Raymond Chandler’s 10 rules for writing a detective novel:

1. It must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.
2. It must be technically sound as to the methods of murder and detection.
3. It must be realistic in character, setting and atmosphere. It must be about real people in a real world.
4. It must have a sound story value apart from the mystery element: i.e., the investigation itself must be an adventure worth reading.
5. It must have enough essential simplicity to be explained easily when the time comes.
6. It must baffle a reasonably intelligent reader.
7. The solution must seem inevitable once revealed.
8. It must not try to do everything at once. If it is a puzzle story operating in a rather cool, reasonable atmosphere, it cannot also be a violent adventure or a passionate romance.
9. It must punish the criminal in one way or another, not necessarily by operation of the law. … If the detective fails to resolve the consequences of the crime, the story is an unresolved chord and leaves irritation behind it.
10. It must be honest with the reader.

That’s from Chandler’s notebooks. As it happens, Dashiell Hammett, Ronald Knox, and S.S. Van Dine all came up with similar lists. Mystery writers must be very methodical people.

Samuel Butler believed Homer was “a very young woman” living in Sicily. In his 1897 book The Authoress of the Odyssey he argues that the events in the poem fit neatly onto the province of Trapani and its islands. And a careful reading of the action, he says, reveals “jealousy for the honour and dignity of woman, severity against those who have disgraced their sex, love of small religious observances, of preaching, of white lies and small play-acting, of having things both ways, and of money.”

I have touched briefly on all the more prominent female characters of the ‘Odyssey.’ The moral in every case seems to be that man knows very little, and cannot be trusted not to make a fool of himself even about the little that he does know, unless he has a woman at hand to tell him what he ought to do. There is not a single case in which a man comes to the rescue of female beauty in distress; it is invariably the other way about.

“Moreover there are many mistakes in the ‘Odyssey’ which a young woman might easily make, but which a man could hardly fall into — for example, making the wind whistle over the waves at the end of Book ii., thinking that a lamb could live on two pulls a day at a ewe that was already milked (ix. 244, 245, and 308, 309), believing a ship to have a rudder at both ends (ix. 483, 540), thinking that dry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree (v. 240), [and] making a hawk while still on the wing tear its prey — a thing that no hawk can do (xv. 527).” He didn’t find many supporters, but Robert Graves took up the idea in his 1955 novel Homer’s Daughter.

In 1948, as T.S. Eliot was departing for Stockholm to accept the Nobel Prize, a reporter asked which of his books had occasioned the honor.

Eliot said, “I believe it’s given for the entire corpus.”

The reporter said, “And when did you publish that?”

Eliot later said, “It really might make a good title for a mystery — The Entire Corpus.”