How much work does your title do to take readers into the story?Learn more about Fair Play at the publisher's website.
The title of my book comes from the fair play doctrine, one of the defining principles of Golden Age detective fiction - the concept that the reader should have a fair chance to solve the mystery before the grand reveal. The trick was to provide the reader with enough clues so that they could have, as TS Eliot put it “a sporting chance to solve the mystery”. It was so central to mystery writing at the time that The Detection Club – a dining club and discussion forum for writers of detective fiction founded in 1930 – began its own constitution with the line: “it is a demerit in a detective novel if the author does not play fair by the reader.” Over the years, many writers have put together their own version of the fair play rules: TS Eliot, Ronald Knox and SS Van Dine. Some writers, like JJ Connington and Ellery Queen, in radical displays of fair play, even included cluefinders at the back of their books. These were appendices that listed out all the clues with their corresponding page numbers to show the reader that they had in fact been given “a fighting chance” to solve the mystery. In my book, I use these fair play rules together with the familiar structure of a Golden Age detective novel - with its murder, its suspect, its Watson and the reveal - to explore...[read on]
The Page 69 Test: Fair Play.
Q&A with Louise Hegarty.
--Marshal Zeringue