Читать книгу Agatha Christie’s Complete Secret Notebooks - Агата Кристи, Agatha Christie, Detection Club The - Страница 56

Monsignor Ronald Knox (1888–1957) was a priest and classical scholar who wrote six detective novels between 1925 and 1937. He created the insurance investigator detective Miles Bredon, and considered the detective story such a serious game between writer and reader that in some of his novels he provided page references to his clues. When he edited a collection of short stories, The Best Detective Stories of 1928, his Introduction included a ‘Detective Story Decalogue’. These distilled the essence of a detective story, as distinct from the thriller, into ten cogent sentences:

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.

2. All supernatural 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 long scientific explanation at the end.

5. No Chinamen must figure in the story.

6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition that proves to be right.

7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.

8. The detective must not light on any clues that are not instantly disclosed to the reader.

9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts that 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.

But as will be seen from a survey of Christie’s output, many of the Rules laid down by both Knox and Van Dine were ingeniously ignored and often gleefully broken by the Queen of Crime. Her infringement was, in most cases, instinctive rather than premeditated; and her skill was such that she managed to do so while still remaining faithful to the basic tenets of detective fiction.