To me, one reason that Knox's Decalogue is interesting is that it's venerable enough for there to be stories that deliberately play with it. I'm particularly aware of the visual novels Virtue's Last Reward (which arguably makes a point of violating the letter of each of the rules while preserving their underlying intent) and Umineko When They Cry (which is hard to explain without blatant spoilers except to say that the rules wind up being much more important than they initially seem). I'm curious as to whether there are other examples of this phenomenon.
I was about to mention Umineko, I mean, there is even a character named Knox, and it is not a coincidence. As for what it is, it is strongly inspired by Agatha Christie's "And Then There Were None" but it ends up questioning the nature of reality.
There is an anime but it doesn't do the visual novel justice. I don't consider the adaptation that bad, it is just that the story is so twisted and complex that it is simply impossible to fit into 26 episodes.
Have recently discovered the Honkaku novels from Japan, which were part of a revival of golden age, "fair play" detective fiction. I recommend starting with The Honjin Murders. Have really enjoyed them as it's the first time after Christie that I've discovered something close to it.
Fr Knox also belongs to the rare category of people to translate the entire Bible. It is always interesting to see what a single mind/voice can produce in that regard. He also wrote a small companion piece for that effort, with the lovely title “On Englishing the Bible”. For those curious, his translation can be found online here:
In Czechia we have "Hříchy pro pátera Knoxe" (Father Knox's sins) which is detective series (both in book forms and tv series) where the author deliberately breaks these ten rules (one in each story). You have to guess who is culprit and which rule was broken.
It's written by Josef Škvorecký.
The 'police procedural' crime drama has become very popular on British TV in recent years. There's probably too of much it to be honest.
The most popular is a BBC series called Line of Duty about corruption in the police force ("bent coppers"). There are seven series (seasons) so far and the plots are far-fetched but entertaining. Every episode features police interviews or interrogations which make up much of the drama.
I absolutely adore Line of Duty. I like how everyone in the team of protagonists is not entirely clean, though not estirely bad either.
Of course the prime example and my favorite cop TV show ever is The Shield. You are rooting for the bad guys, though you gradually realize just how bad they are as the series progresses, and eventually you become horrified and want their punishment to finally arrive... but still, every time they evade it you (I) find myself cheering. Horrifying.
Line Of Duty is absolutely excellent and a cut above regular police procedura, but it bends the rules slightly: there are times when the first the audience is made aware of a piece of evidence is when it appears in the interview scenes. Magnifies the impact of the drama but at the expense of it not being even theoretically possible for the viewer to be ahead of the detectives.
One thing I find refreshing of British cop shows is how things that are trivial in US shows just aren't possible.
Neither cops nor criminals go guns blazing everywhere, simply because having access to a gun is a big deal. An entire season of Line of Duty is about this.
Cops in threatening situations cannot simply pull a gun out of the blue. This forces scriptwriters to become a bit more creative about problem resolution.
Whenever you're tired of US cop shows, try a British show!
I’m trying to decide whether Midsomer Murders [0] follows these rules. I think it does with the possible exception of Rule 6 (no accidents or unaccountable intuition): DCI Barnaby often develops an intuition about a complex chain of events (usually multiple murders). Additional rules that seem to apply to Midsummer Murders include:
* If one of the suspects is a previously convicted hardened criminal, he will turn out to be innocent
* Any person identified as obviously guilty by Barnaby’s sidekick will turn out to be innocent
* If, early in an episode, Mrs Barnaby is seen to have acquired a new hobby, it will definitely be related to the murder in some way
I am partial to Ellery Queen. Especially the earlier novels, which often have an explicit announcement at the point in the book when you have received all the clues necessary to solve the case.
> 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
The Murder of Roger Ackroyd breaks that one decisively, no? I find it interesting that Agatha's first classic was already turning the genre on its head.
Pretty sure she broke this one too:
> The detective must not himself commit the crime.
Somewhere, probably in the essay referred to, Knox acknowledges Christie's bending of the rules. But it has been an awfully long time since I read the essay.
