“Did no one, any more, no one in all this wide world, change their record now and then?” he wonders despairingly. In a hospital recuperating from a broken leg, Detective Inspector Alan Grant despairs of the books on his bedside table, among them a writing-by-numbers mystery called The Case of the Missing Tin-Opener.
Her disdain for formulaic fiction is confirmed in the opening chapter of The Daughter of Time (1951). As if willfully guying Monsignor Knox, the main character in her novel Brat Farrar (1949) was an impostor posing as a missing twin to grab an inheritance.
During her career as a crime novelist-from The Man in the Queue (1929) to The Singing Sands (published posthumously in 1952)-she broke almost all the commandments. No wonder Josephine Tey never belonged to the Detection Club. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.” “The ‘stupid friend’ of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader…. “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,” Knox decreed. His prohibitions included accidental discoveries and unaccountable hunches, undeclared clues and hitherto unknown poisons. Like any game, mystery writing had its rules, which were codified into “Ten Commandments” by the British author Ronald Knox-who, fittingly enough, was also a Catholic priest. Recruits had to swear an initiation oath promising that their detectives “shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God.” A joke, no doubt, but this was kidding on the level. One of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels was actually titled The Body in the Library.Ĭhristie and Sayers were founder-members of the Detection Club, a dining society formed in London in 1930.
Sayers earned fortunes by satisfying an apparently limitless public appetite for corpses in English country houses. That is the familiar template for crime fiction in the golden age, those years between the First and Second World Wars, when authors such as Agatha Christie, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Two hundred pages later, when the police have exhausted all lines of inquiry and made hee-hawing jackasses of themselves, an amateur detective summons the dramatis personae to the same library-they may well include an actress, a tennis pro, an embittered widow, a disinherited younger son, and of course a butler-to reveal which of them is the killer.
0 kommentar(er)
