The Viaduct Murder

The Viaduct Murder is a mystery novel by the English writer Ronald Arbuthnott Knox, first published in 1925. It was included by Howard Haycraft in the list of detective fiction that he considered the cornerstones of the genre.

The book begins on a golf course, where a clergyman, a retired academic, a former intelligence officer and a golfer on holiday lose a ball near a railway viaduct and find a body in the ground below. The position of the dead man's hat, some distance from where he fell, tells them that he did not simply fall, and the four of them set out to work out who killed him. Knox, who was a priest and a scholar as well as a writer of detective fiction, has the group investigate by argument as much as by inquiry, and the novel is one of the earliest examples of the conversation-based mystery in which the solution is arrived at by a handful of intelligent people reasoning in a comfortable room. It also has one of the first appearances in the genre of a set of rules for fair play, the subject Knox later codified in an essay.

Knox wrote several detective novels in the 1920s and 1930s, and he was also responsible, with other writers of the period, for the rules that Golden Age detective fiction was meant to keep to.