Author and critic Willard Huntington Wright, who wrote under the name S.S. Van Dine and created the Philo Vance mystery series, came up with a list of no less than 20 rules for writing detective stories.
Some of them seem redundant to me, and I know a few of them have been out-and-out broken, if not actually chucked in their entirety. For instance, Rule 3 that "[t]here must be no love interest" and Rule 16 that "[a] detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no 'atmospheric' preoccupations" seem rather dated given today's sleuths, with their angst-ridden relationships, unhappy childhoods and other sundry personal problems.
Even Rule 7, stating that there "simply must be a corpse in a detective novel" was violated ages ago by no less an author than Dorothy L. Sayers in Gaudy Night.
However, some of these rules (such as the notion of playing fair with the reader by providing all the clues necessary to solve the mystery) have stood the test of time. In any case, it's interesting to compare the 1920s view of the genre with today's.
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