Forgotten Book - Still Dead

Still Dead, by Ronald Knox, was published in 1934 and features Knox's regular sleuth, the insurance investigator Miles Bredon. The setting is Scotland, and the mystery is one of those vanishing-body puzzles. Colin Reiver's corpse was spotted, apparently, on a Monday, but then disappeared before turning up on the Wednesday. He seemed to have died of exposure - but had he been murdered, and if so, when and by whom?

The set-up is very good, and the unravelling of it so complicated that many readers will be glad of the footnotes Knox helpfully supplies to point out where relevant clues appeared earlier in the text. I did, however, feel that here -as in an earlier Knox book, The Footsteps at the Lock - my interest faltered because of the lack of sufficient incident after the initial flurry of activity. My old friend Robert Barnard often used to say that second murders in books are "vulgar", but a further killing here would, quite frankly,have livened up the second half of the story.

Colin is not someone for whom we feel much sympathy. He has killed a child in a road accident, although the criminal justice system didn't pin the blame on him. To get away from it all, he is sent by his family on a cruise to Madeira and the Med, but his death occurs as soon as he returns to the family estate in Scotland.

Although I was not greatly enamoured of the plot, I enjoyed some of Knox's little touches, touches which suggested to me that, had he taken the detective genre as seriously as, say, Dorothy L. Sayers, he could have made a more notable contribution to it as a novelist. In fact, he is now better remembered for a few good short stories, and his 'Decalogue', a tongue-in-cheek set of rules for writing detective fiction. But there are moments of genuine passion here, notably in his scathing words about a doctor who is a eugenicist - and eugenics were popular with many people until the horrors of their practical application in Nazi Germany became apparent. I could have done with more of this real feeling in the book, and a bit less of the almost interminable debate about what had actually happened to Colin's body. Not a masterpiece, then, but one with a number of points of genuine distinction which make Still Dead still worth reading.

Ronald Knox and the Rules of Detection

Ronald Knox, about whom I posted the other day, was a keen Sherlockian, and an intellectual student of the genre. He was involved with the Detection Club right from the outset, and was among the contributors to Club publications such as Behind the Screen and The Floating Admiral.

He is, however, probably best remembered by mystery fans today for his ‘Decalogue of Detective Fiction’, which began life as a lecture and later formed the preface for a volume of short mystery stories which he edited in 1928. He argued that the detective story is a tale told back to front, with the body appearing early in the story and the detective trying to establish the facts which led to the murder. He argues that the formality of the true detective story (as opposed to the thriller, which depends for effect on shock value) required a set of governing rules and he set out his own idea of the ten commandments of the genre.

The first commandment, for instance, is that 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’. Even today, this concept seems to me to have some merit in relation to the whodunit, but like all rules it can be broken to great effect by writers of talent. Some of the other commandments (‘not more than one secret room or passage is allowable’) are a touch facetious while ‘the detective himself must not commit the crime’ is a rule which, if rigidly enforced, would have deprived us of a number of classic crime novels.

So Knox’s commandments are fun, and a historic curiosity, but not much more than that. However, I can’t help wondering - do readers of this blog have any commandments of their own for modern day writers? If so, let me know!