In Postmodernist Fiction, Brian McHale calls detective fiction “the epistemological genre par excellence” (2001, 9). The genre’s concern with the transmission, reliability, and the objects of knowledge, McHale argues, is defining for what he calls the epistemological dominant detective fiction shares with most modernist texts (ibid.). Each chapter of this book has explored aspects of generating, delimiting, manipulating, verifying, and organizing knowledge as it is transmitted between text and reader and/or utilized by detective figures. I have shown how inextricably these epistemological concerns are linked to the forms—in particular, the form of the list—that transport them.

Even within the confines of the genre of detective fiction, however, knowledge is by no means a unified category; between story worlds, and across changing historical and ideological backgrounds, conceptions of knowledge shift and adapt to both the role of the reader and the function of the detective in the respective texts. In some texts, such as the fiction of Agatha Christie, detection relies on knowledge that entirely depends on clues situated in the story world, whereas Austin Freeman’s Thorndyke novels, for example, frequently reference areas of expert knowledge that exist as professional fields outside the text to validate the detective’s conclusions. In yet another way, Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories draw on bodies of knowledge that are entirely imaginary and are neither anchored in the real world nor displayed as an element of the story world accessible to readers. The final section of this book aims to highlight how the various conceptions of knowledge discussed in the previous chapters are inseparable from the roles these novels assign to their readers and from the lists and list-like devices that are crucial to defining those roles.

Perhaps the most intuitive and probably the most widely spread expectation of the kind of knowledge relations readers will encounter in a work of detective fiction arose during the Golden Age in the first half of the twentieth century: the idea that all clues necessary to solve the mystery must be featured in the text, and that, therefore, solving the puzzle the text presents is a matter of sharp observation and logical combination. Golden Age fiction requires no specialized knowledge of either its detectives or readers, and the combinations necessary to solve a case are generally based on common sense. Moreover, the texts present readers (and detectives) with puzzles that can be solved by contemplation and communication and do not require detectives to display any physical prowess. In this setup, readers have the chance to match the detective. The facts that most frequently further the investigations of a Hercule Poirot or a Miss Marple are from the domestic realm and thus accessible to a wide range of readers (see Knight 1980, 109).Footnote 1 In A Murder Is Announced, for example, it becomes important that a door’s hinges have recently been oiled, and The Murder of Roger Ackroyd features a piece of furniture that has been moved as an important clue.

Basing the knowledge an investigator needs to succeed on common experience and clues featured in the text is an ideal condition upon which the roles of reader and detective can become merged with one another. It is the detective’s task to read clues rather than conduct forensic experiments or draw on experience gained in past investigations, and the Golden Age’s promise of fair play—of a plausible story that is based on clues accessible to the general reader—invites readers to take on the role of detectives themselves and try their hand at reading the patterns provided by the text to identify the solution of the mystery.

Both the novels of Agatha Christie discussed in chapter four and the Murder Dossiers of Dennis Wheatley and J.G. Links discussed in chapter three invite their readers to become active as investigators and promise them a fair chance of success. Christie’s novels do so implicitly through their authors’ membership in the Detection Club (founded in 1928): all members of the club had to swear to observe the rules of fair play in the “Detection Club Oath,” which served as a signpost for the club’s high professional standards (see Haycraft 1976, 197). In contrast, Wheatley and Links directly promise their readers in the author’s note preceding Murder off Miami that the material readers find in the dossier is presented “without any extraneous or misleading matter,” and they even point out the passage in the dossier where readers will have “all the available evidence […] to hand” (n.p.) that is necessary to solve the case.

While both Wheatley and Christie engage their readers in the act of detection, they do so in rather different ways. Murder off Miami is designed to bear the greatest possible resemblance to a real-world police file and promises a realistic detection experience to the reader. The Murder Dossiers even go as far as insinuating that the reader will actually be responsible for the outcome of the investigation and for apprehending the suspect. The author’s note to Murder off Miami, for instance, directly asks the reader to decide “who you will arrest” for the murder (n.p., emphasis in original). Subsequent dossiers cut back on the verisimilitude aspect and instead rely on their game-like nature to keep readers engaged. For this degree of involvement, basing the knowledge required to solve the mysteries in the material itself is of course vital. The lists that organize the various pieces of evidence are essential to facilitate the reader’s easy access to the information needed for their investigation because they either summarize information or serve as a navigational tool that allows the reader to easily locate pieces of information in different parts of the dossier.

