This week I’m handing the reins over to author Elizabeth Roy for the first of a short series of posts about the famous Detection Club: Thanks Elizabeth, over to you…
You may know of the Detection Club which was founded in 1930. If you don’t, you will know many of its members, both past and present. The earliest members represent some of the best-known detective fiction writers from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction.
Initiation into The Detection Club:
Evidence within the initiation ceremony and surrounding the administration of the Club’s membership oath allows us to deduce that fostering a golden age of murder mystery writing was among the members’ goals.
The famous oath was: “Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them, using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them, and not placing reliance on, nor making use of, Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?”
Most prospective members had written at least two successful pieces of detective fiction, with only A. A. Milne as an exception. Milne had published The Red House Mystery in 1922, but his next mystery didn’t appear until 1933. However, he was a prolific writer in other genres, most famously of course, his work for children. Prospective members also had to be sponsored by at least two members. The vote to accept or deny the new member was held in secret.
During the initiation ceremony, each new member was asked to name a thing he or she held in particular sanctity. Increased sales were substituted if the prospective member could not think of any sacred thing. Then, if the new member ever broke the oath just taken, he or she was “cursed” with the threats of lawsuits for libel, misprints, being cheated in contracts with publishers, and constantly dwindling sales.
Detection Club Meetings
At the dinner party meetings, the founding members enjoyed the company of other mystery writers and assisted each other with technical questions that they encountered as they wrote. While current members meet less frequently, in the early days, members regularly travelled to London to meet at the Café Royal and other locations.
At the meetings, the members sometimes agreed to collaborate on a novel or an anthology of novellas in round-robin style with each collaborator contributing one or more chapters.
For the collaboration on The Floating Admiral, the members agreed to rules that reduced the possibility of collaborators creating unlikely or impossible complications to the plot without showing that the contributor had a plan for reaching a reasonable plot resolution. Each collaborator had to include a sealed resolution to the plot he or she envisioned based on his or her contribution plus the chapters previously provided by others. These resolutions were published with the novel.
The founding members:
The founding members included: Dorothy L Sayers, Agatha Christie, Ronald Knox, (who created Knox’s Commandments, also known as The Knox Decalogue, the ten fair-play rules that all members were to use as guidelines when writing their mysteries, and that are still used as guidelines today for the writing of murder mysteries of the traditional type. The famous initiation oath was based on these statutes.) G K Chesterton, who served as the first president of The Detection Club, Freeman Wills Crofts, Arthur Morrison, Hugh Walpole, John Rhode, Jessie Rickard, Baroness Emma Orczy, R Austin Freeman, G D H Cole, Margaret Cole, E C Bentley, Henry Wade, Constance Lindsay Taylor, H C Bailey and Anthony Berkeley.
These men and women represented some of the finest and most meticulous authors of mystery fiction–and non-fiction, and most of them are still widely read and greatly admired today.
