Being something of a fan of the mystery writer Herbert Brean, I am ever on the lookout for work by him, especially the short stories ‘Murder Buys a Ticket’, a.k.a. ‘Nine Hours Late on the Opening Run’ (1941) and ‘The Man Who Talked with Spirits’ (1943) listed in Adey. In these searches, I recently discovered that Brean acted as editor for The Mystery Writer’s Handbook (1956), in which members of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) provided advice for people looking to write “detective, suspense, mystery, and crime stories”.

Some of the names involved will be familiar to Golden Age fans — Anthony Boucher, Fredric Brown, John Dickson Carr, John Creasey, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Stanley Ellin, Anthony Gilbert, Stuart Palmer, Rex Stout — while others probably haven’t even heard of themselves. And, of course, we’re past the Golden Age, and so while many of the ideas discussed herein are interesting, the puzzle plot is not high on anyone’s agenda. It will surprise no-one that some of the tenets of the Golden Age are espoused by writers who worked in the Golden Age, like Stuart Palmer saying…

Play fair. If they guess it, I mean the intelligent readers, they’ll still like you for playing fair and not cheating, any time, anywhere. No twins, no butlers who turn out to be the master’s long-lost brother.

…or Lawrence Treat coming out in favour of the impossible crime…

State the impossible occurrence, and then try to explain it.

…but my interest here lies in what is said about the state of writing after the Golden Age. Brean introduces this by saying “[C]areless workmanship has resulted in a whole series of mystery story clichés, and that if you want to avoid repeating them you might like to be reminded of what they are. So we asked for suggestions from the membership of the MWA, and here are the nominations, for your edification, amusement — and proper warning” and then provides the following list, presumably acquired by submissions from the various contributors to the volume (the numbering is mine, for easy reference later, but the order and contents are unchanged):

1. The twin-brother alibi — contemptible!
2. The use of some too-familiar terms, like “private eye,” “sleuth” and “mastermind.”
3. “I had a hunch…”
4. “The kill-light in his eyes…”
5. “Her breasts were twin peaks…”
6. “We will reconstruct the crime.”
7. “The dead eyes stared…”
8. “He barked” or “He rasped.”
9. Had I but known.
10. Beds.
11. Titles that are fine-sounding but have not the remotest relation to the story.
12. The city controlled by Mr. Big.
13. The night-club background.
14. The medical examiner who takes a quick glance at a corpse and, without an autopsy, states the time and cause of death.
15. The devastating beauty and sexiness of every female character in the story.
16. Innocent people deliberately keeping information from the police for no sensible reason.
17. The extraordinarily quick recovery of those who have been manhandled or otherwise seriously injured.
18. The clear thinking of detectives who have just consumed enough liquor to pickle their brains for all time.
19. The heroines whose occupations are never known, but who seem to have days and nights free and to live well into the bargain.
20. The Helpful Criminal: “All right,” he snarled, “you’ve got the goods on me, but you’ll never take me alive.” There was a crash of glass, and then he was gone — to his death. (Nobody had the goods on this boy; a good lawyer would have made the detective — and writer — look silly. So the criminal helps everybody by the uncalled-for confession.)
21. The mention of “clues.”
22. The tough, sadistic cop.
23. The client who puts cash on the desk of the private eye.
24. The clue based on special knowledge (but I knew, of course, all along, that tansafrans luberitum burst into flame at 44 degrees centigrade).
25. The Wench Dunit. I am so damned tired of reading rewrites of the last scene of The Maltese Falcon.
26. The second (and third and ad infinitum) murder of the Man Who Knows Too Much. Second and third murders should be as carefully and personally motivated as the first.
27. Great Aunt Lisa who calls all her heirs together to tell them she’s going to change her will but not till tomorrow so there’s lots of time to kill her tonight.
28. The hero who gets slugged from behind a door in almost every chapter.

Yes, we’ll get to that in a minute. Let’s go over some of the sensible ones first.

This being a collection of American authors, it’s unsurprising that so many of the tropes derided herein feel like conventions from American crime fiction: #2, 3, 4, 5, 12, 13, 18, 19, 20, 22, 23, 25, and 28 — nearly half the list — seem to be a response to the Noirish tendencies that sprung from the imitators of Dashiell Hammett (and I include Raymond Chandler among them, come at me). If anything, it feels like the stirring of the relatively sparse embers of the American Private Eye novel was leaving people with a chill, and, having never had a great deal of love for that style of book, I can understand why.

There’s a sense, too, of the characters needing to be more than just ciphers or — in the case of the women — vamps: #5, 15, 19, and 25 asking that we perhaps treat our fictional females a little more kindly in these more enlightened days. It’s true that many authors — A.A. Fair, say — traded heavily on the licentious attraction of the women in their plots, but even Fair would, at times, allow a little more life to these sex objects by imbuing their circumstances with some human considerations. But, yes, the Female-Shaped Sex Trophy the Man Wins at the End was clearly wearing thin, even if it was about to be taken up by the movies in a big way.

Some of these, however, really baffle me.

American crime fiction was generally less concerned than its British cousin with fair-play clewing — this must surely be why people go so gah-gah for Ellery Queen, one of the few classic-era American writers to include more than three clues in their books on a regular basis — but #21 seems a trifle harsh to me. Surely there’s a difference between the conventions that comprise a genre — a crime, an investigation, the investigation of that crime founded on some sense of reasoning and intelligence, even if the detective is drunk half the time and battered unconscious the other half — and the disdainful rejection of clues as a tiresome trammelling that the genre needs to break away from. But, then, this is 1956, and the crime thriller was leaning more heavily into the second half of the sobriquet, and clearly someone was tired of being expected to apply any sort of reasoning to their slug-fests.

I’ll agree that #16 is a frustration, though often the recourse of the bad writer seeking to extend a thin plot, and I can understand people getting tired of #27 even if it is one of the great classic setups for a closed-circle murder mystery. But, equally, I have nothing against #26 — a killer who kills again purely because someone sees something or comes to an understanding of the crime that might reveal their identity is, for my money, a perfectly valid way for a novel to add intrigue…always providing, of course, that the reader it kept in the loop of that character’s actions and is able to deduce at the time of the death what that person might have known (the skill, of course, is in keeping this from the reader).

I also have no issue with #24, again provided that the information is shared fairly with the reader (some of these complaint do feel like authors whingeing: “But that’s, like, really haaaaard.”). For a great example of this, see The Problem of the Green Capsule (1939) by John Dickson Carr — knowledge well and truly lost to history, perfectly maintained in the amber of good telling and intelligent clewing. Yes, bad examples exist, but one person being bad at a thing doesn’t mean we banish that thing forever.

What, though, of #10?

Beds? Beds?! Am I reading that right? Assuming the members of the MWA don’t have a problem with novels set in the historic county of Bedfordshire, precisely how did the spongy thing you sleep on become a tiresome cliché by 1956? A conveniently-placed bed for the drunk, concussed hero to fall into with the breastily-described, unemployed, sexually-charged heroine, yes, I can understand that becoming tiresome or feeling outmoded. But what do beds have to do with crime fiction? And, more importantly, which MWA member is venting their insomnia-fuelled frustrations here?

Your thoughts, as ever, are appreciated…