Mystery Rules (part 2)

Brook and Sarah are joined by mystery expert Frances to discuss other rules of mystery fiction.

Discussed and mentioned

Dashiell Hammett’s Suggestions for Crime Writers: “Suggestions to Detective Story Writers” (New York Evening Post, June 7 & July 5, 1930)

(Raymond) Chandler’s Law: First appeared in a letter to The Atlantic Monthly editor Charles W. Morton and is in his essay “The Simple Art of Murder” (The Atlantic Monthly, December 1944).

“When in doubt, have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”

Brian Garfield’s Rules: ‘10 Rules for Suspense Fiction’ Writer’s Digest, February 1973

On Writing (2000) Stephen King

Elmore Leonard’s 10 Rules for Good Writing (2001): Excerpted from the New York Times article, “Easy on the Adverbs, Exclamation Points & Especially Hooptedoodle.”

“Writing Mysteries” ed. Sue Grafton (2002)

Sue Grafton’s Philosophy & Approach to Mystery Writing: Writers Digest (2010) Interview

Related episodes

Noir and Hardboiled: part 1 (released May 24, 2022)

Noir and Hardboiled: part 2 (released May 31, 2022)

Agatha Christie: part 3 (released March 8, 2022)

For more information

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Transcript

This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.

Sarah	Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah.
Brook	And I’m Brook, and we both love mystery.
Sarah	Hi Brook.
Brook	Hi, Sarah. Today, we’re going to have such a fun conversation with a returning friend. Would you like to introduce her?
Sarah	I will. Yes. I’m so excited that Frances has returned. She is a former bookseller, an author, lecturer, and all-around expert on mystery. Frances previously joined us on early episodes about Agatha Christie and noir and hard-boiled mysteries. Welcome back, Frances.
Frances	Thank you for having me. That’s wonderful. So we’re going to talk about The rules of crime writing after the Golden Age.
Sarah	Yes, so excited. Brook and I did an episode where we talked about some of the rules that came out. And we can’t wait to hear what… what you’re going to tell us about.
Frances	Yeah, it’s a lot of be a lot of fun, I think. So… Um. if we look at crime fiction in general. At that after the golden age and partway in the golden age things drastically changed because of what people did for entertainment. So pulp magazines were an enormous field. Everyone had a radio. And they listen to dramatizations of shows. A lot of them you can hear on Internet Archive for free.
Frances	You just sign up for an account and… It’s a go-to place. They went to films a lot. And… So even in 1932…the mainly first gangster film was called Scarface. And uh, it was a ter It’s a terrifying movie to even watch now. But gangsters were a big thing in the 1930s and 40s. in real life and… And they’re fiction films, that sort of thing. Movie palaces. were built. that’s sat 5 ,000 people in them to go to a film. There were also chapter films that would appear before the movie. So every week when you went to see a movie you would see the next chapter. They called them serials. So that was kind of cool. And they had them for kids and they had them for adults. And um, they were usually adventure, mystery or sci-fi.
Frances	The ones for kids would have been… No, I’ve just drawn a blank on the name. Ah it’s a group of boys and a couple of girls that are in them. And I’ll i’ll get you the name for it but they they were a riot and in fact in one serial they started a detective agency. And they had a peephole in the door that was, you pulled a string on the inside and an eyeball came out and your head sat in the eyeball so that you could see who was trying to get in. Uh, and detective magazines, pulp magazines, came out like Dime Detective, Mystery, Black Mask.
Frances	But magazines in general… like Liberty and different, more general topics also carried crime fiction in it. So… that’s sort of the setting for people in that time period. And in the real life gangsters, you had John Dillinger and and people like that. So Bonnie and Clyde that sort of atmosphere began changing crime fiction. From the English country house or… calmer, more intellectual investigator or detective.
Frances	So that’s setting the tone. And people like Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler decided that people wanted more realism in what they were reading. They couldn’t identify with the Golden Age necessarily. Just like they wanted to solve you know where John Dillinger was hiding out and that kind of stuff, they wanted to solve crime fiction.
