Crime-Fiction: The Twenty Rules Of Crime Fiction

Renowned crime-fiction author P.D James once said ‘Crime fiction confirms our belief, despite some evidence to the contrary. That we live in a rational comprehensible and moral universe.’(Goodreads Inc:2015) The crime-fiction genre in itself has the power to restore justice and order in the word however fictional it may be. It has the power make one believe that in the end the perpetrator will always be found and will be punished. However, crime in the real world isn’t always necessarily resolved so does it have to be in the crime fiction world? Does order always have to be restored? According to ‘The Twenty Rules of Writing Crime Fiction’ first published in 1928, it does. This along with many rules are a basis of what a detective story, or

In this series, it is not detectives who solve the crime, rather it is a group of attorneys and students getting together to prove their client is innocent. It does not necessarily matter if this client is innocent, the main goal to make it seem like they are. In process with steps of deduction and evidence they come to the root of what really happened to figure out if their client is indeed innocent, hence why it can easily be mistaken for crime-fiction. However, ‘The Twenty Rules for Crime Fiction’ states that ‘The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter’(Van Dine 1928: para.7). and ‘There must be but one detective — that is, but one protagonist of deduction — one deus ex machina. To bring the minds of three or four, or sometimes a gang of detectives to bear on a problem, is not only to disperse the interest and break the direct thread of logic’ (Van Dine 1928: para.10). Not only does HTGAWM not have a detective in it but rather, it has a group of lawyers which as stated breaks the flow of logic and instead of one detective who is the protagonist unravelling these clues it is often her team, hence why it does not fit in to the purist crime-fiction genre despite having few elements of

The ‘twisted murder plot’ as stated in the synopsis is the murder plot of Annalise Keating’s (criminal defence professor) husband. However, on top of all the it is based around the fact her husband had a different love interest whilst concurrently she was also involved in an affair. As complicated as this may be, there are also many other scandals such as affairs with superiors, infidelity, or an affair with a client. Love is a crucial part of the plot on ‘How to Get Away with Murder.’ This is a problem because it states that ‘There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar’ (Van Dine 1928: para.4.) in the twenty rules for crime fiction. Considering a vital element of HTGAWM is its integration of love in to the plot it proves that it cannot be classified as purist crime fiction although it may have some