Rules for mysteries

In a used book shop in Akron a couple weeks back I found stacks of The Armchair Detective, a magazine published from 1967 to 1997 that was dedicated to mystery fiction. It contained a few original stories, but mostly the magazine carried interviews with authors, articles and reviews. I subscribed to the quarterly from the mid-'70s to the mid-'80s. The first issue I received looked like it had been written on a typewriter and copied, the pages then stapled together. The only graphic elements in the magazine were an amateurish cover drawing and an ad for a California bookstore specializing in murder mysteries.

The quality of the publication improved with the very next issue and continued to improve over the years until it actually had a slick color cover and was bound with glue, not staples. Still, it was always a low-budget magazine, even though the subscription prices kept climbing and my own low budget eventually forced me to drop it. So finding copies of TAD, as it liked to called itself, in that Akron bookstore was a delightful surprise. Learning that they were giving the magazines away was even better news, and I left with an armload of copies from the quarterly's last few years.

One of the articles that has caught my attention so far is in the fall 1985 issue, or just a couple of issues after I let my subscription drop. It's called "The Whodunnit List" by Herbert Resnicow. The list is that mystery writer's 40 rules for whodunnits.

His first eight rules could apply to fiction of any kind. It must be entertaining, educational, internally consistent, etc. Not until rule 9 does Resnicow get down to whodunnits: "The crime must be murder." Most mystery writers do follow this "rule," although interestingly, Arthur Conan Doyle, one of the pioneers of whodunnit fiction, usually did not. Most Sherlock Holmes stories did not deal with murder at all. Other exceptions include mysteries written for children, such as those Nancy Drew stories.

Rule 16 states, "The killer must be an amateur." One finds professional killers in thrillers, but rarely in detective stories, and probably for good reason. A good murder mystery gives us a number of suspects, any of whom may have had a reason to kill the victim. Such a group is unlikely to have a professional hitman in it. There could be somebody who would hire a killer, however.

One of the oddest rules is No. 25: "Red herrings, per se, are out. No person or clue may be introduced solely for the purpose of confusing the reader ..." I thought that's what all mystery writers did. The murderer usually winds up being the least likely suspect and the most important clue is usually the one not even noticed by the reader. So doesn't that make every other suspect and every other clue a red herring there "for the purpose of confusing the reader"?

I like rule 29: "Luck is OUT." Too many fictional detectives just get lucky at the end. Or killers reveal themselves by committing other murders or by doing something stupid that gives themselves away. I like detectives, whether amateurs or professionals, to actually do some detecting.

"All questions must be answered, none left hanging," says Resnicow in rule 31. That's why there is usually a chapter after the one in which the killer is revealed. The detective has to explain how he or she arrived at the right answer and how and why the crime was committed. Answering all questions is one reason whodunnits rarely, if ever, qualify as literature. Literature always leaves questions unanswered, something to talk about after the last page. There's not much to talk about after an Agatha Christie or Robert Barnard mystery. Although maybe I'm wrong. The Armchair Detective found plenty to talk about for 30 years.