Ronald Knox's ten commandments for detective fiction banned the secret passage and the unknown twin

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Very few Golden Age locked-room mystery novels actually obey all ten of Knox's rules The English locked-room mystery tradition kept the fair-play rules while the American pulps ignored them Poirot straightens the ornaments and Miss Marple knits: both are reading the room in different costumes The ice-and-string tricks behind most locked room mystery solutions stopped working once readers learned them How a single historical mystery hides its clue inside an object the period had just invented The Mystery of the Yellow Room is still the standard every locked-room mystery gets measured against S.S. Van Dine's twenty rules and Knox's decalogue disagree on almost everything Series that age in real time versus historical mysteries frozen in one decade One of Knox's rules is a flat ban on a Chinese villain and reprints tend to drop it quietly Where to start with modern locked-room mysteries if the Golden Age classics feel dusty