Youdunnit I

The postmodern detective story may be a more or less straightforward pastiche of style and plot conventions; or it may be a narrative that ironizes the form, imitating its structures but subverting and distorting them.

The most obvious way of subverting a form that is geared towards the solution of a mystery is to absent or defer the denouement. Thus the postmodern detective narrative is constructed around an absent centre (absence of a crime, absence of a solution); the detective narrative, insofar as the solution of the crime stands for the production of meaning itself, invites the application of poststructuralist theories of différance.

An example: a man reading a pulp detective novel borrowed from a library becomes dangerously obsessed with the narrative, to the extent that his life is consumed by the desire to know the solution. His prurient interest in the sexual dimension of the crimes described mounts to the point where the act of reaching the last page becomes for him a promise of orgasmic release. But the last page is missing, torn out. He complains at the library, but there are no other copies. He approaches the publisher, but the book is out of print. He attempts to visit the author, but he is dead. Finally he obtains a copy from the legal deposit library, and on turning the last page finds a publisher’s note informing the reader that the novel was left unfinished at the time of the author’s death. He will never know.

Alright, I’ll come clean: that was the plot of an episode of the popular BBC sitcom Hancock’s Half-Hour (1960).

In that episode, Hancock is shown in one sense to be the ideal reader of a detective novel, because he identifies with the detective so completely that he not only attempts to do the detective’s work in finding the solution to the crime (and these sequences are very funny), but also turns detective himself in finding the solution of the solution. This he does successfully, and even if the result is for him unsatisfying, for the viewer it is a perfect comedic pay-off.

However, in another way Hancock gets it wrong: the ideal reader of a detective novel should not identify completely with the detective; he should keep his distance, play the game. The reader’s true adversary is not the murderer, but the author. Gilbert Adair gives an insightful account of this here.

Pastiche of detective stories is a tricky balancing act, because the genre itself has a recuperative power and even in its classical form can accommodate self-referential games. I mentioned in the previous post the chapter in John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man (1935), in which the detective tips a theatrical wink to the reader:

‘But […]’, interrupted Pettis, ‘why discuss detective fiction?’
‘Because’, said the doctor frankly, ‘we’re in a detective story and we don’t fool the reader by pretending we’re not. Let’s not invent elaborate excuses to drag in a discussion of detective stories. Let’s candidly glory in the noblest pursuits possible to characters in a book.’

Such explicit self-referentiality may be rare in the classic detective novel, but there are gestures towards it also in Conan Doyle and Christie where the detective’s fame (which is of course really a literary fame) always precedes him; or in Chesterton, where Father Brown is asked to compare his methods of detection with those of other fictional sleuths.

Gilbert Adair’s Agatha Christie pastiches came in for some bad reviews for their irritatingly knowing tone and self-referential clowning. Myself, I rather enjoyed the one I read (A Mysterious Affair of Style), because Adair is clearly quite aware (as he shows in the above article) that the classic detective story is not itself ‘innocent’: it is a game between a knowing author and a knowing reader.

A Christie parody of a different sort, The Prismatic Bezel by Sebastian Knight, was published in 1925 (the same year as Christie’s third Poirot story The Mysterious Affair at Styles); already by that date the murder mystery had become a moribund form, a thing ‘shamming life, painted and repainted, continuing to be accepted by lazy minds serenely unaware of the fraud.’ Knight’s story places a corpse in a boarding house and populates it with the usual cast of suspects. Then the distortions begin: the detective character is called in but fails to arrive; the configurations of the story shift ‘with a quick sliding motion’ and all of the suspects are revealed to be connected with each other; the boarding house setting melts away and is replaced by a country-house; the crime plot fades out and the story takes on the contours of an entirely different type of novel. But then the detective arrives and we are back in the mystery plot. The corpse is revealed to have vanished. Finally the chief suspect (suspected by the reader from the start for being the most conspicuously innocent-looking character) is unmasked: not as the murderer, but as the victim. ‘You see, one dislikes being murdered’.

Knight’s story is of course the invention of Vladimir Nabokov, in whose 1941 novel The Real Life of Sebastian Knight the above description appears. Around the same time, Raymond Chandler, who also thought that classic detective fiction had exhausted itself as a form, was busy writing the books that would in large part define a new genre: the hard-boiled thriller.

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Youdunnit II

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Tzvetan Todorov’s seminal ‘Typology of Detective Fiction’ clarifies the distinction between mystery and thriller. (Although it seems to me that the dominant form today, in British detective fiction at least, does not quite fit either of these genres, being perhaps closer to the ‘police procedural’.) Todorov makes the starting point of his analysis this extract from Michel Butor’s L’emploi du temps (1956):

Every crime novel is constructed around two murders: the first, committed by the killer, is merely the pretext for the second in which he is the victim of the true murderer, the immune murderer – the detective who puts him to death, not by one of the vulgar methods was himself reduced to using, poison, dagger, silenced pistol, or silk stocking garrote, but by the explosion of the truth.

This neat formulation is often quoted approvingly as an apt description of the way crime narratives work. But Butor’s novel itself does something much more interesting, and this explanation is nothing but a lure, a paper-thin construct that the centripetal narrative strains against and destroys.

