PERSPECTIVE

Journeys to the farthest reaches of interactive entertainment

ALEX SPENCER

T here’s this strange skill you gather, reading videogame reviews – or at least I did, as a kid relying on magazines as my portal to all games beyond the annual Christmas and birthday purchases. You learn to internalise a game’s ruleset, as laid out by the writer, in order to run a kind of dodgy emulation in your head. Nowadays, though, with virtually any game available within minutes of reading about it, these aren’t muscles I need to stretch very often. So I’ve found another way of exercising them: detective novels.

Take Benjamin Stevenson’s Everyone In My Family Has Killed Someone, which opens with Ronald Knox’s ‘Ten Commandments Of Detective Fiction’, the rules of engagement between writer and reader, as established during the genre’s 1920s Golden Age. Example rule: ‘Not more than one secret room or passage is allowable’. A couple of pages later, Stevenson stresses that he wants to play fair with you, in a way that reflects the century that has passed since Knox. He identifies, upfront, every chapter in which a murder will occur; read on Kindle, these appear as hyperlinks leading you to the relevant page. It’s an astounding trick, but one that – for my money – Stevenson struggles to match through the rest of the book.