On my recent trip to Iceland we were watching the BBC
channel in the hotel room before going to bed (the entertainment value of the
Icelandic Shopping Network could only last so long) and I caught a fun segment
about the British Library which is showing an exhibit called Murder in theLibrary: An A-Z of Crime Fiction. The exhibit looks at the development of the
whodunit genre and features the “10 Commandments” of Monsignor Ronald
Knox.
If you haven’t looked up the good Monsignor’s rules they
basically consist of some guidelines to prevent the author from pulling
solutions to a problem out of thin air and keep a story based in reality. The rules hold up pretty well even over
80 years after being written – except for that one about the Chinamen. I’m not really sure what that rule was
attempting to accomplish, but we’ll hope that it wasn’t as racist as it
sounds.
Anyway, once I returned home I did a quick google on the
exhibit and found an interesting article that covered the rules and posed the
question: Is the Whodunit dead? Has the reading public moved on to thrillers,
true crime and procedurals? Is the
Whodunit now a passé relic of an older time?
Well, I have to say that if I took a survey of the authors
on this blog that the answer would be a definitive, “No!” The Whodunit is alive
and well on the Stilletto Blog – whether it’s Joelle Charbonneau’s roller
skating heroine cleaning up a small town mysteries or Maggie Barbieri’s college
professor solving murders with the help of a handsome NYPD homicide detective –
our gang write crimes that get solved.
It’s my personal theory that books, like music, no longer
have one mainstream genre that is overwhelmingly popular. The world has more
readers than ever and that allows readers to pick the specific genre that
appeals to them. The Whodunit may
no longer be THE thing to read, but I don’t think it’s being read any
less. In fact – I’m about to start
reading a new one today.
