"So far we have confined ourselves strictly to killing people on paper"In 1928, a group of British mystery writers formed The Detection Club, sometimes referred to as the London Detection Club. Members included Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, G.K. Chesterton, A.A. Milne, and in later years, PD James & John LeCarre. [Formal records were not kept until 1930.]
A 1930's Detection Club Dinner
In addition to monthly dinners, and helping each other with the writing of their individual mysteries, the group published anthologies. They agreed to loosely adhere to "Knox's Commandments", a list of 10 guidelines developed to give the reader a fair chance at guessing the guilty party.
My intent for this post was to research the group and write about it, but then I came across an article written in 1933 by Gilbert K. Chesterton, about the society. Since there's no possibility of me telling the story better than Chesterton, I've included his article below. But for those who do not wish to read the entire article, here, first are two interesting tidbits:
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The Oath
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Dorothy Sayers & the Detection Club Skull
Members of the club took part in an initiation ceremony, which included an oath written by Sayers:
"Do you promise that your 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?"
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Ronald Knox & His
Ten Commandments of Detective Fiction
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Ronald Knox, an early member of the Detection Society, believed that a detective story must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end.
In brief, Knox [and the Detective Society] believed that the reader should be allowed to attempt to solve the mystery before the detective, in a detective novel.
[Side Note - In 1926 Knox presented Broadcasting the Barricades on BBC radio. Orson Wells, in a 1980s interview, credits Knox's broadcast as the inspiration behind his War Of the Worlds broadcast.]
Ronald Knox
Knox's Ten Rules for Detective Fiction
- 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.
- All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
- Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
- No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
- No Chinaman must figure in the story. [See Chesterton's article below for an explanation]
- No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
- The detective must not himself commit the crime.
- The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
- 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.
- Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
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SO far as I know, no detective has ever detected the Detection Club. Detectives have even been asked to dinner by the club; but I never could be certain, from the expression on their faces, that they, had detected it very much. It is a very small and quiet conspiracy, to which I am proug to belong; and it meets in various London restaurants and discusses various plots and scnemes ui crime. True, our ostensible object is to embody the results of discussion not in crime, but in crime stories. I am not here to rend the veil from private life or even to exhibit any morbid curiosity about it; but I have every reason to believe that Mrs.
Agatha Christie and Freeman Wills Crofts and the other members of the club have not, in fact, ever experimented in the coarser and N more carnal manifestations of homicide, but have hitherto confined themselves strictly to killing people on paper. The club is, in short, a small society of writers of detective stories; and its only object, beyond the higher and more ideal object of amusing itself, is best summed up in two statements: (1) That a detective story is a story, and subject to the same literary laws as a love story or a fairy story or any other form of literature; and (2) that the writer of a detective story is a writer and is just as much bound in the sight of God and " man to be a good writer as if he were the writer of an epic or a tragedy. . It was only a historical accident, and. the historical accident of a specially un historical period, that so many serious readers got the notion that a detective story was what was once called a shilling shocker, with no more intellectual ambition than a penny dreadful; or what used to be called, in America, a dime novel.
There is nothing in the nature of a tale of murder and mystery to prevent Dante or Shakespeare from writing in that form; indeed, there are many things in Dante and Shakespeare that are much more like a good shocker than they are like a priggish and pretentious novel about sociology and education. It was precisely the aim of the old religious or tragic traditions that death, or the revelation of death, should come as a shock. Both are exactly contrary to the skeptical, callous or indifferent spirit of those who describe all change as what they would call a gradation, or what some of us would call a degradation. The detective story has not shared any of the modern forms of degradation. I have already remarked that the shocker is now the only book that is not merely shocking.
AS one who has more than once had the honor of imposing the oaths of admission on new members of the society, I take a pride in setting out these conditions of membership in their actual form; thereby setting a good example to the Mafia, the Ku Klux Klan, the Illuminati, the Rosicrucians, the Red Badgers, the Blue Buffaloes, the Green Gorillas, the League of Lefthanded Haberdashers, the Association of Agnostic Albinos and all the other secret societies which now govern the greater part of public life in the age of publicity and public opinion.
We are a private society, but not a secret society; and the following is the exact formula of initiation, drawn up by one or two of the most rising and distinguished writers of English detective fiction.
