范达因（S.S.Van Dine，1888年10月15日-1939年4月11）
美国推理小说之父，由其撰写的「推理小说二十条守则」，是推理小说史上最全面、最完整、最严谨的写作戒律，同时也被众多后来者奉为推理小说写作的＂圣经＂，范达因的代表作为「菲洛•万斯（Philo Vance）探案系列」。
主要推理作品：
班森杀人事件（The Benson Murder Case，1926）
金丝雀命案（The Canary Murder Case,1927）
格林老宅谋杀案（The Greene Murder Case,1928）
主教谋杀案（The Bishop Murder Case,1929）
聖甲蟲殺人事件（The Scarab Murder Case,1930）
狗園殺人事件（The Kennel Murder Case,1933）
龍殺人事件（The Dragon Murder Case,1933）
賭場殺人事件（The Casino Murder Case,1934）
花园杀人事件（The Garden Murder Case，1935）
The President's Mystery Story（1935，与Rupert Hughes, Samuel Hopkins Adams, Anthony Abbot, Rita Weiman，John Erskine接龙合著）
綁架殺人事件（The Kidnap Murder Case,1936）
葛蕾西．艾倫殺人事件（The Gracie Allen Murder Case,1938）
冬季杀人事件（The Winter Murder Case，1939）
推理小说二十条守则:
一、 必须让读者拥有和侦探平等的机会解谜，所有线索都必须交代清楚。
（The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.）
二、 除凶手对侦探所玩弄的必要犯罪技巧之外，不该刻意欺骗或以不正当诡计愚弄读者。
（No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.）
三、 不可在故事中添加爱情成分，以免非理性的情绪干扰纯粹理性的推演。我们要的是将凶手送上正义的法庭，而不是将一对苦恋的情侣送上婚姻的圣坛。
（There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.）
四、 侦探本人或警方搜查人员不可摇身变为凶手。如此等于拿一分钱铜板，说它是五元金币一样，这是不实的陈述。
（The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.）
五、 控告凶手，必须通过逻辑推理，不可假借意外、巧合或没有合理动机的嫌犯自白。以后者的方式破案，无异是故意驱使读者到一个不可能找答案之处搜寻，等读者失败回来之后，才告诉他们答案从头到尾在你口袋之中，这样的作者，不会比一个笑匠好到哪儿去。
（The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.）
六、 推理小说必须有侦探，侦探不侦查案情就不能称之为侦探。侦探的任务是搜集一切可能的线索，再根据这些线索找出那个故事一开始时犯下恶行的人。如果侦探没有通过分析线索得出结论，那么就像小学生从算术后面得到答案一样，侦探并没有解决问题。
（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; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.）
七、 推理小说中通常会出现尸体，尸体所显露的疑点愈多愈妙。缺乏凶杀的犯罪太单薄，份量太不足。三百页对于谋杀以外的犯罪来说实在是太冗长了。毕竟，读者的辛苦和精力的消耗必须得到回报。美国人本质上比较富于人性，因此，一桩凶狠的谋杀案会激起他们的报复之念和恐惧心理，他们希望杀人者受到法律制裁。所以，当一个"恶毒"的谋杀案发生时，再温厚的读者都会怀抱满腔正义热忱来追捕凶手。
（There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse the better. No lesser crime than murder will suffice. Three hundred pages is far too much pother for a crime other than murder. After all, the reader's trouble and expenditure of energy must be rewarded. Americans are essentially humane, and therefore a tiptop murder arouses their sense of vengeance and horror. They wish to bring the perpetrator to justice; and when "murder most foul, as in the best it is," has been committed, the chase is on with all the righteous enthusiasm of which the thrice gentle reader is capable.）
八、 破案只能通过合乎自然的方法。就推理小说而言，魔术、求神问卜、读心术、降灵符咒或水晶球等等一概列为禁忌。一个根据理性的推理故事，读者才有公平的机会参与斗智，但若和神异的世界竞争，甚至跨身四次元的形而上世界缉凶，读者等于在起跑点就注定输了。
（The problem of the crime must he solved by strictly naturalistic means. Such methods for learning the truth as slate-writing, ouija-boards, mind-reading, spiritualistic séance, crystal-gazing, and the like, are taboo. A reader has a chance when matching his wits with a rationalistic detective, but if he must compete with the world of spirits and go chasing about the fourth dimension of metaphysics, he is defeated ab initio）
九、 侦探只能有一名，也就是说，负责真正推理缉凶的主角，就像古希腊战争剧中的解围之神-deus ex machina-一样，是独一无二的。为解决一个谜题而搬来三、四名侦探，只会分散阅读的乐趣，打乱逻辑推理的脉骼，更会不当剥夺读者和侦探公平斗智的权益。侦探人数超过一名，读者会弄不清谁才是他真正的竞争对手，这就像让一名读者单挑一支接力赛跑队伍一样。
（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, but to take an unfair advantage of the reader,who, at the outset, pits his mind against that of the detective and proceeds to do mental battle. If there is more than one detective the reader doesn't know who his codeductor is. It's like making the reader run a race with a relay team.）
