“…However light in texture the story may be, it is offered as a problem of logic and deduction. If it is not that, it is nothing at all. There is nothing else for it to be. If the situation is false, you cannot even accept it as a light novel, for there is no story for the light novel to be about. If the problem does not contain the elements of truth and plausibility, it is no problem; if the logic is an illusion, there is nothing to deduce. If the impersonation is impossible once the reader is told the conditions it must fulfill, then the whole thing is a fraud.

“It is not a very fragrant world, but it is the world you live in, and certain writers with tough minds and a cool spirit of detachment can make very interesting and even amusing patterns out of it. It is not funny that a man should be killed, but it is sometimes funny that he should be killed for so little, and that his death should be the coin of what we call civilization. All this still is not quite enough.”

This quote reminded me of S.S. Van Dine’s 20 Rules for Writing Detective Fiction. Chandler is describing here the ways a detective novel can be unsatisfactory, and is basically telling the reader a few of his own rules he’s picked up on in detective fiction. This quote made me think over some of the readings I’ve been assigned in my literature class. When I read this, I tried to tell if any of them did the things Chandler warns us of. If you’re writing a detective novel, the story must be based in logic and deduction. Or else, it probably couldn’t be classified as a detective story at all.

In The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Agatha Christie chose for the narrator to be the murderer, but doesn’t reveal this truth until the very last few pages. I feel like Dr. Sheppard being the murderer just threw all of the logic we gathered throughout the book out the window. As soon as I finished reading, I started flipping back through the pages and rethinking the plotlines or scenes where we got clues from Sheppard himself to try and see if she ever lied to us. I feel like looking at this book through Chandler’s perspective, the story is a “fraud,” and logic became an illusion by the end. Agatha Christie’s writing is what really pulled the ending together, though. If it wasn’t so well-written, I would have been a lot angrier on that last page of Sheppard’s epilogue.