Writing is a solitary pastime.

To invent the characters and stories that readers love,

most authors have to lock themselves away from the world,

avoiding company and interruptions until the blank page is filled.

Not everyone wants to spend all their time hunched over their work though, and the writers of detective fiction in the 1930s were no different.

Anthony Barclay, the creator of the sluth Roger Sharingham, began organizing regular dinners

for his fellow detective authors in 1928.

This gathering eventually evolved into a more formal organization called the

Detention Club, which numbered Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ronald Knox, Emma

Aortcy, and others among its founding members.

They dined together, they drank together, and sometimes they wrote together.

The novels they collaborated on aren't necessarily among the best known works of Detective Fiction, but they're fascinating all the same. We're so used to the idea of a who-done it

being constructed by a single all-knowing author who invents the solution but keeps it hidden

from the reader until the last minute.

What happens when a dozen writers work together on the same plot? Today we're delving into the round robin.

Welcome to She Dunnet. I'm Caroline Crampton. In this episode we're going to take a look at the multi-author detective stories from the early days of the detection club that were written in the the Is it the possible to construct a compelling who done it this way? Or is it the case that too many cooks spoil the broth?

Let's find out. First, let's look at this idea of the round-robin. It's a phrase that has a variety of

of meanings in different contexts, but they all share a common sense of rotation or passing around.

In sport, the phrase denotes a tournament in which each competitor plays all of the others,

and in computing it refers to a kind of algorithm used to schedule processes in a sequential and equitable fashion.

For our purposes, the most relevant point of origin comes from the practice of creating

round-robin petitions in the 18th century.

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