The ruler shall say to the candidate—. M. N„ is it your Arm desire to become a member of the Detection Club?
Then the candidate shall answer in a loud voice—That is my desire.
Ruler—Do you promise that your 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, Jig- gery-pokery, coincidence or act of God?
Candidate—I do.
Ruler—Do you solemnly swear never to conceal a vital clue from the reader?
Candidate—I do.
Ruler—Do" you promise to observe a seemly moderation in the use of gangs, conspiracies, death-rays, ghosts, hypnotism, trap-doors, Chinamen, super criminals and lunatics; and utterly and forever to forswear mysterious poisons unknown to science?
Candidate—I do.
Ruler—Will you honor the King's English?
Candidate—I will.
Then the ruler shall ask—M.N., is there anything you hold sacred?
The candidate having named a thing which he holds of peculiar sanctity, the ruler shall ask- M. N., do you swear by (here the ruler shall name the thing which the candidate has declared to be his peculiar sanctity) to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the club?
But if the candidate is not able to name a thing which he holds sacred, then the ruler shall propose the oath in the manner following—M N., do you, as you hope to increase your sales, swear to observe faithfully all these promises which you have made, so long as you are a member of the club?
Then the candidate shall say—All this I solemnly do swear. And I do furthermore promise and undertake to be loyal to the club, neither purloining nor disclosing any plot or secret communicated to me before publication by any member, whether under the influence of drink or otherwise.
Then shall the ruler say to the company—It there be any member present who objects to the proposal let him or her so declare.
If there be an objector, the ruler shall appoint a time and place for the seemly discussion of the matter, and shall say to the candidate and to the company—
Forasmuch as we are hungry and that there may be no unseemly wrangling amongst us, I invite you, M. N., to be our guest tonight, and I hold you to the solemn promise which you have given us touching the theft or revelation of plots and secrets.
But if there be no objector, then shall the ruler say to the members—Do you then acclaim M. N. as a member of our club? Then the company's crier, or the member appointed thereto by the secretary, shall lead the company in such cries of approval as are within his compass or capacity. When the cries cease, whether for lack of breath or for any other cause, the ruler shall make this declaration—
M N., you are duly elected a member of the Detection Club and if you fail to keep your promise, may other writers anticipate your plots, may your publishers do you down in your contracts, may strangers sue you for libel, may your pages swarm with misprints and may your sales continually diminish.
Amen.
Then the candidate and after him all the members present shall say—Amen.
I hope to be forgiven if I dwell with some fond gratification upon one or two of the principles mentioned in this great constitution of the republic of crime lovers, or amateurs in the art of murder. The first provision, which eliminates the preternatural, both of the higher and the lower types, along with various modern forms of the very modern vice of superstition, I need not discuss at length. To all true lovers of crime it will be apparent that a detective story must never turn into a ghost story.
THIS is not because the writer believes in ghosts, or in some cases even In God, or in the general possibility of spiritual interventions from another world. On this matter the club shows the broadest and most tolerant spirit, several members notoriously in possession of a Deity of some kind, have already managed to insinuate themselves into its ranks. It is founded on the fundamentally sound principle that spiritual influences are infinite, whereas the police novel by its nature is finite. It is not fair if it is not finite; it is not fair if it does not work with a fixed and limited set of laws and conditions and as far as possible with a fixed and limited number of persons, places, exits, entrances and even opportunities. It is a game; and a game may be defined as an enjoyment of limitations, even of artificial limitations.
To solve the problem of the shooting of a Wesleyan minister or some such simple and everyday affair by introducing an afreet, an archangel, a witch from Endor, a winged horse, a Chinese dragon, a deceased relative exuding ectoplasm, or any such intruder on the family or the house party, is of the nature of cheating, exactly as it is cheating at chess to put an extra piece onto the board. Nor is it any the less cheating because the extra piece has, in appearance and ordinary action, the holy and sanctified character of a bishop. Anti-clericals may see a horrid significance in the fact that the bishop in chess moves sideways, though they win find it difficult to apply it to the unchivalrous conception that the knight always moves crooked. But the point is that the game depends on there being a certain number of bishops on the board, and a certain number of moves for the bishop; and the game would break down as a game if the bishop could excommunicate the pawns instead of taking them. This logical and limited square, like a chessboard, which the French call the cadre, is in some degree necessary to all art; but is vitally necessary to the art of the detective story.