Frances	The tone changed considerably. And brought about all that pulp kind of writing where the atmospheres were dark, the investigators often um rather than police would be private detectives or independent operators. Hammett was a Pinkerton man. And Pinkerton’s was a big detective agency that was throughout the country with an office in San Francisco. But he worked out of Baltimore at the Pinkertons. And because he did that he had inside knowledge for the books that he wrote. And ah there’s a reason I’m saying that. We’ll come back to it.
Frances	Moral ambiguity. It was also prohibition in the United States. Which lasted for 20 years or so as opposed to ours which was much shorter in Canada. Um and there was… outright violence. that was described. That’s a lot different than somebody in, say, an Agatha story where they might have used poison. This was out-and-out shoot them up. Because Chicago Typewriters, or Tommy Guns, they were technically called were everywhere.
Frances	Cars changed. Because people like Al Capone had his vehicle. fully lined in… in metal so that they couldn’t shoot through the doors and stuff. So all of all of this is changing the fiction. that was getting read.
Frances	So in 1930 in the a New York Evening Post, two issues in June and July um Dashiell Hammett wrote what he considered a set of rules. 24 suggestions.
Frances	This is before. Chandler’s Rules came out. So… He had he was working at a time as a crime fiction reviewer for the New York Evening Post.
Frances	And he was disgusted with five books that he read. For one of his review things and he thought this is ridiculous. These people do not know how to be realistic in their writing. They don’t have the facts right.
Frances	So he wrote down these suggestions, things like, The Colts 45 Automatic Pistol. Um, has no chambers. The cartridges are put in a magazine. And they even are mentioned. With a reference to that, in Agatha Christie’s that ah forensics book, that’s about how she learned forensics, they mention the fact that she had learned quite a bit more as she went through her books, and you could tell when she started to speak to investigators and find out about these different things. Um,
Frances	What he did was he wanted. realistic police procedures in ballistics forensics and common blunders because it was taking away from the authenticity of the work. So another thing he said was that um a lawyer can’t impeach his own witness
Frances	The length of time a corpse has been, this is the 24th one, has… The length of time a corpse has been a corpse can be approximated by an experienced physician but only approximated. Remember, it’s 1930.
Frances	And the longer it has been a corpse, the less accurate the approximation will be. So… he had people that were writing in their books that well it’s obvious they’ve been dead for 27 hours or something, you know, in a heated room with whatever. And it just really irritated him.
Frances	And I like that he called them suggestions. Chandler’s rules are very different because he tells how you should be doing writing. and the suggestions. But there is Chandler’s Law. which he abided by. all the time and that’s what it became known as. “When in doubt have a man come through the door with a gun in his hand.”
Frances	So that that became known as Chandler’s Law. In. In 1932 scientific methods began to change drastically. In that year alone. The. the FBI sent up its national crime lab. In Washington, DC. At the time they were known as the Bureau of Investigation. not to become. the FBI until a couple of years later. but that’s and it still exists and it’s a fabulous tour to do. What they showcased was um new inventions and methods. for crime scene investigation. And this is what… Hammett and Chandler both alluded to at different times because they figured out that they could use plaster molds to take a mold of a footprint or whatever. Ballistics. analysis meant that they could match bullets and casings to firearms.
Frances	1932. And that’s all because of the gangsters tearing around towns. and in the countryside shooting up things. They started to build databases for tire trend patterns, typewriter typefaces and watermarks and it became it was national so anybody could send stuff to them.
Frances	And around that time, um dictographs were also so… they almost like us sending an email now, these would come over the wires. and they could get their analysis sent back quickly. to police services. Um, um’ the ultraviolet light. and comparison microscope. were both invented then.
Frances	So there was a lot. going on. and a lot for people to learn about if they were going to write accurate crime fiction. In ’44, Chandler wrote, “The Simple Art of Murder” which was put into the Atlantic Monthly. And that is where He alludes to the rules and and they’re in that book the notebooks of Raymond Chandler which is a great book too. But it started these started out as magazine articles, these. rules, which is… just shows that it was made available to everyone. to read about.
