![]() ![]() ![]() Margery Allingham, however, wasn’t following anyone else’s rules when, in 1937, she published Dancers in Mourning. (Example: The criminal must be mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know. Indeed, Monsignor Ronald Knox, a Catholic priest and mystery writer, even came up with the Ten Commandments of writing detective fiction. There were a great many conventions to these stories. And always the heart of the story was the puzzle that the all-knowing detective had to solve. Often the story involved some element of a locked room in which a murder victim is found. These mysteries, also called whodunits, were emblematic of what has been called the “Golden Age” of detective fiction between the First and Second World Wars. A year earlier, in The Arabian Nights Murder, John Dickson Carr trotted out his detective Gideon Fell to figure out how a dead body found in a museum, holding a cookbook, came to be there. In 1937, Agatha Christie published Death on the Nile in which her detective Hercule Poirot has to solve a whole bunch of puzzling murders while on a river steamer cruise. ![]()
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