at Liddle we speak ghost

This one's saying you can get 20% off

a monstrous range of Halloween costumes with Lidl Plus

Get sorted before they vanish

Little, more to value

18 plus GB only while stocks last

Offer ends 15th of October

Terms apply see little.comaK slash LPTV

In 1928, the American art critic Willard

Huntington Wright published a very important essay. It appeared in the September issue of the American

magazine under his mystery writing pseudonym SS Van Dy, and was titled 20 Rules for Writing Detective Stories.

Plenty of his directives are now very familiar to crime fiction fans. He was in favour of

authors playing fair with their readers, detectives using logical deductions and murderers sticking

to scientific means rather than dabbling in the supernatural.

Ronald Knox, a British crime writer, covered quite similar ground in his Decalogue or Ten Commandments,

which appeared in the same year.

Look a little closer at the 13th item on SS Van Dines list, though, and a bit of a discrepancy appears. It begins,

Secret Societies, Camorra, Mafias et all, have no place in a detective story. No secret societies

or clubs were to be permitted in crime fiction. That's very clear. And yet, writers don't seem

to have been able to help themselves on this point.

There are fascinating examples of secret societies and mysterious clubs in golden age detective fiction,

and in real life, writers seem to have loved to found and belong to such organisations.

...