Frances	So we’ll we’ll jump ahead. past because we’ve got the noir podcast that you have um and these guys are still writing. But when we get to the 50s and 60s you get a whole other kind of thing that happens. Because in the UK… Ruth Randell turned crime fiction on its head because she started writing psychological thrillers. And Patricia Highsmith wrote them in the in the United States.
Frances	And people started to go, wow, what is this? it made straight mystery fiction, much more complex. You weren’t told everything. You had to figure things out by reading about the person. and why they might be. doing what they’re doing. And so characters focused on different things suddenly characters were being asked, why are they doing that? The reader is asking, why are they doing that? And um they dug deeper into human behavior.
Frances	So Highsmith and Rendell were the leaders at the time of that. people started looking at things very, very differently. But part and parcel of that you now get police procedurals much more prominent than they had been. They were prominent in television, which had come about now. So you get Dragnet which was also a radio show, which was also made into a film.
Frances	So, this all of this kind of stuff was coming out of the woodwork and police procedurals. Now, it’s not that they didn’t exist before, because Malgret was started in 1930. But he continued up well on Over 70. novels of just Malgret and there were short stories and all that sort of thing.
Frances	So… Hilary Waugh in 1952 wrote Last Seen Wearing and it is considered the first American police procedural that is straight police procedural. Um, and then in 1956 the great Ed McBain, or also known as his original name, Evan Hunter, began the 87th Precinct Series, the first one ah was written in 1956. And it was a highly unusual series.
Frances	Because no one character is the main narrator. It switches for each book. So someone from the precinct homicide squad takes charge of the case. So you always get very different ways of investigating different thoughts. All the characters are still in the books, but they’re very minor roles. So that was quite inventive because that’s an unusual technique, and he wrote um Well, there’s tons of them. that he wrote. I don’t have the exact number down.
Frances	And in the 60s and 70s, Sajol and Walu, brought out Martin Beck. A Scandinavian. Police officer investigator and ah there were 10 books that he and his… partner decided to write. And that’s what they kept to, the 10 books, but they are considered… classic police procedural work.
Frances	And then there’s Vandervettering. In Amsterdam in 1975, he comes out with his pair of Amsterdam police officers. So, you’ll notice something else is happening. We’re moving into other countries now. That’s another big change that took place Um, And so then… uh
Frances	We get to the 80s James Lee Burke and Dave Robichaux set in New Orleans. That was in 87. Michael Connolly, 92. Harry Bosch. Still pumping them out these two guys. It’s great.
Frances	J.A. Vance did a female Uh, No, did JP Beaumont. So J .A. Vance, and that was in ’85. And police procedures are still popular today. So we’re going to backtrack now. Brian Garfield. was the writer that wrote Death Wish in 1972, which turned into a couple of different movies. But he came out. With the next set. of rules.
Frances	So the first one was “start with action, explain it later”. “Make it tough for your protagonist. Give them a worthy antagonist and make things look hopeless.” “Plant it early, pay it off later. Don’t bring in new characters. to or facts at the end to help solve the crime.” So he wrote 10 of them.
Frances	And… “Choose your character according to his ah to your own capacities. as well as his.” And part of part of that is because if you’re not a police officer, you don’t know how to investigate. and all that research that has to be done to do it. And he also says, And he and Hammett said the same kind of thing. “If you don’t know something, go to someone who does know what you need to do.” Spend time with police officers. They’re totally willing to talk to you about stuff.
Frances	Same with if you’re getting into um Uh… forensics and things, the volume of material now that you need to know is so different from the 1920s and 30s.
Frances	I like this rule, number six, “give the protagonist a tight time limit and then shorten it because it heightens at the suspense.”
Frances	So he always has a reason. for something give the protagonist a personal state. “No longer is it acceptable for the hero to solve a mystery just because it presents an interesting puzzle. The more intimate his involvement in the main conflict of the story, the better.”
