Meta: Rambling about Detectives

[alixtii]

After I accidentally deleted my open windows at skip=525, I worked my way back through my flist, reopening the windows, and IE crashed at skip=475. At that point, I gave up, and I'm just going to rely on newsletters to catch up. If anything interested, don't be afraid to drop a link in the comments.

Speaking of which, metafandom introduced me to this incredibly insightful comment:

JKR strikes me as a huge control freak a lot of the time, and it extends to the way the text is received, I think. It's as if she really thinks that we all should be reading the text a certain way, otherwise we're 'delusional' or whatever. And this approach trickles down to fandom where it becomes a problem because the point of any fandom is to bring together different interpretations of the text. I think it happens because overall JKR's trying to write a mystery, and in a mystery, other interpretations of the set evidence aren't important, and in some ways are even a threat to the end conclusion of the mystery itself. The problem is, I think, so much of her mystery relies on a concrete, black-and-white understanding of character motives when the characters she's created are all very deliberately grey. If that makes any sense.

I think this is brilliant, personally, because I do think that there is something about an Agatha Christie novel which challenges the sort of assumptions those of who are theoretically sophisticated routinely make. I think it comes out of the ethos which informs the detective novel, which is really positivistic at its core: it's the assumption that all questions can be solved by science, i.e. is the process of observation and deduction. If we all just knew how to look, the way that a Sherlock Holmes does, everything would be instantly transparent instead of seeing through a glass darkly.

(Tomorrow I get to write a critical theory on Lacan's "Seminar on 'The Purloined Letter'," so right now I'm full of all kinds of thinky thoughts about how it sometimes seems that a detective is looking for a transcendental signified, or rather like any positivist the police want a transparent non-contingent non-transcendental object, but Dupin is really looking for a signifier in a web of signifiers. Like any positivist, the police are just deluded transcendental idealists, but Dupin is able to make the Nietzschean/post-structuralist move.)

This conception of the detective story was at its height in the 1920s and '30s, and for me is really most purely epitomized by S.S. Van Dine's "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", just a few of which I'll quote here(a similar list can be found here:

1. The reader must have equal opportunity with the detective for solving the mystery. All clues must be plainly stated and described.

2. No willful tricks or deceptions may be placed on the reader other than those played legitimately by the criminal on the detective himself.

3. There must be no love interest. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.

4. The detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should never turn out to be the culprit. This is bald trickery, on a par with offering some one a bright penny for a five-dollar gold piece. It's false pretenses.

5. The culprit must be determined by logical deductions — not by accident or coincidence or unmotivated confession. To solve a criminal problem in this latter fashion is like sending the reader on a deliberate wild-goose chase, and then telling him, after he has failed, that you had the object of his search up your sleeve all the time. Such an author is no better than a practical joker.

6. The detective novel must have a detective in it; and a detective is not a detective unless he detects. His function is to gather clues that will eventually lead to the person who did the dirty work in the first chapter; and if the detective does not reach his conclusions through an analysis of those clues, he has no more solved his problem than the schoolboy who gets his answer out of the back of the arithmetic.

What is interesting, instructive even, in this list is Van Dine's absolute certainty that the point of a novel is to act as a puzzle, and the goal of the reader is to discover the one and only "right" answer. "The detective story," he writes, "is a kind of intellectual game. It is more — it is a sporting event."

There's no wrong way to approach a text, and those who see a detective novel as a sort of one-person parlor game will get no reprimand from me. But this is not how I like to read an Agatha Christie novel or a Sir Arthur Conan Doyle story, and my guess is that it is people like me and not Van Dine who are in the majority. My blessing to those who read them as a puzzle, but if I choose instead to use it as a source text for a fanfic in which Tommy and Tuppence have an orgy with Irene Adler, Vera Claythorn, and Neville Chamberlain, then that's fine too.