In some ways such a sophisticated postmodern gesture is in fact an idiotic literalism, an inverse-quixotic way of reading narrative conventions: not the desire to make real life like a novel, but the desire to make novels more like ‘real life’:

In the crime novel the narrative gradually explores events prior to its beginning […] in reality, all too often, it is only when our lives are suddenly disrupted by the explosion of a tragedy that we rouse ourselves and try to find its origins

The postmodern crime novel continually frustrates attempts to impose order and meaning; its clues resist interpretation, events get distorted by the very act of investigating them. The narrative involves the reader in ever more labyrinthine twists, and increasingly indistinguishable temporal layers. There is no ‘explosion of truth’, only the explosion of meaning into fragments.

Witold Gombrowicz’s Cosmos (1964) takes further the idea of detection as a descent into madness. Paul Auster’s City of Glass and Ghosts (1986) do something similar, in subverting the conventions of the hard-boiled detective narrative, and tipping in a large dose of metafictional whimsy to further confuse matters. If I sound dismissive, I don’t mean to: I loved the New York Trilogy when I first read it, and I even made it the subject of a tedious postgraduate essay I wrote for a module on the impenetrable French theorist Maurice Blanchot. The NYT attracted many imitators, none of whom added much to the mix. Sam Taylor’s The Amnesiac (2007) is the most recent one that I’ve read; it wears its debt to Auster on its sleeve, and isn’t very good.

Novels like Butor’s, Gombrowicz’s and Auster’s function according to a logic that does not merely foreclose the possibility of a solution to the mystery, but ultimately reveals there never was any mystery to solve in the first place. The founding event of the detective narrative has been whipped out from under it, and if its attendant devices remain (clues, suspects, surveillance), they point only to an absent centre. The story of the investigation is no longer underpinned by the story of the crime. Todorov noted that in the generic detective narrative the story of the crime is the story of an absence in that it cannot be immediately present in the book; the difference here is that the story of the crime is an absence made pervasively present in the book. Clues become freely-circulating signifiers, leads become aporias, the lure of a solution becomes the endless deferral of meaning.

These kind of novels often get called ‘metaphysical detective stories’. It would probably be better to call them postmodern or poststructuralist, and reserve the ‘metaphysical’ label for the work of a Borges, or, at a stretch, of a Chesterton.

Umberto Eco’s historical mysteries represent a different type again, I think, because even if they load elements of the story with semiological significance, they do not violate the structural logic of the genre: both The Name of the Rose and Baudolino have murder mysteries and solutions that are recognizably classical in their form.

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Youdunnit III

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In any case, the genre-defying twist is in many ways invited by the very conventions of the genre, as if distortion of the form were built into the form itself, and some of the most 'unconventional' solutions are actually found in the most classic and even genre-defining stories. Even discounting ‘unusual’ solutions that are nevertheless perfectly permissible in the ‘classic’ canon (suicide disguised as murder, etc), the genre has from the get-go been corrupted by every manner of perversion. Unclassical solutions in ‘classic’ stories (Christie, Dickson Carr, Chesterton, Poe, Collins) include the following: the narrator did it; the victim did it (not suicide); everyone did it; no-one did it (there was no crime); a non-human animal did it; the criminal doesn't know he did it (but it wasn’t an accident); etc.

The Oulipopo (note that reduplicated syllable: Ouvroir de Littérature Policière Potentielle) was founded in 1973 as a sub-commission of the College of 'Pataphysics. François Le Lionnais had in 1971 written the founding text of the ‘analytical’ wing of the movement (the other being the ‘synthetic’, concerned with the composition of detective stories under various constraints), a study entitled ‘Who is Guilty?’, in which he attempted to outline all the possible solutions to a murder mystery narrative. (My information here all comes from the excellent Oulipo compendium, ed. Harry Matthews.)

Le Lionnais, who had clearly read many more crime stories than I have, even knew of examples of the following: the detective did it; the author (who is not the narrator) did it; the publisher did it. There are even apparently instances of the most genre-defying and perverse solution of all, that is, the absence of any solution (‘we can never know’) which ramifies, in Le Lionnais’s scheme, into three distinct types.

It is one of the most widely-acknowledged rules of the genre that the detective cannot be the culprit (Van Dine reserved particular scorn for this gimmick). I don’t know which story Le Lionnais had in mind here; but I know of one interesting example of the detective-as-culprit: G. K. Chesterton’s ‘The Secret of Father Brown’ (‘You see, it was I who killed all those people’) – where the guilt, however, is moral and spiritual rather than legal.

Clearly some of the instances mentioned here are not properly speaking canonical representatives of the genre, but parodies (for example, the one in which the criminal is the publisher is a ‘humorous story by P. G. Wodehouse’). Still, it is clear that the mystery genre has always clamoured to violate its own generic conventions. Like all genres in fact.

The only twist that had never been done, to Le Lionnais's knowledge was: the reader did it. The Oulipo Compendium duly supplies an example of just that, in Jean-Louis Bailly’s La Dispersion des cendres (1990). (Although it has to be said that this cheats a bit by being merely a description of such a novel and not the novel itself; and by really being a case of ‘the purchaser of the book did it’ rather than the reader.) There are other examples, the internet tells me (pdf), and I’m disappointed – if unsurprised – to see that I’m not the first to think such stories should be categorized as ‘youdunnits’. It appears that the examples mentioned in that link adopt the expedient of the second person narrator. That may seem like a cheap trick, reminiscent of those ‘choose your own adventure’ books we used to read as children, but Michel Butor’s 1957 novel La modification (although not itself a murder mystery) proves that it can be done well.

Incidentally, I have arranged it so that the email notification for one randomly selected comment on this post will remotely trigger a mechanism causing a hammer to smash a flask of poisonous gas concealed in my enemy’s bedroom. You have been warned…