Frances	So he was very big on. Um. on the rules. And he’s not someone, he he mainly wrote Westerns, but he did write some pulp stories and a few other series that he did and he was very prolific. Went by about 15 different pseudonyms for whatever he was writing. It’s interesting the number of crime writers that also write westerns. So it surprises me, but I guess it’s the they are kind of a lot of westerns are like crime stories it’s just a different feel and time period for it.
Frances	The idea of having forensics mysteries also became a sub-genre of crime fiction. and that because of the modern and scientific um advancements. it puts a different twist on solving a crime. And these aren’t the forensics people are out at a crime scene. And so they’re seeing things very differently than how a police officer would see things. So it brought a whole new twist. And the first one was in 1982. Erin Elkins wrote it. And he did a forensic anthropologist, Gideon Oliver, which was then made into films about them. Very… Very. good books they’re good and then of course Patricia Cornwell 1990s she started the Kay Scarpetta series, Postmortem. I still remember when I first read that.
Frances	It was funny because a friend lent me the book and said, you’re going to love this. And I said, “I don’t really like the forensic side of things”. And she goes, “you won’t stop reading it”. And I stayed up all night and read it.
Frances	I still think it’s one of her best in the series. And then of course in 97, so she… Cornwell was 1990, and 97 is when we first see Um, Temperance Brennan. In Deja Dead, Kathy Reichs. book, which of course then. became huge. series and television series. And there’s something that I noticed that no one has… ever really gotten into. Female protagonists became extremely strong.
Frances	Starting in the 70s and continuing on to today. They became female detectives. private detectives or police detectives, but especially the private detective genre. They had them in the 30s and 40s, female protagonists they were in the pulp magazines. They had their own series. There were a few of them. I’ll send you a list. um But it really… turned around in the in the 1977 to I would say 1998. It just rocked with female protagonists. So you get Marsha Muller writing the Sharon McCone series in 77. Grafton, The Kinsey Millhone series in 82. Paretsky. also in 82.
Frances	The V.I. Warshawski. um series. Linda Barnes does Carlotta Carlisle in 85. Val McDermott in the UK brought out… um Kate Brannigan in 92. You don’t see them so much in the UK as you do in the United States.
Frances	S.J. Rosen, love her stuff. Does Lydia Chin. and Anne Holt does Hanne Wilhelmsen, who is a Norwegian. Um,
Frances	character. And then, of course, you get Alexander McCall Smith doing Precious in the number one ladies’ detective agency. And that’s another big hit, of course. And how can we skip Stephanie Plum. and Janet Ivanovich’s Bounty Hunter series.
Frances	So in 2000. Stephen King wrote a memoir called On Writing. And. He did, oh, how many did he come up with? 20? 20 rules for writing.
Frances	Write for yourself and then worry about the audience. whereas almost all of the other rules are the reader should come first. You gotta write for the reader. So that kind of blew things out of the water. Um, He hates the passive voice, so don’t use it.
Frances	Avoid adverbs. don’t obsess over perfect grammar. Read. Now, that’s an important key. Read everything you can. that will make your character grow. Um, write one word at a time. Some of them are kind of and so he continues with a few other things. Then Elmore Leonard’s Rules rules came out. Ten rules for good writing in 2001 so King was 2000 Elmore Leonard is 2001.
Frances	“Never open a book with weather.” That’s the first one “avoid prologues” ah “Never use a verb other than said to carry dialogue.”
Frances	Which I find… quite important. boring but that’s just if you’re reading a whole page of set and he was quite prolific with said. I’d be interested to take a manuscript of his and count the number of saids that he had in it.
Frances	Never use an adverb to describe said. Keep your exclamation points under control. You’re allowed no more than two or three per 100,000 words of prose.
Frances	Never use the word suddenly or all hell broke loose. Use regional dialect patois and patois sparingly. That I can… That I… agree with in My Spooner books, he’s a 12-year-old newsie. and he’s But he. cuts g’s off his words because it’s part of who he is so use it sparingly, but at least to for the reader to get the picture of the character.
Frances	Avoid detailed descriptions of characters. Don’t go into great detail describing places and things. most of his books carry on as if they’re all dialogue. Which… can be a bit distracting because we’re not really used to that kind of thing and try to leave out the part that readers tend to skip. I agree with that too.
