Van Dine 2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played by the criminal on the detective.
This Rule seems to negate the whole purpose of a good detective novel. Surely the challenge is the struggle between reader and writer. In essence, the writer says: ‘I present you with a challenge to spot the culprit before I am ready to reveal him/her. To make it easier for you, I will give you hints and clues along the way but I still defy you to anticipate my solution. However, I give you fair warning that I will use every trick in my writer’s repertoire to fool you but I still promise to abide by the fair play rule.’ As Dorothy L. Sayers said in the aftermath of the Roger Ackroyd controversy, ‘It is the reader’s business to suspect everybody.’
Into this category come Christie’s greatest conjuring tricks, including The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and Endless Night. In both these novels the reader is fooled into accepting the bona fides of a character who is taken for granted but not ‘seen’ in the same way that all the other protagonists are. The narrator is a ‘given’ whose presence and veracity the reader accepts unquestioningly. And, indeed, the narrator’s veracity in each case is above reproach. They do not actually lie at any stage. There are certainly some ambiguous statements and judicious omissions but their significance is obvious only on a re-reading, when the secret is known. In Chapter 27 of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd Dr Sheppard himself states:
I am rather pleased with myself as a writer. What could be neater, for instance, than the following? ‘The letters were brought in at twenty minutes to nine. It was just on ten minutes to nine when I left him, the letter still unread. I hesitated with my hand on the door-handle, looking back and wondering if there was anything I had left undone.’ All true, you see. But suppose I had put a row of stars after that first sentence! Would somebody then have wondered what exactly happened in that blank ten minutes?
All true; but not one reader in a thousand will stop to examine the details, especially not in the more innocent era of the 1920s, when the local doctor had a status just below that of the Creator.
Michael Rogers, in Endless Night, is also scrupulously fair in his account of his life. He tells us the truth but, as with Dr Sheppard, not the whole truth. But if we re-read Chapter 6, which recounts a telling conversation with his mother about ‘his plan’, what a new significance it all takes on when we know the truth. The ‘plan’, and even ‘the girl’, are no longer what we had originally supposed. This novel has much in common with The Mysterious Affair at Styles and Death on the Nile, as well as with The Man in the Brown Suit and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd. In the first two titles, two lovers collude, as in Endless Night, in the murder of an inconvenient wife, stage a dramatic quarrel and have seemingly foolproof alibis; The Mysterious Affair at Styles also features a poisoning which happens in the absence of the conspirators. In the latter two titles, the narrator (a diarist in The Man in the Brown Suit) is exposed as the villain.
Van Dine 5. The culprit must be determined by logical deduction – not by accident, coincidence or unmotivated confession.
An example of confession (albeit not unmotivated) as a solution in Christie’s output is And Then There Were None. Here the entire explanation is given in the form of a confession. In this most ingenious novel, Agatha Christie set herself an almost insoluble problem – how to kill off the entire ten characters of the book and yet have an explanation at the end. The only solution would seem to be the one that she actually adopted – a confession. Confessions do feature in other novels, for example Lord Edgware Dies, Why Didn’t They Ask Evans? and Crooked House, but only as confirmation of what has already been revealed, while Curtain: Poirot’s Last Case contains one of the most shocking confessions in literary history …
Van Dine 15. The truth of the problem must be at all times apparent – provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it.
Although tautological, this is intended as an elaboration of the earlier Rules regarding fairness to the reader. One of the clearest examples of this in the Christie output is Lord Edgware Dies where a very audacious plot is, in retrospect, glaringly obvious with all the clues staring the reader in the face. Other blindingly evident clues include the final words – ‘Evil Eye … Eye … Eye …’ – of Chapter 23 of A Caribbean Mystery; or the description of Lewis Serrocold emerging from the study in Chapter 7 of They Do It with Mirrors; or the thoughts of Ruth Lessing in Chapter 2 of Sparkling Cyanide after her meeting with Victor; or, most controversially of all, Dr Sheppard’s leave-taking of Roger Ackroyd in Chapter 4 of The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.
Knox 6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition that proves to be right.
There are, unfortunately, a few examples in Christie’s oeuvre of ‘deductions’ not based on any tangible evidence. It must be conceded that they can only be accounted for by intuition. How, for example, does Miss Marple alight on Dr Quimper in 4.50 from Paddington? And only the ‘Divine Revelation’ forbidden by The Detection Club Oath can explain how Poirot knows that Lady Westholme from Appointment with Death spent time in prison in her early life.
The crime
The crime itself did not feature strongly in the Rules, although Christie enjoyed the challenge of Van Dine 18 below.
Van Dine 7. There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel.
The first detective novel, Wilkie Collins’ The Moonstone (1878), concerns a robbery rather than a murder, but a mysterious death is the sine qua non of most detective novels. Although she broke this Rule often in her short story output, Christie never short-changed her readers in novel form, generously providing a multitude of corpses in And Then There Were None, Death Comes as the End and Endless Night.
Van Dine 18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide.
The rejection of this Rule could mean a huge disappointment for a reader who discovers, after 250 pages, that the death under investigation is not a crime at all. See how cleverly Agatha Christie overcomes this. In Taken at the Flood, none of the deaths is what it first seems. The seeming murder of ‘Enoch Arden’ is an accident, the death of Major Porter is suicide and the seeming suicide of Rosaleen Cloade is murder. In one brilliant plot she effortlessly breaks both aspects of Van Dine’s Rule. In the Poirot cases ‘The Market Basing Mystery’ and ‘Murder in the Mews’ – both essentially the same story, the latter being a more elaborate version, 15 years later, of the former – we have not murder disguised to look like suicide but suicide disguised to look like murder. But there is another twist; the real murder plan is to get someone else hanged (and therefore murdered) for a crime they did not commit. Both suicide scenes are subtly altered to give an impression exactly opposite to the reality.
Van Dine 19. The motives for all the crimes in detective stories should be personal.
This Rule essentially outlawed murder committed for ideological reasons, specifically political motivation. Van Dine goes on to suggest that this should be confined to secret-service stories and this type of plot is indeed a feature of some of Christie’s international thriller novels – They Came to Baghdad, Destination Unknown, Passenger to Frankfurt – as well as some of the early titles – The Secret Adversary, The Secret of Chimneys – but it is not a feature of her classical detective stories. But into which category does the motive for the first murder in Three Act Tragedy fall?
The detective
The supposedly all-important figure