十、 凶手必须是小说中多少有点份量的角色才行。也就是说，凶手必须是读者有兴趣、而且多少有所了解的人物。如果小说进行到最后一章，才将罪名加在一个陌生人，或一个无足轻重的角色身上，那等于是作者自承无能，不配和读者斗智。
（The culprit must turn out to be a person who has played a more or less prominent part in the story — that is, a person with whom the reader is familiar and in whom he takes an interest.For a writer to fasten the crime, in the final chapter, on a stranger or person who has played a wholly unimportant part in the tale, is to confess to his inability to match wits with the reader.）
十一、 那些做仆人的，比方说管家、脚夫、侍者、管理员、厨师等等，不可被选为凶手。因为这样的凶手太明显了，太容易被找出来，这样的处理实在无法令人满意，读者也会觉得浪费时间。凶手必须是值得花时间花心力去找的人--通常是最不被怀疑的那个。要是凶手果真是某个卑微的奴仆，那作家实在没必要把这种故事写成书，让世人铭记于心。
（Servants--such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like--must not be chosen by the author as the culprit. This is begging a noble question. It is a too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory, and makes the reader feel that his time has been wasted. The culprit must be a decidedly worth-while person--one that wouldn't ordinarily come under suspicion; for if the crime was the sordid work of a menial, the author would have had no business to embalm it in book-form.）
十二、 就算是连续杀人命案，凶手也只能有一名。当然，凶手可以有共犯或共谋，但务必只让一人挑起全部罪行责任，读者的所有怒火必须集中于单一的歹角身上。
（There must be but one culprit, no matter how many murders are committed. The culprit may, of course, have a minor helper or co-plotter; but the entire onus must rest on one pair of shoulders: the entire indignation of the reader must be permitted to concentrate on a single black nature.）
十三、 推理小说中，最好不要有秘密组织、帮会或黑手党之类的犯罪团体，否则作者等于在写冒险小说或特工爱情故事。一场引人入胜、真正美丽的谋杀案会因为这种大规模的罪责而被无可挽回地破坏。诚然，侦探小说中的凶手应该得到一个施展拳脚的机会，但给他一个秘密社团（及其无处不在的避难所、大规模保护等）可以依靠就太过分了。任何一个有自尊心的高级杀人犯都不会希望在与警察的角逐中遇到这样的机会。
（Secret societies, camorras, mafias, et al., have no place in a detective story. Here the author gets into adventure fiction and secret-service romance. A fascinating and truly beautiful murder is irremediably spoiled by any such wholesale culpability. To be sure, the murderer in a detective novel should be given a sporting chance, but it is going too far to grant him a secret society (with its ubiquitous havens, mass protection, etc.) to fall back on. No high-class, self-respecting murderer would want such odds in his jousting-bout with the police.）
十四、 杀人手法和破案手法必须合理且科学。也就是说，推理小说不允许采用伪科学、纯幻想或投机的机关装置，举例来说，谋杀案的死者被才发现的新元素如超镭所杀，这就是不合理的；或者，用极其罕见，甚至是作者凭空想像的毒药害死，这也不行。从毒理学的角度来说，侦探小说必须限制在药物典籍中。一旦作家以儒勒·凡尔纳的方式飞入奇幻王国，他就脱离了侦探小说的界限，在未知的冒险领域嬉戏。
（The method of murder, and the means of detecting it, must be rational and scientific. That is to say, pseudo-science and purely imaginative and speculative devices are not to be tolerated in the roman policier. For instance, the murder of a victim by a newly found element--a super-radium, let us say--is not a legitimate problem. Nor may a rare and unknown drug, which has its existence only in the author's imagination, be administered. A detective-story writer must limit himself, toxicologically speaking, to the pharmacopoeia. Once an author soars into the realm of fantasy, in the Jules Verne manner, he is outside the bounds of detective fiction, cavorting in the uncharted reaches of adventure.）
