Detective Fiction and Literary Theory EDITED WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY GLENN W. MOST WILLIAM W. STOWE AND 0 HARCOURT BRACE JOVANOVICH, PUBLISHERS SAN DIEGO NEW YORK LONDON Copyriaht © 1983 by Glenn W. MOit and William W. Stowe All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy. reco.rdina. or any information storage and retrieval • ~ without pea mdlion in writing from the publisher. Requests for pet uai:1sion to make copies of any part of the work should mailed to: ~ Pa o+iaions. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Publishers, 757 Tirird Avenue, New York, NY 10017. Grateful acknowledgement is hereby givm for pea o-ink,n to reprint the following worb: Roger Callois. II "Le roman policier: jeu" of IV "Pl1i111nces du roman," reprinted from Approclaa dt l'lmaginain by pe1inission of F.ditions Gallimard. © Editions Gallimard 1974. Geraldine Pederson-Krag, "Detective Stories and the Primal Scene. .. reprinted from TM Psychoanalytic Qa,arttrly 18, 1949 by pea ,uitsion of Tlat Psycltoanalytic 0,ulrttrl1. Jacques Lacan, "'Seo1inar on 'The Purloined Letter;., translated with introductory notes by Jdl'rey Mehlman, reprinted from Yalt Fnnch StMdits by pescuiaioo of Yalt Fnncla Studits. No. 48, 1973 © 1973 by Yale Fnnch Studia. Ernst Kaemmel, "Literatur untcrm Tisch. Der Detektivrornan und ,ein psellachaft licher Auftrag." reprinted from Nt11t DftltJclat Uttratur 10, 1962 by pea;omion. of BUro fur Urbebaru:hte, Oea•O•n Democratic Republic.© Hanna Kaemmel, DDR Berlin, 1962. Richard Alewyn, "Der Unprung des Detektivromans," reprinted from Probltmt und Gntalttn by pe1uadlion of Imel Verlag.© Imel Verlag Frankfurt am Main 1974. Helmut Hcissenbiittel, ""Spielrqeln des Kriminalromana," reprinted from Aa,foiitu n,r Littrat11r, by pe1 ,ndlion of the author. Umberto F.co, 0 Narrative Structures in Fleming." reprinted from Tlat Rolt of Tlat Rtadtr: Exploratioru in tht ~miotics of Tuts, translated by R. A. Downie, by permis sion of Indiana Univenity Presa. Roland Barthes, Section XXXII '"Delay" and Section XXXVII 0 The Hermeneutic Sentence," reprinted from SIZ translated by Richard Miller, by pea aoinion of Hill and Wang, a division of Farrar. Straus and Giroux, Inc. and by peammion of Jonathan Cape Limited on behalf of the Estate of Roland Bartbes. Translation copyright © 1974 by Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Inc. F. R. Jameson, .. On Raymond Chandler,'' reprinted from Soutlttm Rnirw 6 (1970) by pea ,nission of the author. Michael Holquist, .. Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in P01t-War Fiction," reprinted from New Uttrary HiJtory 3 (1971-1972) by peamis sion of Johns Hopkins University Press. f!' () .J ~ • f ; ~ ~ t> 3. -- ~' # •• ~ - .:: Frank Ko made, .. Novel and Nanative," reprinted from Tla«Jry of the NoHI: New E.aays. edited by John Halperin, by pdlltission of Oxford University Presa. Copyright © 1974 by Oxford University Press, Inc. Steven Marcus. "Introduction" to The Continental Op by Dashiell Hammett re printed by pc11uission of the author. Geoffrey H. Hartman, .. Literature High and Low: Tht Case ,;,f the Mystery Story," reprinted from The Fate of R«ulin1 and Other Essays by permission of The University of Chicago Press. Copyright © l 97S by the University of Chicago, and by pd ani:won of Tire New York Review of Books. Copyright © 1972 Nyrev, Inc. Alben D. Hutter, "Dreams, Transformations and Literature: The Implications of Detective Fiction," reprinted from Victorian Studies 19 ( 1975) b) pd 111ission of Victo rian Studies and the Trustees of Indiana University. Stephen Knight, .. •. . . some men come up'- the Detective appears." reprinted from Form and ld«Jlo,y in Crime Fiction by permission of Indiana University Press and by pd niiuion of Macmillan, London and Basingstoke. Dennis Poner, .. Backward Construction and the An of Suspense," reprinted from The PMnuit of Crime by permission of Yale University Press. Copyright © 1981 by Yale University. Library of Conaress Cataloging in Publication Data Main entry under title: The Poetics of murder. Bibliography: p. Includes index. l. Detective and mystery stories History and criticism-Addresses, essays. lectures. I. Most, Glenn W. II. Stowe, William W., l946- PN3448.D4PS4 1983 809.3'872 82-23429 ISBN 0-15-172280-3 ISBN 0-15-672312-3 (A Harvest/HBJ book : pbk.) Designed by Jacqueline Schuman Printed in the United States of America Fint edition ABCDE CONTENTS Introduction xi Roger Caillois, The Detective Novel u Game 1 Geraldine Pederson-Krag, Detective Stories and the Primal Scene \/ 13 V Jacques Lacan, Sa11inar on ''The Purloined Letter'' 21 Ernst Kaemmel, Literature under the Table: The Detective Novel and its Social Mission 55,J V Richard A.lewyn, The Origin of the Detective Novel 62 Helmut Heissenbuttet Rules of the Game of the Crime Novel 79 Umberto Eco, Narrative Structures in Fleming 93 V ' ,· Roland Bartha, Delay and The Het 111eneutic Sentence 118 ~., F. R. Jamaon, On Raymond Chandler 122 V Holquist, Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical De ✓Michael tective Stories in Postwar Fiction 149 Frank Kermode, Novel and Narrative 175 Stnen Marcus, Dashiell Hammett 197 Geoffrey H. Hartman, Literature High and Low: The Case of the '✓ Mystery Story 210 Albert D. Hutter, Dreams, Transformations, and Literature: The Im plications of Detective Fiction 230 Da,id I. Grouw,gel, Agatha Christie: Containment of the Unknown 252 /Stephen Knight, ''. .. some men come up''-the Detective appears 266 V D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police 299 Dennis Porter, Backward Construction and the Art of Suspense 32 7 Carre Glenn W. Most, The Hippocratic Smile: John le and the Tradi- tions of the Detective Novel 341 ••• CONTENTS VIII William W. Stowe, From Semiotics to Het 