Anybody can murder Wesleyan ministers if he is allowed to call spirits from the vasty deep to assist him; the problem is how best to perform the necessary task in a quiet, practical and economical manner with the tools provided at a particular place and time. When this principle is understood, it will be seen at once that it applies almost as strongly to the first things against which the neophyte is warned in the second clause: That is, against gangs and conspiracies.
If there is a vast secret society whose ramifications spread from Jamaica to Japan, it is no matter of wonder that it can manage to knock off a Wesleyan minister or two in Wimbledon or Worthing. Not being a matter of wonder, it ceases to be a matter of mystery, and we might just as well try to make a detective story out of the dead body of one peasant left behind by the all-destroying march of Attila and the Huns. "All-destroying Attila" reminds me of the next item of death rays, on which I hold very strong views indeed. All will note the magnificent liberality and generosity hi the spirit of the club, in only asking its members to observe "a seemly moderation" in the use of these three things, even of the last. For my part, I should not be sorry to see a death ray finally extinguishing all death rays.
WHENEVER I find a writer describing some marvelous man of science who is going to impose peace on the whole earth by the threat of a death ray—then I know not only that the writer writes bad stories, believes in bad science and bad philosophy, but I also know he bas had morals, a bad religion and a soul in a state of shocking and terrifying badness, though he may be entirely unconscious of it. I will not argue with him here; doubtless he himself is in a state of innocence— that is, of invincible ignorance. I will only say that peace by permission of an eminent man of science would be, if possible, rather worse than war; and life under the menace of a death ray would be considerably worse than death. I feel the same about the scientific internationalists who talk about war becoming so frightful that no soldier would dare to fight. They do not seem to realize that they are boasting of having invented an instrument of torture so horrible that no martyr would ever dare to die for the truth.
But these slavish and cowardly philosophies are at the very opposite extreme from the noble art of murder, or the detection of murder, as practiced in the true detective story. All the rest of the occasions on which moderation is urged seem to me to be chosen with discretion and justice. I agree that the detective should be careful about trap doors, both in theory and practice; but I think trap doors are much more sporting than hypnotism. A trap door, like any other door, has its limitations; it opens inwards or outwards; and while It is easy to fall down through it, I am told It Is more difficult to fall up. But hypnotism is a perfect instance of that unfair use of the infinite or unknown of which we have' spoken.
For, as nobody knows much about hypnotism, anybody can be made to fall upstairs or downstairs, or float up to the ceiling, or fly through the air; and the impaling of the Wesleyan minister on the spike of his own church spire becomes the work of a moment.
I am glad a firm stand was taken on the subject of Chinamen. The incessant and reckless propagation of wicked Chinamen to do the dirty work of Europeans in their sensational novels has been one of the most servile and antisocial forms of the employment of Chinese labor. But I am glad to say that t has been to some extent stopped by the spirited action of an American writer, Earl Derr Biggers, who has created a good Chinaman, who is also a very credible and convincing Chinaman, and made him the policeman instead of the criminal. "THESE are the principles with which the Detection Club is trying, in a very quiet way, to influence the detective type of Action, it is in a very quiet way, and It has no connection with some similar associations proclaimed In the advertisements of particular publishers; these may be quite legitimate methods of publicity, bat they are merely methods of publicity; the club I speak of works altogether in private though not without some motives of public spirit. It Is mall enough to be more or leas a meeting of friends; though it contains men whose names are sufficiently widely known: Austin Freeman, the creator of Dr. Thorndyke, who has perhaps come nearest to occupying the empty throne of Sherlock Holmes; E. C.
Bentley, who wrote what is generally regarded as the best modern English mystery story, in England called "Trent's Last Case," bat originally published in America, I think, under another title, something like The Woman in Black"; Miss Dorothy Sayers, who sustains about the best level, in my opinion, of lively and intelligent writing in this style. There are others who have gained fame in departments different from this: A really fine novelist like Miss Clemence Dane or a really fine sociologist like O. D. H. Cole.
