The Detection Club was founded in 1930 by a group of leading detective novelists, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Ronald Knox, Freeman Wills Crofts, G K Chesterton and Anthony Berkely. Berkley was the driving force behind its creation. The club had twenty-six members in all, and Chesterton was its first president. It’s the oldest and most august society of crime writers in the world.
The Detection Club was created as a social organisation, it was meant to be a place for writers of crime fiction to get together and talk about their craft. In its formative years, Dorothy L Sayers suggested that the club should work on collaborative projects. This was clearly an idea that appealed to the rest of the members, because they went on to write and publish collections of short stories as well as round-robin mystery novels, starting with The Floating Admiral published in 1931, in which each chapter was written by a different author, twelve in all.
They also wrote successive installments of a whodunit called Behind the Screen, as a radio play for the BBC. Each author read out their chapter in a live broadcast followed a week later by a printed version in the BBC weekly magazine, The Listener.
The Detection Club, celebrated its ninetieth birthday in 2020 with Howdunit, an award-winning masterclass on crime writing. The club continues to be a social organisation, a place for crime writers of all stripes to get together and discuss their craft. They hold three meetings a year, and members are elected by secret ballot. Martin Edwards is the current president.
The Detection Club was originally made up mostly of English and Irish authors, though this was more due to the limitations of geography at the time, than an inclination toward British born writers. Emma Orczy, who was born a Hungarian, but had immigrated to Britain, was among the founding members. John Dickson Carr was the first American added to the club in 1936, and he was living in the UK at the time.
The original members of the club discussed and agreed on a set of rules on how to write detective fiction, based on the principle of fairness. The idea being that the reader should be given a fair chance to solve the mystery alongside the detective. So, the writers couldn’t allow themselves to withhold information or to trick the reader in any way. Ronald Knox set down these rules as follows:
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.
All supernatural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.
Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.
No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.
No Chinaman must figure in the story. (I know this sounds offensive, and I apologise, but I’m quoting here.) The idea behind this rule is that all the suspects should belong to the same social circle.
No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.
The detective must not himself commit the crime.
The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.
The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.
Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.
Most of these rules have been broken at one time or the other by members of the club, but they continue to be a useful guideline.
…
Sources:
crimereads.com
cozy-mystery.com
collectingchristie.com
martinedwardsbooks.com
between the pages 