Abstract
Like detective fiction, psychoanalysis is a narrative art. Both function as a literature of crisis in looking for clues to previously unsolved traumas and in seeking secure boundaries to fix knowledge and desire in a social context. Sharing not only methodology but also tropes of analysis, plotting and deciphering, both detective fiction and psychoanalysis promise popular culture certainties which they cannot ultimately deliver. Psychoanalysis is often cited as a form of secure knowledge of human motivation and desire, but it reveals a double nature, simultaneously suggesting the impossibility of a firm grasp on what is, by definition, unknowable, the unconscious. Similarly, detective fiction offers a narrative guarantee of answers as solutions, but, as Scott McCracken points out, individual novels raise more questions than they are able to satisfy.1
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Notes
Scott McCracken argues that part of the appeal of detective fiction is that it raises more social questions than it is able to answer. See Scott McCracken, Pulp: Reading Popular Fiction (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1998), pp. 50–74.
Critics who have used psychoanalysis to understand detective fiction include Dennis Porter, The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981)
Sally R. Munt, Murder by the Book? Feminism and the Crime Novel (London and New York: Routledge, 1994)
and Gill Plain, Women’s Fiction of the Second World War: Gender, Power and Resistance (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1996).
Peter Brooks, Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
Dorothy L. Sayers, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (1928; London: New English Library, 1968). All later page references will be incorporated into the chapter. The word ‘resurrection’ is used to describe the exhumation of a corpse, leading to the discovery that the corpse was murdered, so rendering the death ‘unnatural’.
Agatha Christie, Appointment with Death (1938). Alison Light argues for Christie’s fundamentally conservative absorption of Freud in this novel.
See Alison Light, Forever England: Femininity, Literature and Conservatism between the Wars (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 102–4.
P.D. James, Death of an Expert Witness (1977).
P.D. James, Devices and Desires (1989).
Ngaio Marsh, Final Curtain (1947).
Margery Allingham, More Work for the Undertaker (1948).
For Cosette functioning as the Jungian ‘self’ archetype, see Barbara Vine, The House of Stairs (1988; Harmondsworth: Penguin, ‘Three Novels’ edn, 1990), p. 783.
Ngaio Marsh, Singing in the Shrouds (1958).
Agatha Christie, The ABC Murders (1936).
Margery Allingham, Death of a Ghost (1934).
Ngaio Marsh, Artists in Crime (1938).
P.D. James, A Taste for Death (1986).
Ruth Rendell, Kissing the Gunner’s Daughter (1991).
Dorothy L. Sayers, Clouds of Witness (1926).
Margery Allingham, The Tiger in the Smoke (1952).
Ngaio Marsh, Opening Night (1951; London: Fontana, 1963). All later page references will be incorporated into the chapter.
Agatha Christie, Dead Man’s Folly (1956).
Agatha Christie, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926).
Agatha Christie, They Do It with Mirrors (1952).
Agatha Christie, Sleeping Murder (1976).
Dorothy L. Sayers, Gaudy Night (1935; London: New English Library, 1978), p. 264. Peter Wimsey persuades Harriet that celibacy does not necessarily lead to the Freudian casebook.
Margery Allingham, Look to the Lady (1931).
Julia Kristeva, ‘Women’s Time’, in The Kristeva Reader, ed. Toril Moi (Oxford: Blackwell, 1986), pp. 187–213.
Ruth Rendell, A Judgement in Stone (1977).
Dorothy L. Sayers, Murder Must Advertise (1933).
Ngaio Marsh, Final Curtain (1947; London: Fontana, 1956), p. 190.
Agatha Christie, The Hollow (1946; London: Fontana, 1955). All later page references will be incorporated into the chapter.
Margery Allingham, Flowers for the Judge (1936; Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1944). All later page references will be incorporated into the chapter.
P.D. James, Original Sin (1994).
P.D. James, An Unsuitable Job for a Woman (1972; London: Sphere, 1974). All later page references will be incorporated into the chapter.
Ruth Rendell, The Veiled One (1988; London: Arrow, 1989). All later page references will be incorporated into the chapter.
C.G. Jung, The Collected Works of C.G. Jung, vols i–xx, A and B, ed. Herbert Read, Michael Fordham and Gerhard Adler, trans. R.F.C. Hull (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1953–91), vol. vii, p. 92.
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© 2001 Susan Rowland
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Rowland, S. (2001). Detecting Psychoanalysis: Readers, Criminals and Narrative. In: From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell. Crime Files Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230598782_5
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