111eneutics: Modes of De- tection in Doyle and Chandler 366 Source References 385 Suggestions for Further Reading 387 Index 389 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This book would not exist without the help of a large number of individuals and institutions. Howard Sandum and his staff at Har court Brace Jovanovich have been most helpful, as have the staffs of the English Department at Wesleyan (especially Janice Guarino) and the Clauics Department at Princeton. The resources of the Princeton, Wesleyan, and New York Univenity libraries have been put variously at our disposal, as have those of the Research Division of the New York Public Library. Many of the writen here have contributed more to the project than the simple permission to reprint their work. And our friends and colleagues Karin A. Trainer, Richard H. Brodhead, K.hachig Tololyan, Charles Larmore, and many others have been generous with support and advice. Much of the cost of typing and photocopying, finally, has been borne by our respective universities. INTRODUCTION The Golden Age of the detective novel is over, we are told, and so is the Golden Age of detective criticism. Chandler and Hammett are dead, and Sayers and Christie, and both halves of Ellery Queen. Some forty years have passed since W. H. Auden made his celebrated pitch for detective novels as profane replays of the Christian drama of guilt, confession, and atonement and since Edmund Wilson likened reading them to unpacking ''large crates by swallowing the excelsior in order to find at the bottom a few bent and rusty nails.'' Meanwhile, though a large number of detective titles continue to be published every year, the pre-TV days of the ''whodunit'' as mass entertainment and intel lectual couse celebre are dead and gone. Hercule Poirot, Lord Peter Wimsey, the Continental Op, Philip Marlowe, and even such latecom ers as Inspector Maigret, have all taken their places with Strephon and Amaryllis as emblems of a golden time. But myths require revisions, and new traditions arise fron1 the ashes of the old. While scholars are most usefully engaged in preserving and anthologizing the past, novelists and critics even novelists and crit ics of detective fiction go on writing, making it new, as Pound counseled, and making it strange, as the R11ssian Formalists advised. Just as poetry and its criticism-and, incidentally, sheep raising survived the Golden Age that was already long gone when Theocritus and Virgil sang, so, too, detective fiction and its criticism-and, inci dentally, murder are thriving today, when the slouch hat and the sleek roadst~ have gone the way of the shepherd's crook. When, in the title of a famous attack on the genre, &lmund Wilson asked, ''Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?'' he thought the answer ''No one''- was self-evident. History has proved him wrong; millions of readers continue to care who killed whom in thousands of detective novels, both old and new. Furthe111iore, the criticism of detective fiction has never been healthier or more wide ranging than it is today. Taking advantage of their popularity, their relative simplicity, and their clear position as a model for many other kinds of narrative, contemporary literary •• INTRODUCTION XII critics and theorists have used detective novels u test cases and examples for all sorts of literary speculation, from investigations of narrative techniques to discussions of the social function of literature, its psychological effects, and the philosophical systems it anumes or promotes. These novels have come to be seen as conte111porary folk tales, cultural documents par excellence, and prime illustrations of · mental and social processes. This book brings together some of the most important studies of detective fiction to have been published in the last forty years. Rather than reprint the elastic essays of the prewar years, we have chosen to assume that these studies are well known to most readers and have provided a bibliography for those who need to search then1 out. Here we have reprinted only more recent work. Most of it has been pub lished before, but none of it has been easily and affordably available to readers, scholars, and students in college courses. The emphasis in these essays is different, too, from what would have been the emphasis in an anthology of classic pieces The earlier studies often were essentially attacks on the detective novel's pretensions or defenses of its literary merit. The debate on these issues continues; questions about the genre's value persist despite any number of claims to have answered them once and for all. But for the most part the articles collected here tend to put such questions to one side. Instead}, they start from the obvious and indisputable fact of the popularity of detective fiction and ask, ''Why?'' Depending on the kind of answers they give, they can be arranged roughly into three groups. __ The first of !h~phasiua the relati<>n of-d~tivc ~~tiQn_to_the .,_ art of storytelling, to ••n~_r:ratiyity_" as it Js-All~, the structure of_ of stories and the nature narration. In its essence, the deteciwenovel Nfueties··or 1s almost pure narrative. setting and characterization add charm, it is true, but the real power of the genre d~tjy~Jr;~m its -an4_ Qf..l.hewayu_ltcy cao manipulation of stories ktold, Some ·dctec five are ltOi ieS all. ..p. lot, intricately woven tissues of causes and effects, coincidenca and missed chances, that challenge the reader by their complexity. Others focus more on the telling, teasing their readcn out of thought and patience by limiting the na-r-r-a-tive po-in-t o-f v-iew and ' ----- controlling the rhythm and teiiipo of "tne exposition. As a resu1t, defeclive noveTsnave provtaed ideal material1orineorists of plot and of narration.