Whipped Cream Difficulties

Michael Swanwick has a post up on his website about one of his recent short stories.

This jumped out at me:

It’s a character fault. I don’t respond well to even the most benevolent authority.

Why? Well, earlier in the day, I’d been reading something that came across Hacker News that I had not seen before:

“S.S. Van Dine’s Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories“.

A lot of these make sense. A lot of these I either want to break, or find someone who’s already broken them. Perhaps, like Swanwick, I have a problem with authority.

For example:

There must be no love interest in the story.

That’s a little obsolete, ain’t it?

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.

I had a famous counter-example I wished to cite here, but on inspection, it turns out that the murderer (who was also the narrator) was not the detective. I can’t think of an actual good counter to this, and I suspect Van Dine may be right about this one.

The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects.

Defensible. I can imagine a detective novel featuring someone who doesn’t start out as a detective, but sort of falls into it (say, for personal reasons: the case is close to his heart). The Fabulous Clipjoint might be a good example of that, but Ed and Am still detect.

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better.

So you can’t have a detective novel in which the central crime is, say, an embezzlement scheme, or financial fraud? Now I want to write that book.

There must be but one detective–that is, but one protagonist of deduction–one deus ex machine.

No “wunza” novels? No team detective novels? Now I want to write those books. (“He’s the Pope. She’s a chimp. They’re detectives.”) And again, The Fabulous Clipjoint and Brown’s subsequent Ed and Am books probably break that rule. (I equivocate a bit here because I haven’t read Clipjoint because I don’t have a copy of it yet. I guess I should get off my behonkus and buy the American Mystery Classics edition (affiliate link)).

Servants–such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like–must not be chosen by the author as the culprit.

So we’re throwing out the whole “the butler did it”? I see Van Dine’s point, but I think it depends on how well the servant character is developed. For example, the long suffering family butler, who is well developed as a character, plays an integral role in the novel…and killed his master for knocking up the butler’s daughter.

There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed.

Murder on the Orient Express was published in 1934. Van Dine wrote this list in 1928.

Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story.

Now I want to write that book.

A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no “atmospheric” preoccupations.

I don’t think this detracts from the detective novel, if it is well done. Would this count as “atmospheric preocupation”?

There was a desert wind blowing that night. It was one of those hot dry Santa Anas that come down through the mountain passes and curl your hair and make your nerves jump and your skin itch. On nights like that every booze party ends in a fight. Meek little wives feel the edge of the carving knife and study their husbands’ necks. Anything can happen. You can even get a full glass of beer at a cocktail lounge.

(Yeah, granted, not a novel, but it could have been.)

On the other hand, Van Dine’s advice reminds me of Elmore Leonard:

If it sounds like writing, I rewrite it.

Which makes sense.

A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story.

I can see ways of making that a compelling story. Thomas Perry’s Pursuit (affiliate link) is a very good example of this. But Van Dine would probably argue it isn’t a detective story, and I’d disagree with him. Then we’d end up having martinis (with bathtub gin, of course, because prohibition).

A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide.

I’d say I want to write this, and I can see ways of doing this, but Van Dine may be right here: it’d be a lot of effort, and I’m not sure there would be a payoff at the end. Then again…what if the detective is investigating a suicide or accident, trying to find out why it happened, and it ends up being a crime? Say the suicidal individual was being blackmailed?

The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal.

Arguably, if the motive is impersonal, it’s probably a professional criminal. (Or maybe action by a foreign power.) See my comments above on that subject.

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.

This is a decent list. It does have some things in I’m rather fond of (like dogs and tobacco) but those date back a ways. I think Van Dine was right about them being overused devices when he put the list together. But:

The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.

Fortunately, spiritualism (at least in the sense Van Dine was familiar with) is dead. But I can see working the bogus fortune teller/séance/other modern spiritualist equivalent into a story.

The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unravelled by the sleuth.

Of course, Van Dine’s list predates the Zodiac Killer by a good bit. But by now, even that trope may be overused.

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