Christie’s novels, on the other hand, rely on their readers’ expectations to find the clues they need concealed in the text, and the anticipation of these clues becomes the basis for misdirecting the reader’s attention in order to manipulate the conclusions readers draw. Rather than framing her stories in terms of verisimilitude and a realistic experience, Christie structures her novels in a way that exploits (potential) ambiguities to create suspense. Misleading clues and red herrings are therefore something readers would expect in Christie’s fiction, and trying to separate true clues from false leads becomes as much part of the reader’s detective activity as piecing together the correct solution to the mystery.Footnote 2 Christie’s lists reflect this ambiguity; they can supply the reader with useful summaries of evidence gleaned by the detective or provided by the narrator, but they may also misdirect the reader’s attention and distract from hints hidden elsewhere in the text.

Both Christie and Wheatley cast their readers as investigators who are at least potentially able to solve the problem the texts pose with nothing but the clues featured in the texts. The widely spread belief that Golden Age fiction allows its readers to take on the role of detective goes hand in hand with an “illusion of effective self-help and self-sufficiency” (Knight 1980, 110)—values which have great appeal to “an audience deeply imbued with [the] anxious individualism” that Knight sees as distinctive for Christie’s largely bourgeois readership at the time her early novels were published (ibid., 127). The individual’s power to restore order to a world that has been tipped out of balance is a strong ideological undercurrent that runs through detective fiction of the Golden Age, and the intratextual knowledge Christie’s novels are steeped in suggests that restoring order in this way lies not only within the power of the detective but also within that of the reader.

Lists feature prominently as an organizing and tracking device in all kinds of self-help literature even today, and it is no coincidence that the list’s affordances of tracking and organizing are the ones that feature most prominently in Golden Age detective fiction. Agatha Christie repeatedly employs lists as a device to allow the reader to track her detectives’ thoughts step by step, for example, in the list of Poirot’s ten questions in Murder on the Orient Express or in the list Miss Marple leaves behind before she disappears in A Murder Is Announced. Christie’s detectives, furthermore, make lists to efficiently organize information and to thus have available at one glance a great number of details pertaining to their investigations. This practice can, for example, be observed in the list Poirot makes of the passengers’ belongings in Death in the Clouds or in the list of stolen items he uses in Hickory Dickory Dock. Reordering those details correctly, that is, finding the organizing principle that is able to do so—or so the stories promise—will result in restoring order to the world that has been disturbed by the murder.Footnote 3

Wheatley’s Herewith the Clues also leaves no doubt about how its readers are expected to track and organize information with the help of the list-based dossier format. The score sheet the volume contains is a preorganized grid that allows readers to track the progress of their investigation—the investigation visibly progresses with each slot filled in—and to organize the evidence they examine according to which suspect can be associated with it. The entire dossier is organized into distinct sections that list different types of evidence and that are meant to serve as a finding aid for readers. The dossier format foregrounds the list’s capability to track and organize information, and thus already co-defines the role readers are assigned in the crime dossiers. “[T]he material form of an expression,” as Lisa Gitelman argues, hence tends to become conflated “with its linguistic meanings” (2014, 3). Murder off Miami is based on the same list-mechanisms and employs its list-affine structure to create verisimilitude by organizing its material in a way that emulates a real-world police file. This structure allows readers to chronologically track the information gathered by detective officer Kettering. Kettering’s lists and summaries of times accounted for, alibis, personal profiles, belongings, and pieces of evidence enable readers to track the progress of his investigation in a similar way that Christie’s lists provide readers with access to her detective’s thoughts. To successfully identify the murderer, readers have to re-frame Kettering’s collected information in the same manner that Christie’s detectives reorganize the lists of facts they collect in order to solve the puzzle.

