RONALD KNOX’S TEN COMMANDMENTS

OF DETECTIVE FICTION
broadcaster, Charles Williams, Chinaman, crime, criminal, detective fiction, essayist, evil mastermind, John
Buchan, mystery, priest, Ronald Knox, Stephen King, theologian, translator, Uncategorized, Watson

Ronald Arbuthnott Knox (17 February 1888 – 24 August 1957) was an English
priest, theologian and author of detective stories. He was also a writer and a regular
broadcaster for BBC Radio. Knox went to Eton College, England, and went on to win
several scholarships at Balliol College, Oxford. He was ordained an Anglican priest in
1912 and was appointed chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford, but he left in 1917 upon his
conversion to Catholicism. In 1918 he was ordained a Catholic priest.
In addition to being a Catholic priest, theologian, broadcaster, essayist and
translator, he also wrote six popular novels in the detective fiction genre. Knox was a
student of this particular form of literature and, typical of his astute and powerfully
analytical brain, he came up with his own Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction.
Here they are:
1.   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.
Okay, this one is rather longwinded but it is logical. If you want your readers to be
satisfied at the end, the criminal must be a character they have already met in the
course of the book. Using a surprise hobo who has just drifted into town and decided to
murder one of the local gentry is cheating. Knox was, of course, aware that this cheat
was used in many of the fashionable crime magazines of the day, but found them just
as abhorrent as we would do today.
Knox was much more subtle. Yes, the culprit must be a character in the story. But it
must not be a character that the reader has had the chance to sympathize with. If the
author pulls that trick, the reader feels cheated and is likely never to indulge the writer
with any further book purchases. There are exceptions to this rule, nevertheless, as in
the case of Agatha Christie’s brilliant “The Murder of Roger Ackroyd,” which was
published in 1926. It didn’t hurt her sales one little bit. Evidently, Agatha had a different
set of rules…
2.     All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
This is not fantasy we’re dealing with here. It’s real life – well, sort of. Readers are
creatures of habit – aren’t we all? – and demand that the author play the game. Here
there are no fairies, elves, ghosts, saints, angels, demons or trolls to clutter up the
literary landscape. Just give us the facts, right? Except this is fiction and not fact. The
novelist Stephen King seems to have done a creditable job of mixing straight fiction with
fantasy (as did C.S. Lewis’s pal, Charles Williams). So why is the whodunit exempt?
Possibly because, like the hobo in rule 1, it is a device that is too easy and, again,
leaves the reader feeling cheated.
3.     Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
Here, Knox sounds peeved about the irritating way in which writers magically produce
secret passages in old houses and trick switches in libraries that unlock secret
doorways which swing out to allow the protagonist to pass on and discover the secret
room. Too many of the thriller writers of the period produced this rabbit out of the hat.
The word “secret” is key. Knox wants a straightforward mystery where the reader sees
every hand that is played and there are no wild cards. The enjoyment is in guessing the
culprit before the detective has revealed who it is, not in wildly surmising architectural
anomalies and physical impossibilities.
4.   No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will
need a long scientific explanation at the end.
This, again, would be too easy. Foisting a South-East-Asian weed, or a sinister
contraption on the reader smacks of cheating. It is a device that is favored by the writers
of adventure stories. John Buchan wasn’t above the odd mechanism or appliance. He
used that to give Richard Hannay pause in “The Thirty-Nine Steps” and it didn’t really
come off. It was a lazy technique that could have turned out much more convincing if
there had been some human interaction, rather than a scene in which the red-faced
hero struggles with wooden beams, gears and cogs for half an hour, while the nefarious
criminal makes his escape.
5.     No Chinaman must figure in the story.
Chinaman? What Chinaman? This harks back to the dying days of the British Empire
when all sorts of foreign nationals were flooding into London to do commerce with the
biggest power players on the planet. The Chinaman was regularly used as the evil
mastermind character in the magazines of the day. In the 1920s the Chinese were seen
as exotic, sinister and somehow not quite above board. Here they were infiltrating
British society, selling their unfamiliar wares and slightly distasteful take on life to the
masses in the great metropolis. They were trying to take over our lives, by Jove!
When you pick up any appliance, from a toothbrush to a garden hose, and find the
words: “Made in China,” you have to ask yourself if things have changed significantly in
a hundred years – including our attitudes.
6.     No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an
unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
The premise of all classic whodunits is that the reader must be presented with all the
same facts that the detective has. The purpose of this is to give the reader an equal
chance to solve the puzzle. Coincidences, chance happenings and bizarre hunches rob
the reader of that sense of being just as smart as the hero of the piece, because they
are the hand of external agency in a world we thought was a level playing field. Readers
are sensitive to that in the same way that cryptic-crossword solvers are sensitive to
being given a fair chance to complete the puzzle by being given fair clues.
7.     The detective must not himself commit the crime.
In reality there is little room for this particular brand of shenanigan. Many detective
novels are designed to be part of a series in which the detective solves crime after
crime. If the culprit turns out to be the same person who is investigating, then the author
has effectively shot him- or herself in the foot in terms of a putative sequel. It is true that
the most convincing detective characters should also have their own faults and wrestle
with their own demons. But the author must stop short of allocating blame for the main
crime to the detective, otherwise what you end up with is a kind of moral anarchy in
which the reader ceases to care about solving the crime.
8.    The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the
inspection of the reader.
This is a tricky one. As mentioned, the reader should have the same chance to solve
the crime that the detective has. But to the same extent the author must have enough
latitude that he or she does not have to telegraph each clue. Often the best way to
introduce clues is as asides, or in minor conversations, or in apparently insignificant
details arising that are quickly passed over. In that case, the reader really does know
each clue, but not its immediate significance for the solving of the crime.
9.   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 Watson character’s purpose is to highlight the intelligence of the detective, ask the
same questions that the reader is asking, and occasionally to summarize the
 investigation’s progress so far. The reason why he has to be dumber than the reader is
to give the reader that superb sense of superiority that comes from being one step
ahead of him. In a sense, the reader should be able to answer many of the questions
that the Watson figure articulates.
10.  Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly
prepared for them.
These literary devices, by our time, have worn decidedly thin and smack of the lazy
author who can’t resist pulling a fast one in order to solve chunks of the puzzle. Even if
the author has prepared the reader for the appearance of the twin or double, the
modern reader will experience a sense of letdown when the fact is revealed.
Virtually all of these “rules” have been broken by successful novelists who had
the skill to hold the reader’s attention beyond the first few pages, through the ensuing
story, right to the denouement. In fact, many of Knox’s rules seem superfluous, or at
least partially inapplicable to modern day detective fiction. And yet, taken as a whole,
they present us with the proposition that, in this particular genre, care must be taken
over the telling, the explication and the execution of a story that is meant to be an
entertainment which challenges the reader’s intellect and is worth the price on the cover
of the book.