The Evaporation of the Extraordinary Gentleman: S. S. Van Dine's Rules

For a person with lofty standards who had written serious essays and a book on Nietzsche (1915) and The Creative Will (1916), he seems to have justified his condescending to the detective novel in the first paragraphs of his Scribner's article in saying that different standards apply to different genres. [...]he wrote, "they are unable to fulfill each other's function; and the reader who, at different times, can enjoy both without intellectual conflict, can never substitute the one for the other." Wright's view of what it was that separated mystery fiction from other forms of fiction is delineated in his Scribner's essay and in his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories" published in American Magazine in 1928 and widely available on the Internet.