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Introduction to Focus: Detective Fiction

2021; University of Nebraska Press; Volume: 42; Issue: 5 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/abr.2021.0071

2153-4578

David Watson,

Digital Games and Media

Introduction to Focus: Detective Fiction David Watson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution David Watson, Focus Editor As a child of television, the detective has been a constant figure in my world; my first examples, to use the term “detective” a bit broadly, were Maxwell Smart and Joe Friday from Get Smart and Dragnet, thanks to reruns that aired on Nick at Night during the late 1980s. My first intertextual allusion was noticing, a few years later, that Inspector Gadget sounded and acted an awful lot like Agent Smart and that Penny, like Agent 99, was the reason behind Gadget’s madness. Later, I would realize this was also my first deconstructive lesson about rationality and gender relations. My second intertextual discovery would be noticing the PBS segment Mathnet, part of the Square One Television program, where kids used math to solve crimes, was a parody of Dragnet. It turns out this genre has been educating me my whole life. Any quick scan of just about any streaming service or best-seller list suggests my interest in the genre is not unique. Whether true crime, prime-time procedurals, or classic detective fiction, there are facets to this narrative structure, one where a crime occurs and is later solved, that make it continuously appealing. American pragmatist Charles Sanders Pierce explains part of this appeal, suggesting that “Doubt is an uneasy and dissatisfied state from which we struggle to free ourselves and pass into the state of belief,” adding, “Doubt … stimulates us to action until it is destroyed…. The irritation of doubt causes a struggle to attain a state of belief,” which Pierce calls inquiry. When a crime is committed, the moral universe is suspended, and not until the detective has solved the case, restoring the moral order, can we, the audience, breathe a sigh of relief, our doubt resolved, the common world reestablished. This desire to restore order which structures much detective fiction mirrors the structure of our relationship with the world; when expectations are met, we barely think about the world as such, but as soon as something goes awry, when something upsets expectations, we begin a quest to explain and restore order. Namely, we become detectives, seeking to resolve our doubts. Much like the fictional detective, theories will be tested in the world; however, the fictional detective can reach closure and achieve certainty, something the world does not afford the living. In assembling a puzzle through inquiry, arriving at the truth, the detective becomes a superhero in the “post-truth world.” They achieve what we so desire; to know the truth in such a way as to end inquiry and leave doubt behind. Beginning in some ways with Poe’s story “A Man in the Crowd” and taking distinct shape in his three stories, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter,” the figure that will be forever duplicated of the rational detective in a rational world outwitting irrational people was born in C. Auguste Dupin. From Dupin to Holmes, Poirot to the modern police procedural, the world is seen as stable a fixed entity capable of being solved if one can just see rationally. This version of the rational detective has been a constant since its inception, with new incarnations occurring annually. Because the detective’s pursuit can be viewed as not simply for a criminal but for something broader: truth, justice, and order, the genre has also been a playground for writers who wanted to challenge conventional notions of rationality, morality, and the like. A classic example is Borges’s deconstruction of Poe’s detective stories, arguing that the desire for order is the appeal of the genre and that a predictable, rational world is an illusion. Existentialists like Samuel Beckett would turn the genre into a useful metaphor for the fruitless quest of finding one’s own final identity while postmodern writers like Thomas Pynchon would use the genre’s conventions to explore the role conspiracy played in the rise of a new cultural imaginary in the post-war era. Detective Fiction constantly adapts, not only to entertainment tastes but to philosophical concerns of the day. In...