance. 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 (with its ubiquitous havens, mass protection, etc.) to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds in his jousting-bout with the police.
I don’t remember reading any cozy mysteries where this would apply (there might be one or two set in the 1920s but I’m not sure). As a rule it makes sense. Too easy to fall back on those protections from a group you belong to. In similar fashion we ignore police officers, with one reason being the group is more than the individual.
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. For instance, the murder of a victim by a newly found element–a super-radium, let us say–is not a legitimate problem. Nor may a rare and unknown drug, which has its existence only in the author’s imagination, be administered. A detective-story writer must limit himself, toxicologically speaking, to the pharmacopoeia. 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.
Again my thoughts immediately go to the paranormal section. A witch can pretty much do anything she wants, right? But overall I would agree with this. There really isn’t much fantasy in the mainstream of cozy mysteries.
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. And one of my basic theories of detective fiction is that, if a detective story is fairly and legitimately constructed, it is impossible to keep the solution from all readers. There will inevitably be a certain number of them just as shrewd as the author; and if the author has shown the proper sportsmanship and honesty in his statement and projection of the crime and its clues, these perspicacious readers will be able, by analysis, elimination and logic, to put their finger on the culprit as soon as the detective does. And herein lies the zest of the game. Herein we have an explanation for the fact that readers who would spurn the ordinary “popular” novel will read detective stories unblushingly.
These are getting longer as we go along, aren’t they?
I completely agree with this rule. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten to the end of a legitimate mystery without the realization of the clues being there for me all along. The occasional solve before the detective doesn’t make the book any worse, either. I feel I solve just the right amount to make me feel smart, and to keep me reading more of them. If I solved all of them it would be boring reading, but if I solved none I might feel too dumb to keep going too.
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; but when an author of a detective story has reached that literary point where he has created a gripping sense of reality and enlisted the reader’s interest and sympathy in the characters and the problem, he has gone as far in the purely “literary” technique as is legitimate and compatible with the needs of a criminal-problem document. A detective story is a grim business, and the reader goes to it, not for literary furbelows and style and beautiful descriptions and the projection of moods, but for mental stimulation and intellectual activity–just as he goes to a ball game or to a cross-word puzzle. Lectures between innings at the Polo Grounds on the beauties of nature would scarcely enhance the interest in the struggle between two contesting baseball nines; and dissertations on etymology and orthography interspersed in the definitions of a cross-word puzzle would tend only to irritate the solver bent on making the words interlock correctly.
I think I now agree with this, although when I first read it I didn’t. The first sentence is what tripped me up. Long descriptive passages can definitely be welcome. As Van Dine writes more, it’s clear he means writing which has nothing to do with the story, divergence into unrelated territory. That can be distracting from the purpose of the story.
17.
A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by house-breakers and bandits are the province of the police department–not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. Such crimes belong to the routine work of the Homicide Bureaus. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.
This rule basically describes cozy mysteries to a T. We’re not interested in the run-of-the-mill crimes where the cops come in and do their thing. That’s an entirely different genre. We want the little old lady to have done it for very mundane reasons (or for her to be the sleuth, thank you Miss Marple).
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 play an unpardonable trick on the reader. If a book-buyer should demand his two dollars back on the ground that the crime was a fake, any court with a sense of justice would decide in his favor and add a stinging reprimand to the author who thus hoodwinked a trusting and kind-hearted reader.
Yes, absolutely. We want the satisfaction of finding out whodunnit and knowing they will face their just desserts.
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.
To save you the trip to the dictionary I had to take, gemütlich means pleasant and cheerful.
This rule applies perfectly to cozy mysteries, it could be one of those foundational features of the genre.
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.
– 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.
– The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.
– Forged finger-prints.
– The dummy-figure alibi.
– The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.
– The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person.
– The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops.
– The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in.
– The word-association test for guilt.
– The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unravelled by the sleuth.
This is a small hodgepodge of items for the last rule, and by and large they are good and cozy. I don’t remember seeing any of them in stories recently, except perhaps the barking dog. If you were considering writing a cozy, start with this list of what not to do. Or, if you’re feeling adventurous, use these as your ideas, if you can pull them off in a fresh way.
Conclusion
If you followed along with each rule, you can probably guess what our conclusion is going to be.
At the beginning I didn’t expect the rules to relate to cozy mysteries. I figured some of them would still apply generally, and a few specifically.
I was pleasantly surprised to see how much they all do still apply today.
This list could almost be written by us here at CozyMystery.com. Many of them could be taken directly from our own rules about what is and isn’t a cozy mystery.
A few of them are more specific, notably the ones which we decided are relevant to the Paranormal theme in cozies. I can’t hold this against Van Dine though, since this aspect of mysteries is much more recent than him.
For the rest, we have a couple of quibbles, but they’re largely technical complaints. If I said 18 out of 20 apply to cozy mysteries, I don’t think I’d be far wrong.
So I guess well done to S. S. Van Dine. Almost a hundred years after he created these rules, they are still mostly applicable today. Few of us could hope to have something we’ve done last that long.
Do you have anything to say about this article? Agree or disagree with what we have to say? Let us know in the comments below.
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Cozy mysteries are my favorites, but I am one of those readers/writers who prefer NOT to read about murder all the time. I love a creative mystery about something different. Most small communities don’t have murders all that often, and someone who travels a lot should not be bumping into all the ones that just happen to have one when they get there. This is so unrealistic and depressing to me. That’s why I sponsor a writing contest that is about a “Living Mystery.” Nobody is allowed to die for any reason in the mysteries written for my contest, not even a mention of Aunt Beula who lives in Maine and died last week. This is to help folks remember that not all mysteries must be murders.
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I forgot to mention that I enjoyed reading this page. Thank you for making this available.
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