Explore "The Technique of the Mystery Story" by Carolyn Wells on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
Many years ago, old-fashioned family papers published stories, beneath whose titles a line in parenthesis read, "Founded on fact." Such tales were invariably uninteresting, and at last the editors learned not to publish them.
A true tale of a criminal problem and its solution is uninteresting because it is not planned to be interesting. The technique of the detective story calls for the same kind of planning and preparation on the part of the author as does a successful act of legerdemain. The prestidigitator takes a rabbit out of a silk hat, but unless he had planned for it beforehand he couldn't do it. What he might take, unplanned, out of the hat,--its leather band or gilt stamped lining,--would be of no interest to his audience.