this post was submitted on 30 Jul 2024
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Christie deliberately breaks Knox's rules, and for that matter, Willard Huntington Wright’s Twenty Rules usually seeing them as a challenge of how to include such features without alienating the reader. In some cases, for instance, the culprit is the maid or butler, but the character is well established before she is outed. In other cases, there are secret passages, or even affairs of state that might or might not figure into the mystery.
I'm not familiar with Wright's. I'll have to go look it up.
But yes, absolutely. I think that Knox's rules are actually even less rules and more guidelines than many other writing "rules", such as Chekhov's gun, are. And even those are only guidelines. Basically all of Knox's rules were specific examples of popular tropes at the time, where the real underlying issue was "don't make a mystery story where the solution is impossible to figure out even in hindsight by throwing in what is essential a deus ex machina".
Wright's pen name was S. S. Van Dine ( on Wikipedia ), a mystery writer himself when he posited his rules and (allegedly) obeyed them in his own stories.
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Yeah thanks. I actually went and read his rules right after making my previous comment. My main thought was that it's basically a more explicit enumeration of the same underlying rules Knox had. Interesting to read, if only because it implies more about what his contemporaries were often doing wrong.