The lists in Adams’s dossier novel The Notting Hill Mystery also have a strong disposition toward highlighting their tracking and ordering capacities, but a closer look at the different kinds of listing devices the novel employs reveals that it adopts a two-pronged strategy with regard to the knowledge it draws on. Adam’s dossier relies on intratextual clues that the reader has access to for making its case against Baron R., but it also embeds sources of expert literature that exist outside the story world in order to support Henderson’s claims to exactitude and meticulous documentation. This in-between position can be connected to the double role assigned to the reader in this text. In the position of investigating officer that the reader shares with Henderson, they are required to examine the textual clues they are presented with in Henderson’s collected document to carefully construct their case against Baron R. In this role, readers have to draw their conclusions based on pieces of information scattered through the collected documents that need to be meticulously compared and cross-referenced to reveal the pattern they conceal. Henderson’s footnotes and table of contents endow readers with listing tools to help accomplish this task, and exactitude or the ability to pay attention to details, rather than command over any kind of expert knowledge, is the key to succeed in this.

In the position of addressee and jury that the reader also shares, however, their task is to act as a judge on the reliability of the information Henderson collects in his dossier. In this role, the reader is to verify that Henderson’s detective work is sound. Readers need to weigh the reliability of Henderson’s meticulous work, which points to the Baron’s guilt and the existence of mesmerism, against the conviction that such preternatural mesmeric powers cannot exist. Positing the reader as the addressee of Henderson’s dossier blurs the boundaries between story world and real world. The references to documentation practices and expert knowledge that exists in the real world—the second body of knowledge that The Notting Hill Mystery draws on—further strengthen this fuzziness. The dossier, for example, includes a (correct) reference to a specific page of Alfred Swaine Taylor’s On Poisons, in Relation to Medical Jurisprudence that serves as proof for the varying effects that antimony poisoning can have on a person’s constitution and thus provides a plausible explanation for the symptoms one of the characters is experiencing. A meticulous reader is given the opportunity to verify this source and can thus fact-check some of Henderson’s collected statements. References of this kind serve as a guarantor for the narrator’s reliability and create the bias that other pieces of information that readers cannot verify outside the story world will nonetheless be accepted as reliable.

As a typical listing technique, referencing puts on display material that serves as a guarantor for knowledge of (or at least familiarity with) the sources being referenced. Lisa Gitelman calls this the “know-show function” and makes a case for visibility as a central aspect upon which (at least implied) reliability hinges (2014, 1). Referencing as a means to display knowledge employs a mechanics of “implied self-evidence that is intrinsically rhetorical” and based on a document’s visible properties (ibid., 2); visibility, hence, becomes associated with truth. To unfold their potential as “epistemic objects” (ibid., 1) documents need to be displayed. The Notting Hill Mystery draws on this rhetoric of visibility and credibility to present extratextual expert knowledge as support for information that is situated within the story world. The dossier depicts two differently conditioned bodies of knowledge as provided by the same source—Henderson—and thus imbues the one that is constructed inside the story world with the verifiable reliability of the other.

When detective fiction features extratextual knowledge, this knowledge can generally be situated within the realm of science and professions associated with forensic investigations. Other areas of knowledge such as history or politics that may play a bigger role in the life of the average reader are rarely drawn upon in these stories. What I call extratextual knowledge thus usually comprises the professional knowledge of experts in a designated scientific field. Richard Austin Freeman’s Thorndyke novels make the prominent display of such expert knowledge their unique selling point, and their prefaces and paratexts advertise the accurate depiction of scientific disciplines and forensic methods in the texts. The solutions Thorndyke proposes for his cases tend to be corroborated with an abundance of professional knowledge from a variety of scientific disciplines, and the texts present Thorndyke as a knowledgeable expert in all of them.

