Mystery

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

‘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