Just a note about rule #5… in an effort to not use an offensive term for asian immigrants the author has possibly inverted the meaning of the rule:
5. No racial stereotypes. – to a 21st century reader implies that an author will not use racial stereotypes, that the characters can be their own individuals regardless of their race. In the original it means that there will be no asian immigrants in the story, and Knox further clarified that he thought their presence spoils a good story.
The page I link above also contains a similar list of "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories" by S. S. Van Dine. He avoids any racists rules, but has a "classist" rule that speaks to America in the 1920s as seen by avant-garde art critic…
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.
On the contrary, I think it's quite clear that Knox meant one should avoid the cliche. The version you linked is the original when it was only nine rules, the later decalogue version is even clearer, I think:
>No Chinaman must figure in the story. Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our western habit of assuming that the Celestial is over-equipped in the matter of brains, and under-equipped in the matter of morals. I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of 'the slit-like eyes of Chin Loo', you had best put it down at once; it is bad. The only exception which occurs to my mind--there are probably others--is Lord Ernest Hamilton's Four Tragedies of Memworth.
It's the western habit of assuming asians are intelligent but immoral that ultimately spoils the story, not the presence of asian immgirants themselves.
I also clicked through to read the original, had a different interpretation of the use of that rule. It seems to me directed at focusing attention on competition within a social class rather than outside it.
These stories are about members of the same group competing, not about in vs out-group competition.
i.e. imagine a school mystery: "the case of the stolen grade book" with culprit "random stranger who walked onto school grounds". The forbiddenness of such a solution is not racism/classism/ageism, but just that they're not part of the same social milieu of students, teachers, and parents. Them showing up makes all the fraught student<=>student, student<=>teacher interactions meaningless. Such a culprit's has different freedoms, social restrictions, and resources are different than the characters. If the culprit were another teacher with freedom to move, you get interesting contrast to students lack of mobility (needing hall passes to do their investigations). The mechanics of the story with an in-group culprit force readers to think about the social relations gaps they personally see in their own lives.
The political implications of this are inconclusive to me - it avoids "othering" traditionally outside groups (to the authors of these books) and portraying them as criminals - but it does this by ignoring their participation in society and making them vanish.
Culprit selection is difficult; compare Colombo, who has similar rules: "the culprit is nearly always from the upper class" - is this a racist/classist policy or not?
> It seems to me directed at focusing attention on competition within a social class rather than outside it
> These stories are about members of the same group competing, not about in vs out-group competition.
Okay, but it doesn't seem obvious to me why "detective story" necessarily implies "story about competition within a social class". If I read a blog post titled "20 rules for making pasta-based dishes", and one of the rules was "don't ever use cheese", I'm not going to argue that there aren't a wide variety of good dishes you could make without cheese, but I'd definitely walk away with the assumption that the author has some sort of bias if they think it's a universal rule.
It seems like there was a decent amount of context missing here which leads to this ambiguity. Reading the original I can see it a couple of different ways but it seems to me that what is implied is that there was a genre of story in which the villain was always Chinese and that genre was full of shitty books that relied on racist cliches rather than clever plots or good writing. The advice then is to not follow down that path.
To me a modern equivalent would be if Spielberg decided to make a reality show to try to do a good version of it: at the end of the day the genre is just shitty and unsalvageable for more reasons than one.
Also it is hard to figure out if the original source was prejudiced against Chinese people or not from this alone. This is a discussion about good and bad writing, not about race directly.
I was responding to the comment about the rules that the person who did the crime couldn't be a butlet/maid/etc., not the rule you mention, which is an entirely different can of worms
His name is C. Auguste Dupin, and he is not an inspector, nor is he ever called that. Sloppy research of this type makes everything else in the article rather suspect.
Apart from the misspelling correction, I don't see how the change is an improvement.
Edgar Allan Poe invented the murder mystery genre we know today
with Inspector Dupin, a purveyor of “ratiocination,” or intensive reasoning
— who was introduced to the world in The Murders on the Rue Morgue.
Previously the link [Inspector Dupin] was about Edgar Allan Poe's character "Not-An-Inspector Dupin" who was introduced to the world in The Murders on the Rue Morgue.
Now the link is about the TV movie "Inspector Dupin" which is based on German novels published in the last decade and unrelated to The Murders on the Rue Morgue, Edgar Allan Poe or the invention of the murder mystery genre we know today.
