So if Holmes
was right on this occasion, he was right by luck and not by deduction.
But that must be the best of writing a detective story, that you can
always make the lucky shots come off. In no other form of fiction, I
imagine, does the author feel so certainly that he is the captain of
the ship. If he wants it so, he has it so. Is the solution going to be
too easy! Then he puts in an unexpected footprint in the geranium bed,
or a strange face at the window, and makes it more difficult, Is the
reader being kept too much in the dark? Then a conversation overheard
in the library will make it easier for him. The author's only trouble
is that he can never be certain whether his plot is too obscure or too
obvious. He knows himself that the governess is guilty, and, in
consequence, she can hardly raise her eyebrows without seeming to him
to give the whole thing away.
There was a time when I began to write a detective story for myself.
My murder, I thought, was rather cleverly carried out.
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