There are other popular writers of my own generation, like Edgar Jepson, and many promising representatives of the rising generation, like Anthony Berkeley. I do not fancy that the club would have fitted in very well with a colossal cosmopolitan publicity, like that, of Edgar Wallace. I say so not so much because he was a best seller as because he was a mass-producer. We have all enjoyed his ingenious plots, but there was inevitably something in his type of plotting that recalls our shyness in the presence of the omnipresent Chinaman of the "League of the Scarlet Scorpion." He was a huge furnace and factory of fiction, imposing by its scale, but not suited to this particular purpose. It would be like going with one's family and friends on a motor tour and finding oneself escorted by all the cars out of the factories of Mr. Ford. It would always raise the question of whether Mr. Ford belonged to the club or the club belonged to Mr. Ford. Therefore, in our little group, the external fame or success is largely accidental and the friendship is the original fact.
Perhaps the most characteristic thing that the Detection Club ever did was to publish a detective story, which was quite a good detective story, but the best things in which could not possibly be understood by anybody except the gang of criminals that had produced it. It was called "The Floating Admiral," and was written somewhat uproariously in the manner of one of those "paper games" in which each writer in turn continues a story of which he knows neither head nor tail. It turned out remarkably readable, but the joke of it will never be discovered by the ordinary reader; for the truth is that almost every chapter thus contributed by an amateur detective is a satire on the personal peculiarities of the last amateur detective. This, it will be sternly said, is not the way to become a best seller. It is a matter of taste; but to my mind there is always a curious tingle of obscure excitement in the works of this kind which have remained here and there in literary history: The sort of book that it is even more enjoyable to write than to read.
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May 1935
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READ MORE
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The archives of the Detection Club are now held, incongruously, in the Marion E Wade Center in Illinois, among a series of manuscripts, letters and ephemera belonging to seven Christian British writers including CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Chesterton and Sayers. (Gems of the collection include Lewis’s wardrobe, the desk at which Tolkien wrote The Hobbit, and Sayers’s pince-nez).
Publications of the Detection Society:
- The Scoop and Behind the Screen (1931, round-robin novellas)
- The Floating Admiral (1931,1932, round-robin novel)
- Ask a Policeman (1933)
- The Anatomy of a Murder (1936) (US title The Anatomy of Murder (New York, Macmillan, 1937) True crime essays
- Detection Medley (1939; US title, Line-Up, 1940; short stories, some original, some reprints; edited by John Rhode)
- Mystery Playhouse presents The Detection Club (January 1948); six 30 minute radio plays by club members on BBC Light Programme written in aid of club funds
- No Flowers By Request (round-robin novella, 1953)
- Verdict of Thirteen (1978; original short stories, edited by Julian Symons, published by Faber and by Harper & Row)
- The Man Who... (1992); original short stories in honor of Julian Symons's 80th birthday, edited by H. R. F. Keating, published by Macmillan])
- The Detection Collection (2005; original short stories in recognition of the Club's 75th anniversary, edited by Simon Brett, published by Orion and by St. Martin;'s (2006))
- The Verdict of Us All (2006; original short stories in honor of H. R. F. Keating's 80th birthday, edited by Peter Lovesey, published by Crippen & Landru and Allison & Busby)
- The Sinking Admiral (2016, round-robin novel, published by Collins Crime Club)
- Motives for Murder (2016; original short stories in honor of Peter Lovesey's 80th birthday, edited by Martin Edwards, published by Crippen & Landru and by Sphere (Little, Brown Book Group).
- Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club (2020; edited by Martin Edwards, published by Collins Crime Club).
- Eric the Skull (2020; a 45-minute BBC Radio 4 play, being a fictionalized account of the setting up of the club, written by Simon Brett and produced by Liz Anstee).
Presidents Of The Society:
G. K. Chesterton (1930–1936)
E. C. Bentley (1936–1949)
Dorothy L. Sayers (1949–1957)
Agatha Christie (1957–1976)
Lord Gorell (1957–1963) [Shared with with Agatha Christie as a co-president ]
Julian Symons (1976–1985)
H. R. F. Keating (1985–2000)
Simon Brett (2000–2015)
Martin Edwards (2015–)
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