Saturday 25 August 2012

The Death of Van Dine

I recently came across a rather fascinating list published in 1928 by S.S. Van Dine entitled Twenty rules for writing detective stories. He remarks with a self-assured certainty that "for the writing of detective stories there are very definite laws - unwritten, perhaps, but none the less binding; and every respectable and self-respecting concocter of literary mysteries lives up to them."

Ignoring for the moment that Van Dine's detective fiction has fallen completely out of favour, and that the man is now little more than a footnote of the sort he was so fond of using in his novels, it takes such a staggering amount of chutzpah to decide that you're the man to define an entire genre - and to compose a pompous and patronising list of rules that you expect people to take as read - that I'm almost in awe of him. Almost.

As it is, his way of thinking was incredibly restrictive. Even literary rules are there to be broken. Any attempt to escape the supposed limitations of the detective genre - even if it were to end in failure - would be more worthwhile than anything written using Van Dine's mindset. With this in mind, I am undertaking a new project, a self-imposed literary challenge: the writing of a crime fiction story that goes against every single rule Van Dine drew up. You can find it here:

The Death of Van Dine

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