Abstract
After a brief return to the origins of crime fiction, distinguishing the mystery tale from the detective story, this chapter addresses the different theories that have sought to account for alternatives to the traditional whodunit grouped under the banner of metaphysical detective fiction. It further justifies the terminological clarification which gives this book its title by acknowledging that the metacognitive dimension of such texts lies, in different but related ways, in their ability to question and subvert the characters’ motivations and their aspirations to closure.
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Notes
- 1.
The “mystery story” is a genre more concerned with “the deep mystery of sin” (Hawthorne 1974, 87) than with the resolution of a crime. It reflects a profound skepticism, what Melville called “the power of blackness,” that is “a crisis of faith and an agony of doubt” which cannot end (Levin 1958, 54).
- 2.
The first “Detective Police Department” was established in London in 1842.
- 3.
This is already clear in “The Blue Cross” in which Valentin, the French detective, is amazed by Father Brown’s intuitive method and his final claim to the villain Flambeau: “Lord bless you, we have to know twenty such things when we work among the criminal classes!” (Chesterton 1948, 22).
- 4.
Even if he usually solves and stays out of the case at hand, Holmes can also be defeated, as he acknowledges in “The Five Orange Pips”: “I have been beaten four times – three times by men, and once by a woman ” (Doyle 1986, 333). Interestingly, he becomes personally involved in the same story when his client, John Openshaw, is murdered, hurting the detective’s pride and leaving him with the desire to take revenge, which he is equally unable to achieve.
- 5.
In Genres in Discourse, Tzvetan Todorov makes an interesting comparison between the quest for the Holy Grail and detective fiction:
Throughout the narrative the reader has to wonder about the meaning of the Grail. The principal narrative is a narrative of knowledge; ideally, it would never end.
The search for knowledge also dominates another type of narrative that we might hesitate to compare to the quest for the Holy Grail: the mystery, or detective story. We know such narratives are constituted by the problematic relation of two stories: the story of the crime, which is missing, and the story of the investigation, which is present, and whose only justification is to acquaint us with the other story. Some element of that first story is indeed made available from the beginning: a crime is committed almost before our eyes; but we have been unable to determine its real agents or motives. The investigation consists in returning over and over to events, verifying and correcting the smallest details, until the truth about the initial story finally comes out; this is a story of learning. But unlike the Grail story, what characterizes knowledge in detective fiction is that it has only two possible values, true or false. In a detective story, either we know who committed the murder or we do not, whereas the quest for meaning in the Grail story has an infinite number of intermediate degrees, and even in the end the quest’s outcome is not certain. (1990, 47)
Like the Grail narrative, the metacognitive mystery tale also builds upon and plays with a number of “intermediate,” transitional, and provisional degrees of meaningful resolution designed to captivate the reader and ultimately frustrate his or her work of interpretation.
- 6.
It is worth mentioning that McHale does not make a distinction between different forms of detective fiction.
- 7.
Messac also pointed out the overwhelming feeling experienced by the detective in the expanding city which represents a unique scenery for his investigations: “le sentiment de complexité mêlé d’étonnement que procure le spectacle des foules grouillantes des grandes villes” (1929, 11). Of course, this recalls Baudelaire ’s own words in his preface to Le Spleen de Paris in which he writes that “[c]’est surtout de la fréquentation des villes énormes, c’est du croisement de leurs innombrables rapports que naît cet idéal obsédant” (1975, 276).
- 8.
Dickens offers an interesting counterexample to the figure of the drunk and inspired flâneur in a short story titled “The Drunkard’s Death.” Indeed, Dickens ’s eponymous drunkard is a widower whose addiction led to his wife’s death and hate of his children. The story also introduces two of the first “undercover” detectives investigating to arrest the drunkard’s son. They discover his hideout after buying drinks for the hopeless father, who then becomes a total outcast, condemned to roam through the streets of London in search of money to pay for his liquor. With him, no revelation. Although he is tired to death of his “endless, weary, wandering to and fro,” he cannot resign himself to die. His grotesque corpse is finally recovered one week later “[u]nrecognized and unpitied” (Dickens 1996, 54–55) in the River Thames. The story testifies another social reality in which there seems to be no escape from the urban life of boredom and despair despised by Baudelaire .
- 9.
Dioramas are in fact literary panoramas which provide information about a city , especially Paris. The genre of the feuilleton and the “physiologies” are also very popular at the time and often feature a flâneur as a protagonist, in Solnit’s words: “Flâneurs were a recurrent subject of the feuilletons – the serialized novels in the newly popularized newspapers – and the physiologies, those popular publications that purported to make strangers familiar but instead underscore their strangeness by classifying them as species one could identify on sight” (2000, 199). For more information about popular urban literature in mid-nineteenth-century Paris, see Gluck ’s essay (2003).
- 10.
It might also be possible to argue that this idea of the street as home can partially explain the possible development of the flâneur into an armchair detective, becoming a “mental traveller” (Coverley 2010, 65) capable of interpreting the “modern” city .
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Dechêne, A. (2018). From the Metaphysical Detective Story to the Metacognitive Mystery Tale. In: Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge. Crime Files. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94469-2_2
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