The inclusion of such a broad range of scientific disciplines paired with the exceptional and specific details Thorndyke draws on for his solutions has a significant impact on the role of the reader in these texts. Unlike the novels of Agatha Christie, Dennis Wheatley, and Adams’s The Notting Hill Mystery, the reader of a Thorndyke novel is not supposed to have any chance at figuring out the solution. With regard to the narrative situation, the reader usually shares the position of Thorndyke’s assistant, who is considerably less knowledgeable than Thorndyke himself and frequently admires the detective’s genius. Thorndyke’s assistant implicitly invites the reader to share his admiration for both Thorndyke as a personality and the power of science as a tool for understanding, for example, when he describes the chemical procedure by which Thorndyke is able to determine a victim’s identity from nothing but cremated remains in chapter 21 of A Silent Witness. To enhance the effect of such impressive feats of detection, Thorndyke’s explanations occasionally contain pieces of information that have not been previously mentioned in the text. Instead of causing discontent and raising concerns about clues that have been concealed unfairly—as would certainly be the case if a Christie novel produced a clue in this way—this narrative technique further supports the use of extratextual knowledge (which most readers have no access to anyways) as a way to corroborate Thorndyke’s status as an exceptional genius. Instead of inviting readers to become active as a detective and participate in finding a solution for the proposed case, Freeman’s novels base their appeal on the awe and wonder that the explanatory power of science and reason can exert. Thorndyke as a character stands as the personification of those powers and thus incorporates the idea that (scientific) knowledge, or a person’s expertise therein, is a way of restoring order to a chaotic world and of controlling circumstances that initially seem to elude our influence.

Thorndyke’s deliberations at times take on a didactic quality the aim of which seems to be to both educate the reader about proper scientific procedures or dismantle common misconceptions and to lend credibility to Thorndyke’s method.Footnote 4 Similar to the extratextual references in The Notting Hill Mystery, the extratextual knowledge Thorndyke draws on functions to bolster the validity of his investigative method in general, even in a case in which this knowledge is based on speculation and creative imagination rather than scientific procedures, as I have argued in my excursus about the Thorndyke novels.

Thorndyke’s displays of scientific proficiency tend to occur toward the end of the novels, but the detective establishes his status as an expert much earlier in the texts through his use of language and particularly through the way in which he uses lists. The form of the list is closely entwined with a great number of scientific practices and is commonly regarded as an efficient ordering tool for providing concise and relevant information. Lists afford objectivity and mastery, and those two affordances take center stage when the Thorndyke novels incorporate extratextual expert knowledge in their representation of Thorndyke and his detective work. When Thorndyke interprets evidence, his deliberations often take the form of the list. Freeman’s novels avail themselves of the aura of objectivity that is associated with the list form to endow Thorndyke’s statements with similar claims to objectivity. Thorndyke’s status as an expert that is frequently brought up in the texts and his abundant use of the list form to conjure up a sense of objectivity and control that is associated with scientific discourse mutually support one another.

Thorndyke’s use of lists demonstrates his mastery over the subjects he talks about. The structured form of enumerations comes with the implicit suggestion that the creator of such a list wields control over the content being enumerated (see Mainberger 2003, 167; see also Stäheli 2016, 23). Behind this expectation stands the idea that breaking something down into its constituent parts and representing it in a brief and concise way is only possible if the list-maker is able to intellectually pervade the material to be presented. Freeman’s novels thus implicitly validate the content of Thorndyke’s statements through the list form, in which they are conveyed. Since readers have no insight into how Thorndyke compiles his lists, they are unlikely to question the list’s authority.

Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories also present their detective as an expert and as a genius personality, but in conceptualizing the knowledge that backs up this status, they take a very different approach from what a reader might encounter in a Thorndyke novel. While Freeman’s novels take great pains to communicate to their readers that the science Thorndyke uses to back up his claims is sound and represented exactly as it works in real life, Holmes lays claims to expertise in various subjects (such as Chinese tattoo art or types of tobacco ash) that are entirely without a referent outside the texts. Holmes’s expertise furthermore differs from the intratextual clues that the novels of Christie and Wheatley make available to their readers and detectives. What Holmes calls his deductions is based on a body of knowledge that is referenced in the stories but neither exists in the real world nor is described in detail in the text. Consequently, as Ben Parker argues in his essay “The Method Effect: Empiricism and Form in Sherlock Holmes,” “[t]here simply is no ‘real’ to the method that the Sherlock Holmes stories could be taken to be applying or failing to apply” (2016, 453). The body of knowledge Holmes’s expertise is based on may thus appear to be extratextual and founded in real-world science, but it is in fact entirely undefined; it is part of the fictional world only by implication, but readers have no access to it, and its specific dimensions remain vague.

