Philo Vance

Philo Vance was one of the original twentieth century detectives, created by S. S. Van Dine. William Powell (right), later of Thin Man fame, was the original Philo Vance in the movies, starting in 1929. If he doesn't look like the quintessential detective, I don't know who does.

Van Dine, whose real name was Willard Huntington Wright, was a literary editor and a Nietzsche scholar who, while recovering from cocaine addiction, turned his hand to detective fiction. As a scholar, he couldn't help but approach the subject in a scholarly fashion. Hence, he not only wrote his novels, but he outlined 20 rules for writing detective stories. This is one of my favorites:

There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded.

Reading Van Dine's Rules For Detective Writers in this day and age is like looking at a list of literary opportunities that absolutely must be seized at the first possible moment. Take apart today's bestseller list, and you'll find all these rules being broken on a regular basis and virtually no one, not even the coziest of authors, adhering to all of them. But for Van Dine, the genre was just beginning, and it was too soon to start experimenting. That would happen soon enough.

Van Dine's books hold up pretty well, by the way, at least the early ones. Take a look. And then compare them to his list, and decide for youself if he's following the rules he himself set.