Month: September 2022

Rev Ronald Knox (1888-1957) ten rules of writing detective fiction:

1. The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
2. All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.
6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
7. The detective himself must not commit the crime.
8. The detective is bound to declare any clues which he may discover.
9. The “sidekick” of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal from the reader any thoughts which pass through his mind: his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

A new Wheatley novel…

At first he could make no sense of what he was witnessing. No beer was seeping from the damaged barrel, instead it seemed to be plugged by a mass of what looked like hair. As he got closer he realised it was indeed hair. Greying hair attached to a head. And as he knelt by the barrel to peer into it, not just a head but a body. The body of a naked woman. Somehow the body of a human being had been crammed into the beer barrel.

(c) Barry silsby 2020

My current favourite