There’s a Golden Age mystery sensibility, but does JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA conform to the Golden Age mystery rules?

Yes, with one exception. The rules of Golden Age mysteries were formulated by Englishman Ronald Knox in 1929 and, perhaps because he was a Catholic priest, they became known as Knox’s Commandments. These rules were adopted as guidelines by the Detection Club, an association of mystery writers of the day, including those three greats of the Golden Age: Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, and G.K. Chesterton. Their aim was to be fair to the reader, eliminating unexplained revelations, deus ex machinas, and all strained contrivances—the solution had to be derivable from clues presented clearly and unequivocally during the story, enabling the reader, if alert and clever enough, to solve the mystery before the whodunnit, howdunnit, and whydunnit are revealed.

JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA complies with all these precepts except Number Five: ”No Chinamen”—a tongue-in-cheek rule, presumably really meant to reject mysterious and unaccounted-for figures suddenly happening on the scene. But the Hong-Kong-born and human-rights-advocating Dr. Wu in JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA is a major character not just in the story, but also in helping to elucidate a larger theme of the book, that is, the rising threat of authoritarianism.

(As an aside, some delicate souls cringe at the word ”Chinamen” and feel the need to apologize for its presence in Knox’s Commandments. Did the term “Englishman,” used above, evoke a similar response? Would “Frenchmen” have been found objectionable? The answer is of course no, and so perhaps it is not ”Chinamen” that should be apologized for but unthinking and ahistorical political correctness.)

The larger theme of rising authoritarianism is also behind the 1930s motif adopted aboard the Mulvane, used not just to invoke a Golden Age milieu but also as a mechanism to ruminate on the last hundred years of history and wonder how, after having successfully risen to the two great challenges of fascism and communism, we find ourselves in such a sorry state today: culturally moribund, mired in debt, ineptly led no matter the party in power, and once again threatened by authoritarian regimes relentlessly working to destroy the democracies, socially, economically, industrially and militarily. In other words, how is it that Western civilization lost its mojo?

But JOURNAL OF THE SUPERNOVA is a murder mystery, not a political tract, and fully complies with the spirit of Knox’s Commandments, indeed not just slipping in clues but explicitly emphasizing and often repeating them to make sure they’re not missed or forgotten. Nevertheless, the author is confident that no one will ever successfully get the whodunnit, howdunnit, and whydunnit by the end of Chapter XLVIII—that is, before the solution is revealed.

There, reader: you have been challenged.