Brook	I love that
Frances	And then… He said, He can sum it all up by saying, if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it. So that came from a New York Times article “Essay on the adverbs, exclamation points, and especially hoopty doodle.”
Frances	That was the title of the article. And Sue Grafton had rules that she came out with in 2010. It was her philosophy and approach to mystery writing in a writer Writer’s Digest interview. And “examine the dark side”. Grafton viewed the mystery novel not just as a puzzle, but as a way to probe the dark side of human nature. They have to have believable foundations.
Frances	In current crime fiction, you need to be able to your reader needs to be able to fit in. 2. They become part of the book. Crime readers, mystery readers just… um devour these works. And I think it’s because… they’re made to feel more a part of it.
Sarah	Mm hmm.
Frances	Michael Connelly said, and there was a a book put out um And i didn’t I don’t have the title of it here. But there was a book put out of a companion of all the writers and what their ideas were onfiction so on writing crime fiction. So he noted that great crime fiction fiction isn’t isn’t just about how a detective solves a case but how the case transforms the character. Which I think is brilliant.
Frances	That’s exactly what it should be doing because that’s how the character grows. and Sue Grafton didn’t like it want to make it feel like the story was always the same. And that can happen in a series. You don’t learn anything about the character. The character doesn’t grow.
Frances	Then we come up to something that’s happening more and more lately. And that is devising its own set of rules. And that is in 2013, a woman, a UK writer, Julia Crouch coined the term domestic noir.
Frances	These are those one-off books that we see so much happening and it has a component of this domestic noir. And… Um, these psychological thrillers, if you want to call them that, the narrator is unreliable. You can’t tell if they’re telling you the right thing or not. The narrative switches. Um.
Frances	So, the contemporary writers who are writing this kind of stuff are now changing the rules yet again. They focus ah they’re beginning to focus on visible Integrated clues, organic character flaws, and pacing. Rather than that formatted thing we had in the Golden Age of of everything was step-by-step investigation. So, Julia Crouch wrote two books. which established the genre. She wrote Cuckoo in 2011 and Every Vow You Break in 2012. Even those titles are similar to titles that are being used today. What domestic noir does is it turns the lens. inward.
Frances	It focuses on unsettling gaze. an unsettling gaze directly into of person’s home and home life. It explores crime, betrayal, and danger unfolds within that unfold within families, marriages, and intimate relationships. The conflicts are deeply personal. Which I think is why they’re often speed reads because you’re so frightened. You have to get through it, right?
Frances	Because this is very psychological. It messes with your mind and it’s supposed to. They examine mothers and daughters locked in psychological power struggles that span generations. reveal neighbors whose friendly facades mask sinister intentions. introduces outsiders who infiltrate domestic spaces. Threatens to destroy the fragile balance of a household. The most dangerous places to gather in? The kitchen, where families gather for dinner. The living room, where they hold conversations in. Or the marital bed.
Frances	Then, of course, in 2020-12, we get Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. And that really threw things into the forefront. And that narrator was so… It’s unreliable. It threw people off It threw readers off balance. which was the whole intention of it. It made shocking revelations that emerged naturally from the domestic framework. Funnily enough, authors in the UK took off with This. type of book. So you get… Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train in 2015. Lisa Jewell has written a few of these that are very dark.
Frances	Claire McIntosh, a very psychological twist she’s been writing them for 12 years she’s still got she’s got a new one out now. And she really likes family drama with genuinely disturbing secrets and setting.
Frances	Now we get psychological thrillers versus domestic noir. There is a slight difference. They frequently overlap, though, and many books are described as both. There are important distinctions. The psychological thriller is any story that places the human mind at the center of its suspense.
