The Philo Vance Megapack

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The Philo Vance Megapack Page 270

by S. S. Van Dine


  18. A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to play an unpardonable trick on the reader. If a book-buyer should demand his two dollars back on the ground that the crime was a fake, any court with a sense of justice would decide in his favor and add a stinging reprimand to the author who thus hoodwinked a trusting and kind-hearted reader.

  19. The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction—in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader’s everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.

  20. And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective-story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author’s ineptitude and lack of originality.

  (a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.

  (b) The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.

  (c) Forged finger-prints.

  (d) The dummy-figure alibi.

  (e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.

  (f) The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person.

  (g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops.

  (h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in.

  (i) The word-association test for guilt.

  (j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unravelled by the sleuth.

 

 

 


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