十五、 谜题真相必须明晰有条理，可让有锐利洞察之眼的读者看穿，我的意思是，在案情大白之后，读者若重读一遍小说，会清楚发现，破案的关键始终摆在他眼前，所有的线索也无一不指向同一名凶手。如果他跟侦探一样聪明的话，不必等到最后一章就可以自己破案。当然了，这样的读者的确是存在的。我对于推理小说所持的基本理论是：如果一本推理小说的架构写得够公平合理的话，要读者无法自己发现答案是不可能的。可以预期的是，一定有某部分的读者和作者一样机灵；如果作者在对犯罪及其线索的陈述和投射中表现出应有的体育精神和诚实，那么这些敏锐的读者将能够像侦探那样通过分析、排除和逻辑指认凶手。这就是游戏的热情所在。这就解释了为什么那些厌恶“通俗”小说的读者会厚颜无耻地读侦探小说。
（The truth of the problem must at all times be apparent--provided the reader is shrewd enough to see it. By this I mean that if the reader, after learning the explanation for the crime, should reread the book, he would see that the solution had, in a sense, been staring him in the face--that all the clues really pointed to the culprit--and that, if he had been as clever as the detective, he could have solved the mystery himself without going on to the final chapter. That the clever reader does often thus solve the problem goes without saying. And one of my basic theories of detective fiction is that, if a detective story is fairly and legitimately constructed, it is impossible to keep the solution from all readers. There will inevitably be a certain number of them just as shrewd as the author; and if the author has shown the proper sportsmanship and honesty in his statement and projection of the crime and its clues, these perspicacious readers will be able, by analysis, elimination and logic, to put their finger on the culprit as soon as the detective does. And herein lies the zest of the game. Herein we have an explanation for the fact that readers who would spurn the ordinary "popular" novel will read detective stories unblushingly.）
十六、 过长的叙述性文字，微妙的人物分析，过度的气氛营造或是对于一些旁枝末节玩弄文字，都不应该出现在推理小说里。这些在犯罪的记录和推理的过程中完全不重要。我们的主要目的是要陈述问题，并经由分析将问题作出圆满的推论。而这类文字只会阻碍情节的发展，并将不相干的事情加进主题里面。当然，必要的叙述和人物的描写可以使小说更为逼真。当作者将故事描写得非常引人入胜时，可使读者的情绪完全投入在剧情的发展和人物的刻画上，就这一点而言，他已经将纯文学的技巧和犯罪文件所需具备的真实性和相容性发挥到同等的境界了。侦探小说是一件严峻的事情，读者去看它，不是为了文学的底蕴、风格、美丽的描述和情绪的投射，而是为了脑力刺激和智力活动——就像他去看球赛或玩填字游戏一样。局间在马球场进行关于自然之美的讲座几乎不会提高人们对两个棒球九号队之间的斗争的兴趣；关于词源学和拼字法的论文散布在纵横字谜的定义中，只会激怒一心想让单词正确互锁的求解者。
（ A detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying with side-issues, no subtly worked-out character analyses, no "atmospheric" preoccupations. Such matters have no vital place in a record of crime and deduction. They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose, which is to state a problem, analyze it, and bring it to a successful conclusion. To be sure, there must be a sufficient descriptiveness and character delineation to give the novel verisimilitude; but when an author of a detective story has reached that literary point where he has created a gripping sense of reality and enlisted the reader's interest and sympathy in the characters and the problem, he has gone as far in the purely "literary" technique as is legitimate and compatible with the needs of a criminal-problem document. A detective story is a grim business, and the reader goes to it, not for literary furbelows and style and beautiful descriptions and the projection of moods, but for mental stimulation and intellectual activity--just as he goes to a ball game or to a cross-word puzzle. Lectures between innings at the Polo Grounds on the beauties of nature would scarcely enhance the interest in the struggle between two contesting baseball nines; and dissertations on etymology and orthography interspersed in the definitions of a cross-word puzzle would tend only to irritate the solver bent on making the words interlock correctly.）