In Raymond Chandler's 1939 novel The Big Sleep, after all, the chauffeur is killed, and no one--including Chandler himself--knows who did it. That ambiguity was preserved in the 1946 film version written by no less greats than William Faulkner, Leigh Brackett, and Jules Furthman, and starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. Does anyone really care? Both the book and the movie are classics, and rightfully so. (Well, I haven't actually read the book.) (ETA: karabair gives a few more details here.) The Da Vinci Code is an international bestselling phenomenon, and there's no way that a reader could keep up with the hero, who uses obscure and almost-true history to concoct an implausible chain of reasoning. And I'm excited to see Tom Hanks, Audrey Tautou, and Ian McKellan acting it out--although with a cast like that, how could I not?

And this brings me to Veronica Mars. Despite it being so often mentioned in the same breath as Buffy, I haven't seen it--or hadn't, until about three weeks ago, when I saw the beginning of an episode. I have to admit that I wasn't thrilled by what I saw; it seemed very soap opera-ish and I already knew there wouldn't be any vampires or witches, so what's the point? But then I watched the end of an episode two weeks ago, and it was all about her solving a mystery, and I was beginning to feel the love. And then it dawned to me: a detective is a sort of ubermensch, using hir intellect to take control of the world. And as such, a detective novel is as much an expression of the will-to-power or adolescent fantasy as a show about a teenage girl chosen to slay the vampires, isn't it? (I've done a JSTOR search and it seems this has been undertheorized, at least in article form, which really surprises me.) So if I do get into VM, I suppose it'll fit perfectly into my supergenius-teenaged-girl-who-takes-over-the-world kink.

I hope to do some longer and more sustained meta later, particularly a craft-of-writing on how we structure fic and how only a subset of fics are strictly speaking "stories," but as my life is going at the moment that "later" promises to be very long from now.

Okay, back to watching the Lindsay Lohan Parent Trap on ABC Family. I really love this film, but a Londoner likes to eat her Oreos with peanut butter? WTF?

Where is the Annie/Hallie twincest?

Comments

[musesfool.livejournal.com]

Hmm... I figured out the central mystery of The Da Vinci Code fairly early on, and thought it wasn't particularly well done.

I think a mediocre detective novel can be enjoyed as a puzzle and nothing more - once the puzzle is solved, the book itself becomes obsolete and uninteresting. A good detective novel, otoh, is a good story, and can therefore be reread and new things will make themselves known upon the rereading, not just the clues one may have missed before, but subtle character interactions that may or may not be clues, but which lend the story depth and texture. And also, I find with detective series - like Nero Wolfe or Amelia Peabody - after a while, the mysteries become secondary to loving the characters and wanting to visit with them.

I do think Rowling sees herself as writing a mystery - hence her quoting of Dorothy Sayers in interviews - and so she sees as less important things that make a fandom excited. Of course, Rowling also stacks the deck against the reader figuring things out because of the way the story is serialized. And also the way she pokes fandom and watches it jump.

I don't think I have anything useful to add, so I'll just shut up now.

[alixtii.livejournal.com]

Oh, I make no claim that The Da Vinci Code is great literature, just the opposite. It has no themes or significance to make me care about the book once I've put it down, so ultimately it's nothing more than an entertaining diversion--and I expect more than that from fanfic. His prose style is clunky, and as a mystery it is constructed with minimal competence. And for me, my biggest problem is that I read Angels & Demons first, and once a man takes on the Illuminati everything else becomes old hat.

My point is that despite these things, the American public has fallen in love with the book. Sure there are better-written mysteries more deserving of the public's praise, but The Da Vinci Code does have what a mystery needs to have--that connection to the adolescent fantasy in the Mary Sueism of its detective. (We could say similar things about Harry Potter.)

As someone who has only read SS/PS and watched the movies, I won't talk about Rowling's techniques as a writer, but I do think that talking about mysteries helps us to remember the different ways that different people approach texts, and to better make sense of what is happening in that and other fandoms.

Thanks for your thoughts!