The Criminalist: The Golden Years of Detection

At the Barnes & Noble Review, my newest column looks at the wonderfully entertaining Bryant & May novels by Christopher Fowler. The plots harken back to the Golden Age of mystery but are very much of our time now. Here's how the piece opens:

In 1928, Willard Huntington Wright (better known as S. S. Van Dine) set down "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", which attempted to cement what should and should not be done in detective fiction. His colleagues and readers took Van Dine’s edicts seriously by virtue of the acclaim he’d racked up for his own rule-abiding sleuth, Philo Vance. Eighty-plus years on, the list seems rather quaint. Many of the greatest detective novels written since then gleefully ignore Van Dine’s rules -- especially No. 16, which guards against any “long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations,” for “such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction.”

 I have a mental image of Arthur St. John Bryant and John May, the London detectives created in Christopher Fowler’s continuing series, chancing upon Van Dine’s fictional detection guidelines not long after publication. They would have been youngsters then, a couple of years past learning how to read, a decade and change from their first meeting as fresh-faced recruits to the Metropolitan Police Force, and 75 years removed from their first joint appearance in Full Dark House (2003) by their creator. And in my fantastical conjuring I see clearly their respective reactions to Van Dine’s treatise: May would have shrugged his shoulders and gone on with whatever more important task he was doing, while Bryant would have noted every word in his head, resolving to do the exact opposite – especially contradicting rule number eight, “chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics.”

Read on for the rest - and for another take, see Robin Vidimos's review at the Denver Post.

Comments

[Howard Shrier]

Wasn't there a list similar to Van Dine's that specified "No Chinamen" should be part of the story?

[Dean James]

Ronald Knox's "Decalogue" declared that no Chinamen should be the villain. They were okay to include in the book otherwise.

[jcrn]

I really like reading these lists because it reminds me of all the times those rules have been broken effectively.