It is the idea of a method and of excessive knowledge behind Holmes’s deductions rather than an actual method and concrete body of knowledge that Doyle’s stories hinge on. This puts the reader in an interesting position: Holmes’s repeated explanations about the seemingly sound and replicable method behind his genius suggest that readers should be able to arrive at the same conclusions as Holmes does. The ethereal quality of the knowledge that Holmes draws on and the way in which the detective presents his conclusions as the only possible interpretation of a given situation (even though there may be equally plausible alternatives), however, make it impossible for readers to emulate Holmes’s inferences. The intended role of the reader thus appears to be similar to that of John Watson, whose perspective the reader shares in most stories: they are supposed to admire the brilliance of Holmes’s feats of deduction and to consider his conclusions as reproducible without ever quite being able to reproduce them.

This reader model is more appealing than it might initially appear, at least in the context of the late nineteenth century, when the Holmes stories were first published. Sherlock Holmes is a projection surface for the hopes his contemporaries placed in science as the key to explaining and hence understanding the rapidly changing world around them. More than a 100 years later, the Sherlock Holmes character featured in the BBC show Sherlock takes on quite a similar role. While Sherlock cuts back on the notion prominent in Doyle’s stories that there is only one possible explanation for any set of circumstances,Footnote 5 the show’s protagonist basically adopts the same heroic role of the exceptional genius who is able to see (through) the structures behind seemingly inexplicable circumstances and to point out patterns in a world that seems impossibly complex to others. The show even replaces the original Sherlock Holmes’s ethereal body of vague knowledge with an equally mysterious and unknowably vast contemporary source of information: the Internet.Footnote 6 Sherlock casts its protagonist’s genius in terms of his ability to navigate great masses of information efficiently and his command over rapidly evolving technology, and thus mirrors the way in which Doyle’s texts make the powers of deduction Holmes commands appear imitable and accessible.

The way in which Doyle’s stories and the BBC show employ lists and listing techniques greatly contributes to achieving the aforementioned effect. Listing functions associated with paper technologies, such as selecting, sorting, and summarizing (see Blair 2010, 3), enable Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes to evoke the idea of knowledge being called on through mere allusions to sources that remain ever vague and unverifiable. Moreover, the frequent referencing of printed reference volumes in Doyle and of the Internet as an unceasing source of information in Sherlock makes these non-verifiable sources appear as plausible explanations for the information the detective produces out of thin air. The paper technologies and listing techniques that both versions of Sherlock Holmes draw on are so central to the transmission of knowledge in real-world contexts that their appearance alone is enough to legitimize whatever stands behind them. Listing techniques thus make it possible to replace actual references, the function of which is to make sources verifiable, with the mere mechanics of referencing.

The omission of actual referents works so well because referencing devices and listing techniques make visible (and by implication accessible) in compressed form the material they refer to. The act of documentation, of writing something down and turning it into a file that can be referenced, has an authenticating effect (see Vismann 2000, 11) that is based on its materiality and, more specifically, on its visibility. Concrete descriptions of the reference volumes Holmes uses, such as the mention of the red cover of a volume (see “Bachelor”, 217) or of his index as a material object that Holmes handles, establish them—and by implication their content—as palpable, unchanging entities that form part of the story world. Such descriptions distract from the fact that the reference works thus mentioned serve to back up ever-changing needs of the individual stories. The impression of infinity that lists can evoke (see Eco 2009, 363–369) and the idea of comprehensive knowledge that the mentioning of encyclopedias conjures up smooth over such omissions, and the technique of listing pieces of knowledge comes to metonymically stand in for the knowledge itself. In Sherlock, both the protagonist’s ever-present smartphone that functions as a visible representation of the Internet Sherlock so frequently uses as a source of information and the screen overlays that make the detective’s thoughts visible to the audience combine to achieve the same effect.

