Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

From Roman Policier to Roman-Police: Wilkie Collins's "The Moonstone"

1980; Duke University Press; Volume: 13; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.2307/1345307

1945-8509

Derek Miller,

Crime and Detective Fiction Studies

The classical detective story disposes of an interestingly paradoxical economy, at once parsimonious and squandering. On one hand, the form is based on the hypothesis that everything might count: every character might be the culprit, and every action or speech might be belying its apparent banality or literalism by making surreptitious reference to an incriminating Truth. From the layout of the country house (frequently given in all the exactitude of a diagram) to the cigar ash found on the floor at the scene of the crime, no detail can be dismissed a priori. Yet if the criterion of total relevance is continually invoked by the text, it turns out to have a highly restricted applicability in the end. At the moment of truth, the text winnows grain from chaff, separating the relevant signifiers from the much larger number of irrelevant ones, which are now revealed to be as banal and trivial as we originally suspected they might not be. That quarrel overheard in the night, for example, between Mr. and Mrs. Smith is shown for an ordinary marital row. That cigar ash-say, pointing unambiguously to Colonel Asquith's brand-is proven to have been deposited on the floor before the crime took place. Of the elaborate house-plan, only this door or that window enters into the solution, and of the exhaustive description of the scene of the crime, only a few items count while the rest relapse into insignificance. It is hardly an accident that most readers of detective fiction can afterwards remember whodunit? but have totally forgotten the false clues and suspects that temporarily obscured his identity. For the detective's final summation offers not a maximal integration of parts into whole, but a minimal one: what is totalized is just-and no more than-what is needed to solve the crime. Everything and everybody else is returned to a blandly mute positivity. This observation, of course, is meant to shift the emphasis from where it normally falls in discussions of the detective story: away from the mystery that it solves towards a recognition of the hypothetical significances that it finally dissolves. Though the detective story postulates a world in which everything might have a meaningful bearing on the solution of the crime, it concludes with an extensive repudiation of meanings that simply drop out. 1 It is often argued that the detective story seeks to totalize its signifiers in a complete and allencompassing order. On the contrary, it is concerned to restrict and localize the