十七、 不可让职业性罪犯负担推理小说中的犯罪责任。至于那些闯空门的小偷恶棍所做的坏事则是警察的责任，不是作家和杰出的业余侦探的事，这类犯法的事是属于刑事组的例行工作。真正吸引人的犯罪，应该出自教堂中某个受人尊敬的大人物，或是以慈善闻名的老太太之手才是。
（A professional criminal must never be shouldered with the guilt of a crime in a detective story. Crimes by house-breakers and bandits are the province of the police department--not of authors and brilliant amateur detectives. Such crimes belong to the routine work of the Homicide Bureaus. A really fascinating crime is one committed by a pillar of a church, or a spinster noted for her charities.）
十八、 在推理小说里，犯罪事件到最后绝不能变成意外或以自杀收场，以如此反高潮的方式结束一场漫长的侦查之旅，等于是对读者开了一个不可饶恕的大玩笑。要是有人买了这本书，发现里面的内容全是骗人而要求退钱的话，任何公正的法院都会站在他那边，而将这位欺骗了忠实读者的作家予以严惩。
（A crime in a detective story must never turn out to be an accident or a suicide. To end an odyssey of sleuthing with such an anti-climax is to play an unpardonable trick on the reader. If a book-buyer should demand his two dollars back on the ground that the crime was a fake, any court with a sense of justice would decide in his favor and add a stinging reprimand to the author who thus hoodwinked a trusting and kind-hearted reader.）
十九、 推理小说里的犯罪动机都是个人的。至于国际阴谋和战略的政治游戏是属于另外一种小说，举例来说，像是特务组织之类的故事。谋杀的情节，必须保持一定程度的平易近人，才可以反映读者的日常生活经验，使他们压抑已久的欲望和情绪有所宣泄。
（The motives for all crimes in detective stories should be personal. International plottings and war politics belong in a different category of fiction--in secret-service tales, for instance. But a murder story must be kept gemütlich, so to speak. It must reflect the reader's everyday experiences, and give him a certain outlet for his own repressed desires and emotions.）
二十、并且（为了给我的守则凑个整数）我在此列出了一些现在没有一个有自尊的侦探小说作家会使用的诡计。因为被频繁使用，所有的推理小说迷对于这几种方式都再熟悉不过。使用它们就等于承认了作者的无能和缺乏独创性。
1.通过将犯罪现场留下的烟蒂与犯罪嫌疑人抽的品牌进行比较来确定罪犯的身份。
2.虚假的招魂术降神会，目的是恐吓罪魁祸首，让他暴露自己的身份。
3.伪造指纹。
4.虚拟人物不在场证明。
5.狗不吠叫，从而表明入侵者是熟悉的。
6.最终将犯罪归咎于双胞胎或与嫌疑人长相一模一样但无辜的亲戚。
7.使用皮下注射器和蒙汗药。
8.警察闯入后，凶手再在密室里实施了谋杀。
9.利用词联想测试判断有罪。
10.密码或加密信件，最终被侦探解开。
And (to give my Credo an even score of items) I herewith list a few of the devices which no self-respecting detective story writer will now avail himself of. They have been employed too often, and are familiar to all true lovers of literary crime. To use them is a confession of the author's ineptitude and lack of originality.
(a) Determining the identity of the culprit by comparing the butt of a cigarette left at the scene of the crime with the brand smoked by a suspect.
(b) The bogus spiritualistic séance to frighten the culprit into giving himself away.
(c) Forged fingerprints.
(d) The dummy-figure alibi.
(e) The dog that does not bark and thereby reveals the fact that the intruder is familiar.
(f)The final pinning of the crime on a twin, or a relative who looks exactly like the suspected, but innocent, person.
(g) The hypodermic syringe and the knockout drops.
(h) The commission of the murder in a locked room after the police have actually broken in.
(i) The word association test for guilt.
(j) The cipher, or code letter, which is eventually unraveled by the sleuth.
