Genre Boundaries (Comment-driven post series)

Before my recent traveling absence, I posted a 'comment-driven post series' article titled 'Do you write yourself?'  This is the next in my comment-driven post series...This one stems from a comment made by Elizabeth Spann Craig on my Touching the Rain post.  Here's what she had to say:

Oh, I have a LOT of boundaries I need to let go! :) I'm not quite ready to with my writing, but that's okay...I'm writing a genre with some boundaries of its own.

- Elizabeth Spann Craig

Elizabeth mentions writing in a genre that has boundaries.  In case you don't know, she writes Cozy Mysteries.  Mystery writing, of course, has its own basic boundaries...or does it?

In 1929, priest, English theologian, and crime writer Ronald Knox created the Ten Commandments for detective fiction in his 'Decalogue.'  Here they are:

1. The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.



2. All supernaural or preternatural agencies are ruled out as a matter of course.


3. Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable.


4. No hitherto undiscovered poisons may be used, nor any appliance which will need a long scientific explanation at the end.


5. No Chinaman must figure in the story.


6. No accident must ever help the detective, nor must he ever have an unaccountable intuition which proves to be right.


7. The detective must not himself commit the crime.


8. The detective must not light on any clues which are not instantly produced for the inspection of the reader.


9. The stupid friend of the detective, the Watson, must not conceal any thoughts which pass through his mind; his intelligence must be slightly, but very slightly, below that of the average reader.


10. Twin brothers, and doubles generally, must not appear unless we have been duly prepared for them.

Needless to say, the rules have been broken.  In fact, in Josef Svoresky wrote a book in the eighties titled The Sins of Father Knox, in which he attempted to break all of these rules.   But Knox had set them up specifically for writers of the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, which speaks specifically to those writers of the 1920s and 30s.  These authors include Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, John Dickerson Carr and Ellery Queen.

According to Knox, a detective story "must have as its main interest the unravelling of a mystery; a mystery whose elements are clearly presented to the reader at an early stage in the proceedings, and whose nature is such as to arouse curiosity, a curiosity which is gratified at the end."  I think we can agree on that!

What defines your genre?