Explore "The Technique of the Mystery Story" by Carolyn Wells on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
[Deduction, in a definite and restricted sense, is the motif of most of the detective stories of to-day. It is an unusually perspicacious analytic deduction from inconspicuous clues that we call ratiocination, or more familiarly, the detective instinct.]
A story quoted in one of the earlier chapters, called "The Sultan and his Three Sons," is a very ancient specimen of analytic deduction. Though it is, in turn, doubtless founded on an even older tale.