Frances	It might involve serial killers with complex pathologies, stalkers driven by obsession, unreliable narrators whose perceptions we cannot trust. The setting varies widely from offices to remote hotels. From psychiatric hospitals to wilderness cabins. It might paint across a wide canvas of locations and scenarios. Domestic noir is narrower in focus. The psychology remains central. The setting, as I said, is always a domestic space.
Frances	And then we get domestic thrillers. They tend to emphasize pace and external plot mechanics above all else. They often feature missing children, explosive affairs, sudden betrayals, and they spread out a lot further than in domestic noir where it’s mainly just in the home.
Frances	So the unreliable narrator, as I said, the storyteller is supposed to be the one that you can trust. as the reader but in this thriller… domestic noir, totally different. The grip on reality for the person is compromised and it forces the reader to check the um, and question the version of events that they have been told. Usually, first-person perspective um forces the readers to question everything. They just can’t trust the person. And the tension between paranormal… paranoia and genuine danger is very realistic for the reader, and the character. It creates suspense which is actually happening behind the narrator’s skewed lens and delivers plot twists um that have sudden Realization. that the truth has to be reframed.
Frances	So, it really it’s really meant to throw the reader off, and keep them guessing at every turn and it’s not It’s not. like a It’s a longer drawn out. criminal behavior. Because it’s psychological, it’s like gaslighting, right? You’re trying to disturb. the character. and the reader.
Frances	The other thing about… more more modern crime fiction is that the justice is not guaranteed that we hope for. A lot of things are left unsolved? Or are… questionable about why things happen. Um for characters, modern characters are much more flawed than they used to be. And that helps with their growth. We got a lot more professional police teams. They try and… and um solve whatever they can. The characters’ decisions they make are more complex which affects the…movement of the suspense. Sometimes they have a very disruptive narrative.
Frances	So the um example that I’d like to use is Turton’s The Seven and a Half Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle from 2018. I could not believe that book. that was so unusual. Where the investigator wakes up. every each day in the body of a different guest at an estate. i mean What? And that. Boy, the perceptions are so skewed in that thing. I started reading it and I thought, what the heck is going on here? And then you get into it and you can’t stop reading it. It was quite quite an interesting book. The whole point is that crime fiction is a ah genre that continually evolves.
Frances	So the rules are constantly changing. And a lot of writers say, Break the rules. Because it’s okay.
Brook	With what you’ve shown us, um a lot of authors have broken those rules that Sarah and I talked about you know, last time. Um maybe all of them have been broken now.
Frances	Or tweaked.
Brook	Or tweaked. Yeah. But I hadn’t thought about it in the context that you’re saying is it’s because of changes in the world and changes in our lives.
Frances	Yeah. Yeah.
Brook	So it’s not just to be avant-garde and do something. crazy. It’s because the world has changed. And so the the rules are going to change.
Frances	And Add the internet. Right? That has changed everything that has changed a lot of sleuthing that can be done Look at the research you can do as a writer.
Brook	For sure. The point you made about needing to know the facts about. the the topic, it’s much easier now. You don’t necessarily even have to befriend a police officer.
Frances	Exactly.
Brook	You can you can do a lot of online research.
Frances	Well, and you can go into the FBI online. Or the… you know the National Archives have thousands of things that you can look at, read about. learn about all of the newspaper archives is quite something.
Sarah	And so in thinking about kind of how. the genre has evolved and how rules have evolved. With it, do you think there are any rules, Frances, that have remained, remained in place.
Frances	I think it’s more tweaking. Rules are being broken all the time. For a writer to break a rule. I think they put a lot of. um thought into it. And the other thing is, I’m not sure how many crime writers know there are mystery rules.
Brook	True.
Sarah	Yeah fair enough.
Frances	Right? you Yeah. So you if you include in your reading books about writing. and about writing. crime fiction. or the biographies of or autobiographies of Crime Raiders. You learn a lot about the process. whether you know there are factual there are set rules or not.
