There's this strange skill you gather, reading videogame reviews or at least I did, as a kid relying on magazines as my portal to all games beyond the annual Christmas and birthday purchases. You learn to internalise a game's ruleset, as laid out by the writer, in order to run a kind of dodgy emulation in your head. Nowadays, though, with virtually any game available within minutes of reading about it, these aren't muscles I need to stretch very often. So I've found another way of exercising them: detective novels.
Take Benjamin Stevenson's Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, which opens with Ronald Knox's 'Ten Commandments Of Detective Fiction; the rules of engagement between writer and reader, as established during the genre's 1920s Golden Age. Example rule: 'Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. A couple of pages later, Stevenson stresses that he wants to play fair with you, in a way that reflects the century that has passed since Knox. He identifies, upfront, every chapter in which a murder will occur; read on Kindle, these appear as hyperlinks leading you to the relevant page. It's an astounding trick, but one that for my money - Stevenson struggles to match through the rest of the book.
This story is from the June 2024 edition of Edge UK.
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This story is from the June 2024 edition of Edge UK.
Start your 7-day Magzter GOLD free trial to access thousands of curated premium stories, and 8,500+ magazines and newspapers.
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