A new book acquired by the Thammasat University Library should help inform students how to write a bestselling crime novel.
Howdunit: A Masterclass in Crime Writing by Members of the Detection Club offers advice about how to write successful stories.
This advice is useful because, as the novelist Edmund Crispin observed,
The fully evolved detective story is technically by far the trickiest form of fiction humanity has so far devised.
The suggestions are from past and present members of The Detection Club, formed in London over 90 years ago by British mystery writers.
These included authors whose books are represented in the TU Library collection: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Freeman Wills Crofts, John Dickson Carr, Len Deighton, Raymond Chandler, Margery Allingham, and Baroness Emma Orczy.
The club’s first president was G. K. Chesterton. The TU Library owns a number of books by and about Chesterton.
The Detection Club issued guidelines only half-seriously, about how to give readers a chance to guess who committed the murders described in stories.
The aim was to avoid unbelievable plot resolutions.
The British-born writer Raymond Chandler suggests to writers:
When in doubt, have a man come through a door with a gun in his hand.
Readers may be interested to know why the man has a gun, how other characters will react to him, what the man intends to do, and related questions.
Another expert, Christianna Brand, advised:
A detective story needs at least one central pin, a new or odd motive or method, or some psychological quirk: not just a jumble of clues for the detective to unravel, eliminating suspects as he goes.
And Margery Allingham pointed out:
“It is a fact that most readers of mystery stories read for the plot but are held by, and afterward remember a tale for, the characters in it.”
Here are some further observations about crime fiction by writers, many of whose books are in the TU Library collection:
The crime novel is the great moral literature of our time.
– Jean-Patrick Manchette
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Nobody reads a mystery to get to the middle. They read it to get to the end. If it’s a letdown, they won’t buy anymore. The first page sells that book. The last page sells your next book.
– Mickey Spillane
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To be honest, I have never thought highly of detective novels, and I rather regret that you, too, write them…. I don’t even mean the fact that your criminals are always brought to justice. It’s nice fairy tale and probably morally necessary….No, what really bothers me about your novels is the story line, the plot. There the lying just takes over, it’s shameless. You set up your stories logically, like a chess game: here’s the criminal, there’s the victim, here’s an accomplice, there’s a beneficiary; and all the detective needs to know is the rules, he replays the moves of the game, and checkmate, the criminal is caught and justice has triumphed. This fantasy drives me crazy. You can’t come to grips with reality by logic alone.
– Friedrich Dürrenmatt
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Detective stories have nothing to do with works of art.
– W.H. Auden
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[Dashiell Hammett’s] The Glass Key is better than anything Hemingway ever wrote.
– Rex Stout
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A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no ‘atmospheric’ preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude.
– S.S. Van Dine
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The detective story itself is in a dilemma. It is a vein which is in danger of being worked out, the demand is constant, the powers of supply variable, and the reader, with each one he absorbs, grows a little more sophisticated and harder to please, while the novelist, after each one he writes, becomes a little more exhausted.
– Cyril Connolly
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The criminal is the creative artist; the detective only the critic.
– G.K. Chesterton
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The detective isn’t your main character, and neither is your villain. The main character is the corpse. The detective’s job is to seek justice for the corpse. It’s the corpse’s story, first and foremost.
– Ross Macdonald
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Don’t go into great detail describing places and things… You don’t want descriptions that bring the action, the flow of the story, to a standstill.
– Elmore Leonard
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A good novel tells us the truth about its hero; but a bad novel tells us the truth about its author.
– G K Chesterton
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I always refer to style as sound. The sound of the writing.
– Elmore Leonard
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I try to leave out the parts that people skip.
– Elmore Leonard
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All the information you need can be given in dialogue. – Elmore Leonard
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My purpose is to entertain myself first and other people secondly.
-John D MacDonald
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There is no detective in England equal to a spinster lady of uncertain age with plenty of time on her hands.
— Agatha Christie
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Human life is a sort of target – misfortune is always firing at it, and always hitting the mark.
— Wilkie Collins
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No one ever got in trouble keeping his mouth shut.
— Elmore Leonard
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At least half the mystery novels published violate the law that the solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.
— Raymond Chandler
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When I think of highly plotted novels I think of detective fiction or mystery fiction, the kind of work that always produces a few dead bodies. But these bodies are basically plot points, not worked-out characters. The book’s plot either moves inexorably toward a dead body of flows directly from it, and the more artificial the situation the better. Readers can play off their fears by encountering the death experience in a superficial way. A mystery novel localizes the awesome force of the real death outside the book, winds it tightly in a plot, makes it less fearful by containing it in a kind of game format.
— Don DeLillo
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I owe my success to having listened respectfully to the best advice, and then going away and doing the exact opposite.
– G K Chesterton
(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)