Detection Club

The Detection Club was formed in the 1920s by a group of British mystery writers including such well known authors as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, G. K. Chesterton, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, and Ronald Knox. In addition to getting together for dinners and helping each other with technical aspects in their individual writings, the members of the club agreed to adhere to a code of ethics in their writing to give the reader a fair chance at guessing the guilty party.

In fact, the 'rules' (no mysterious "Orientals" or undetectable poisons, at most one secret passage, etc.) were formulated by Knox. Chesterton never took any notice, and Christie would certainly skirt these guidelines on occasion. (See history of crime fiction for details.)

This club has continued to this day, in one form or another.

A number of works were published under the club's sponsorship. Most of these were written by multiple members of the club, each contributing one or more chapters in turn. In the case of The Floating Admiral, each author also provided a sealed "solution" to the mystery as he or she had written it, including the previous chapters. This was done to prevent a writer from adding impossible complications with no reasonable solution in mind. The various partial solutions were published as part of the final book.

Présidents

Publications

The Scoop and Behind the Screen (1931)
The Floating Admiral (1931,1932)
Ask a Policeman (1933)
The Anatomy of a Murder (1936)
Six Against the Yard (1936)
Double Death: An Exercise in Detection aka Double Death: A Murder Story (1939)
No Flowers By Request (1953)
Crime on the Coast (1954)
Verdict of Thirteen (1978)
The Man Who... (1992)
The Verdict of Us All (2006)

External links