Ronald Arbuthnott Knox: The Detective Story-Writing Priest
Ronald Arbuthnott Knox was quite the theologist! Born in Kibworth, Leicestershire, England in 1888, he studied the classics at Balliol College, Oxford and was ordained as a priest of the Church of England in 1912. Ronald was a chaplain of Trinity College, Oxford until he converted to Catholicism in 1917, a move that got him written out of his Anglican father’s will.
Ronnie wrote a lot of theological books with titles like Some Loose Stones: Being a Consideration of Certain Tendencies in Modern Theology Illustrated by Reference to the Book Called “Foundations” (1913) and A Spiritual Aeneid: Being an Account of a Journey to the Catholic Faith (1918). Dude even had his own translation of the Vulgate, which is a 4th-century translation of the Bible that is referred to as the Knox Bible. Imagine having your own bible translation!
Anyway, amidst all these theological doings, Ronald had an affinity for detective fiction, and he was known well enough as a mystery writer that his Knox’s Ten Rules for Detective Fiction was agreed-upon by fellow mystery writers in the Detection Club, a group that Ronald was a part of, along with G.D.H. and Margaret Cole and Agatha Christie and R. Austin Freeman and Margery Allingham. Here are all ten!
- The criminal must be mentioned early in the story, but it can’t be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to know.
- There are no supernatural or preternatural forces at work.
- You can have one secret room or secret passage, but only one!
- No undiscovered poisons can be used, and nothing that will require a long-ass scientific explanation.
- This one is sounds kinda racist! No Chinaman! There was a lot of anti-Chinese sentiment going on in the 1920s, and Knox said that any story that has a character with “slit-like eyes” is automatically bad.
- There are no accidents that accidentally help the detective, and the detective can’t act on an intuition that ends up being right.
- The crime cannot be committed by the detective himself.
- If the detective discovers a clue, they need to make sure to tell the audience.
- If there’s a sidekick, a Watson to the lead’s Holmes, then they must be slightly less intelligent than the audience.
- No twins without a very good reason that the reader has been prepared for.
Knox’s impact on culture is low-key, but clearly pretty influential between his religious studies and dalliances with detective fiction. As if that were not enough, Ronald presented a show called Broadcasting the Barricades on BBC Radio in January 1926, which was basically a simulated report of revolution happening in London that many audience members presumed was in real time. The broadcast even announced that Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament had been destroyed, which certainly struck some fear in the hearts of those listening. It certainly didn’t help that inclement weather prevented the delivery of newspapers that weekend, and there were a lot of folks who thought the broadcast was real. Twelve years, Orson Welles did his famous The War of the Worlds broadcast for CBS Radio, and Knox’s show gave him the idea.
The Golden Age of Detective Fiction and the Detection Club is filled with remembered names like Agatha Christie and the guy who created Winnie the Pooh, and interesting names forgotten by history, including our new friend Ronald Arbuthnott Knox. We hope you enjoy reading The Viaduct Murder as much as we enjoyed learning about him.
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Cover image credit: The cover image is by Richard Kay and is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 2.0 Generic per Wikimedia Commons. The book cover image is a map from the 1926 publication of The Viaduct Murder and is public domain per Wikimedia Commons.
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