Abstract
Discussions of what is commonly called ‘detective fiction’ seem obsessed with discovering ‘who done it’, who founded the genre. In pursuing this inquiry the literary scholar may be tempted by an analogy with the detective gathering the material evidence and proposing a retrospective theory which situates every event in its appropriate place in an orderly and totalizing narrative leading from origin to explanatory conclusion. A similar analogy may be (and often is) invoked for the scientist, and especially the psychoanalyst — indeed, for anyone who reads the present for or through an explanation that is perceived as ‘buried’ in the sequences of the past. But before we don the deerstalker we should be advised that there can be a dangerous tautology in the detective’s ‘double logic’ which uses ‘the plot of the inquest to find, or construct, a story of the crime which will offer just those features necessary to the thematic coherence we call a solution, while claiming, of course, that the solution has been made necessary by the crime.’2 Many accounts of ‘detective fiction’ have been bedevilled by this sort of teleological fallacy, especially the orthodox theory which presents Conan Doyle as the model of the genre and in consequence treats earlier writing as a simple anticipation of his ‘classic’. This approach comes close to realizing the analogy in terms of the characteristic which Julian Symons identifies as central to detective writing: the ‘manner of working back from effect to cause, from solution to problem.’3
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‘Popular fictions … need to be read and analysed not as some sugar-coated sociology, but as narratives which negotiate, no less than the classic texts, the connection between “writing, history and ideology”.’1
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Notes
Peter Humm, Paul Stigant and Peter Widdowson, Popular Fictions (London: Methuen, 1986), p. 2.
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984), p. 29.
Julian Symons, Bloody Murder (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1985 [1972]), p. 29.
See Ian Ousby, Bloodhounds of Heaven (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1976)
R. F. Stewart,… And Always a Detective (Newton Abbot: David & Charles, 1980).
Franco Moretti, Signs Taken for Wonders (London: Verso, 1983), p. 9.
See Terry Lovell, Consuming Fiction (London: New Left Books/Verso, 1987).
David I. Grossvogel, Mystery and its Fictions (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1979), p. 15.
Jean-Pierre Faye, La Critique du Langage et son Economie (Paris: Editions Galilée, 1973), p. 16.
See Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1977).
Op. cit., p. 125. See Joel Fineman, ‘The Structure of Allegorical Desire’ in Stephen Greenblatt (ed.), Allegory and Representation (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1981)
and Ronald Schleifer, ‘The Space and Dialogue of Desire: Lacan, Greimas, and Narrative Temporality’, in Robert Con Davis (ed.), Lacan and Narration (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1983) - particularly p. 872.
Frederic Jameson, The Political Unconscious (London: Methuen, 1983 [1981]), p. 22.
The term ‘Miracle’ is no more religious in origin than ‘Mystery’; it refers to the tricks of mountebanks and magicians which were a popular form of secular entertainment in the Middle Ages. See Rosemary Woolf, The English Mystery Plays (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1972), p. 36.
W. Lewis Jones, ‘The Arthurian Legend’ in A. C. Ward and A. Waller, The Cambridge History of English Literature, Vol. I (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1949), p. 243–71.
See Dieter Mehl, The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1968), p. 4.
Marc Shell, Money, Language, and Thought (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1982), pp. 24–6, 41.
See Marc Shell, The Economy of Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), pp. 12–13.
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© 1992 Martin A. Kayman
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Kayman, M.A. (1992). Mystery. In: From Bow Street to Baker Street. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-21786-1_1
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