Surprised there is no mention of Dashiell Hammett, a contemporary of Christie's. He wrote The Maltese Falcon in 1930, introducing the world to Sam Spade, an interesting contrast to Hercule Poirot. The interwar period certainly was the golden age of detective and mystery novels, whether they were more in line with the Christie formula or followed a more hard-boiled, American style.
I wonder to what degree the novels of that period informed the more paranoid, Cold War-era novels and films after WWII. John le Carré and Ian Fleming obviously come to mind, but Orson Welles's The Third Man and Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity are also great explorations of the postwar noir genre.
I'm sure there are essays about how it's all connected, and how it can probably be traced back to early mysteries like Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, but I haven't found anything yet that charts the history of the genre and explains the relative stability of its tropes and motifs over time.
> Surprised there is no mention of Dashiell Hammett, a contemporary of Christie's. He wrote The Maltese Falcon in 1930, introducing the world to Sam Spade
I think it's because Dashiell Hammett wrote in a different genre. Rather than detective fiction, he wrote in the hardboiled or noir style, totally unlike Agatha Christie or Arthur Conan Doyle or other authors of what we associate with "detective/whodunnit fiction". His stories are not that much about the mystery (contrast them with Christie's, which are all about the mystery, and without which they would not be interesting to read), but about the rough and cynical detective making a living in an uncaring world, where corruption rules and the law is similarly dirty and suspect. Also they smoke a lot and wear hats!
Dashiell Hammett is mentioned just after the list of 10 rules:
> Dame Agatha and the Detection Club’s rules ushered in what’s known as the Golden Age of detective fiction. However, on the other side of the pond, a revolution in form was brewing in the livers of Dashiell Hammett and his successor Raymond Chandler. Hardboiled cop fiction took all Agatha Christie’s rules and blew them straight to hell.
Or was the article edited after your comment? [Edit: apparently the whole URL was changed...]
> Billy Wilder's Double Indemnity are also great explorations of the postwar noir genre
God how I love that movie. It's perfect in every sense of the word. "There's a speed limit in this state, Mr. Neff."
Why would it mention Dashiell Hammett? It is an article about Golden Age detective fiction rules, not some overview of all the good detective fiction authors.
Anyway, Hammett wasn't even a Golden Age author, as Chandler's famous essay makes abundantly clear.
The rule "no racial stereotypes" was, in the original
> No Chinaman must figure in the story. (The "No Chinaman rule" was a reaction to, and criticism of, racial cliches prevalent in 1920s English writing. Knox explained, "I see no reason in the nature of things why a Chinaman should spoil a detective story. But as a matter of fact, if you are turning over the pages of an unknown romance in a bookstore, and come across some mention of the narrow, slit-like eyes of Chin Loo, avoid that story; it is bad.")
I quote it not to endorse it, but for a better feel for how they thought
This is the original version from 1924 when there were only nine rules. The version from the decalogue (1929) expands a bit on it:
>No Chinaman must figure in the story. Why this should be so I do not know, unless we can find a reason for it in our western habit of assuming that the Celestial is over - equipped in the matter of brains, and under - equipped in the matter of morals. I only offer it as a fact of observation that, if you are turning over the pages of a book and come across some mention of 'the slit - like eyes of Chin Loo', you had best put it down at once; it is bad. The only exception which occurs to my mind - there are probably others - is Lord Ernest Hamilton's Four Tragedies of Memworth.
The phasing of that is obviously tone-deaf, but I can't object to the principle. Would you read something that mentioned "the narrow, slit-like eyes of Chin Loo"? Didn't think so.
The better solution is obviously to include whatever characters you want but write them well. However, since the authors of that time seemingly couldn't write Chinese characters well, leaving Chinese people out entirely makes for better literature.
If you're an Agatha Christie fan, I highly recommend the 2019 "Knives Out" movie. Writer/Director Rian Johnson is a fan, and the movie does it justice.
The movie is mentioned in the article. I have seen it and did enjoy it -- mostly because it appeared obvious that actors were having a lot of fun. But found it a bit complicated and verbose.