Brook	Yeah. I think that some of these come back to um people who do want to write who um And, you know, I’ll put myself in this category. When you’re just getting started, you’re thinking, I just need to know how to do it. And so you think like, okay, what what’s the… structure? what’s What are the rules I can follow to accomplish this? I guess just kind of like as a life preserver to hold onto when you’re trying to write a mystery.
Frances	You’re right. Or you may not find out about them until you’ve done two books already and You think. why ah Why isn’t this working for me? And then you go and look up. and see what you can find about how to tweak it to fix it. See I keep using that word tweaking because that’s what I think it is. It’s all adjustments
Brook	Yeah.
Sarah	And I kind of think. that the rules are kind of like a recipe. If you’re cooking for the first time, you find a recipe and you’re going to follow it very, very closely because you don’t really know what you’re doing, right? You make sure that you put in. If it says one. teaspoon of salt, you put in one teaspoon of salt. And as you become more comfortable with cooking, you realize that, oh, you know what, you can add a bit more salt or a bit. less and And. kind of play around with the flavors and, you know. So carrots aren’t listed in the recipe, but they’re going to add a little bit of sweetness to this sauce. So I’m going to I’m going to put in a couple.
Sarah	And so I think that’s. Maybe what we see with authors, right?
Frances	Yeah. I think it’s good to have… guidelines. that you can refer to if you want to get out of a sticky situation with your characters see what others have done. But it’s all going to be. It’s all going to be your own comfort level. I mean I can’t imagine following Knox’s rules. I mean, that they’re a little bit… and Consider when they were written. And what? the people’s thoughts were at the time because some of them are derogatory.
Sarah	Yeah. And, and I think written. because of the kinds of stories that were being that were being written at the time, right? So the one about secret passageways. Well, we don’t see a lot of secret passageways in the books that are being published now.
Frances	No. Not yet. Yep.
Sarah	And, you know, maybe it’s because he articulated like. Guys, don’t put so many secret passageways in your books.
Frances	And he probably came up with them too because he read a lot. If you read a lot, of your genre. then you know. What? is acceptable and not acceptable.
Brook	Yeah that’s a really good point.
Frances	And we could all probably come up with 10 if we so we so sat here we could come up with 10. different. Rules. that don’t touch on any of the stuff that’s there It might have components of it.
Brook	Yeah, when you were speaking of the um trend to have the unreliable narrators in psychological thrillers, I was thinking of the rule. that we talked about before sarah which is the detective has to give up all their knowledge to the reader, right. They have anything the detective knows, the reader has to know. And of course, we don’t have a… actual detective in a psychological thriller. But that main character, um it… that it doesn’t happen at all. And most of the time you’re wondering what you learn. if what you learn from them is true or not. So it’s just like. really turning that rule ah completely on its head.
Sarah	That’s how you get the twist. Right.
Frances	Exactly.
Sarah	As the reader, you don’t know. everything that’s going on and then you get the reveal and you’re like “holy cow. I didn’t see that coming.”
Frances	And you’re not mad that you didn’t see it coming.
Brook	Not at all.
Sarah	No, it’s… It’s it it’s amazing.
Frances	Yeah, if you go back through the book. ah you’ll You still won’t… See how it would work.
Brook	That’s great.
Frances	Readers tend to read them very quickly. because the suspense is so built up.
Brook	Yeah.
Sarah	Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you don’t want to linger because it… It’s almost painful.
Frances	Yeah. Sometimes it’s too close to home.
Sarah	Yeah.
Brook	Yeah. This needs resolution or I’m not going to be able to sleep.
Brook	Well, Frances, thank you again. This has been fantastic. I, as usual, whenever you visit, learned so much. I have a page of notes and and reading recommendations that I want to go look into. So thank you so much for coming to talk to us about this topic.
Frances	Thank you. I had a… Fun time. learn stuff on my own like I didn’t know about the rules that Garfield wrote so.
Brook	That’s awesome. That’s great.
Frances	But I know I can break anything.
Brook	That’s right.
Brook	And thank you listeners for joining us today on Clued in Mystery. Until next time. I’m Brook.
Sarah	And I’m Sarah. And we both love mystery.