Visibility and comprehensiveness are the two affordances of the list most central to the presentation of knowledge in both Sherlock Holmes story worlds examined in chapter six. The reference works in Doyle’s stories serve as proof for the comprehensive scope of Holmes’s knowledge, and the conciseness and usefulness of his self-compiled index testify to his depth of understanding of the material the index comprises. Visualization is also the key to presenting Sherlock’s knowledge in the BBC show. This becomes especially evident in the show’s frequent incorporation of maps as visualization strategies for cognitive processes. Maps and indices share many affordances (see Mainberger 2003, 137), such as those of visualization and comprehensiveness, and they take on almost exchangeable functions in Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and BBC’s Sherlock. The way in which Sherlock represents the memories in its protagonist’s mind palace as a navigable field of searchable data, for example, aspires to the same kind of palpability that Doyle’s stories try to award Holmes’s case index. Lists and maps can both be employed as visualization techniques that draw their persuasive power from rendering the data they convey as immutable and mobile at the same time (see Latour 1990, 26). Both Doyle’s stories and the BBC show rely on the affordances of visibility and comprehensiveness to present the bodies of knowledge their detectives resort to as substantial and clearly contoured, when in fact, they do not exist in any delimitable shape.

Since I started this book with a list, it seems fitting to conclude it with a table. The table on the following page displays my findings about the affordances and functions that lists take within the genre of detective fiction and highlights the respective roles of readers and detectives in connection to the various conceptions of knowledge the texts in my corpus operate with. As has been argued in this book, displaying information in the form of lists and tables necessitates a degree of compression that makes only the most salient points visible and is meant to summarize trends rather than represent the more subtle nuances of meaning. The following table is thus meant to be an overview over the key points argued in this book.

 

Dossier novels

Christie novels

Dr. Thorndyke

Sherlock Holmes

List affordances

Tracking; organizing

Tracking; organizing; concealing

Objectivity; mastery

Visibility; comprehensiveness

Function of the list(s)

Summary; navigational tool; provide easy access to information

Directing the reader’s attention; structuring tool for the detective

Generate the impression of scientificity

Referencing tool; placeholder for knowledge that is not displayed; “know-show function”

Role of the reader

Responsible for solving the case; reframe information

Compete with fictional detective to find the solution

Be educated about scientific methods; marvel at powers of science

Attempt but fail to emulate Holmes; admire Holmes’s genius

Role of the detective

Arbiter; judge of suspect’s guilt

Reader of clues

Representative of a professional field

Brilliant thinker; role model

Conception of knowledge

Intratextual; requires active manipulation of the material

Intratextual; clues often from the domestic realm

Extratextual; expert knowledge, often inaccessible to readers

Undefined or imaginary; only referenced, idea of knowledge is more important than actual knowledge details

My corpus of texts shows not so much a diachronic development of the use of lists in detective fiction as it illustrates various constellations of engagement and knowledge transmission that lists can facilitate between texts and readers. These constellations and the functions that lists take in these texts are not unique to the contexts in which they have been discussed here but constitute patterns that resurface in new contexts such as videogames. An approach such as the one taken in this book that focuses on narrative and literary forms within a particular genre can identify such patterns of meaning-making even when other factors (such as a change of medium) tend to obscure them.

As the abundance of listing techniques employed by the BBC series Sherlock already shows, lists in detective fiction are a restricted neither to the temporal domains of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries nor to printed media. The list-based interactive elements of storytelling that I have discussed in the context of dossier novels, for example, resurface in many videogames with a focus on investigative elements. Such games frequently use inventory structures to allow players to manage clues. The game Sherlock Holmes: Crimes and Punishments (2014) even employs screen overlays to display deductions that resemble those used in Sherlock. The game also features a “deduction space” where players can reorder clues and evidence displayed as unordered list in order to make deductions and unlock new tasks. An examination of list-based structures in (investigative) videogames could carry my findings further and tie them to current research on narrativity and interactivity in games.

As a cognitive tool, lists have the capacity to structure thought both within and outside the context of literary representation, and the form has been used to do so since antiquity. The detective fiction genre’s concern with order makes it an ideal backdrop against which the affordances of this form can be examined. Even if different subgenres stress different affordances of the list form, the form itself appears timeless as a means for creating and representing patterns of thought both within and beyond the confines of the detective fiction genre.