Atdtda22: [42.2i] Into a heart of darkness, 610

[Paul Nightingale]

[610.14] "Having inserted a Vontz's Universal Pick, before which the door
bolt, as if having read his mind, smoothly withdrew ..."

The answer to any problem; instant access/decoding.

And so to ...

[610.37-38] "... the businesslike beam of his Apothesis Sparkless Torch
sweeping the gloom until it revealed a human form ..."

Cf. the bureaucrat Vance Aychance on 607: "We're not allowed, of course, to
visit the premises officially ... and you personally enjoying a freedom from
legal restraint we can only dream about ..."


The detective is a key modernist figure, a variant of the flaneur as
described by Benjamin. In Mystery Fiction and Modern Life, Kelly sets out
"to show that the broad, stable continuities characterizing mystery fiction
as a set of related works owe their key features to the nature of modernity
rather than to the nature of, for example, democracy or capitalism".

Observing that the detective is historian, as the historian is detective,
Kelly explains:

Reading others and reading physical clues have this much in common: both aim
at linking the visible and observable with the invisible and unobservable by
means of what amounts to a causal theory. In the case of the former,
observable features of behavior--a shift of the eyes, a quick intake of
breath--are taken as manifestations of some interior state (eg guilt or
apprehension) that is otherwise accessible only to the individual who
experiences it. Seeking to make sense of behavioral clues, the observer
construes the observable feature as the effect of the unobservable cause--in
short, as an index of the other's otherwise inaccessible interiority. 

Similarly, physical clues are the observable residue of events or processes
that occurred in the past and so cannot be observed directly. Correctly
interpreting physical clues assumes a causal connection between what remains
physically in the present and some (postulated) past activity. [...] 

In addition to skills and knowledge associated with penetrating and
unmasking deception and interpreting physical evidence, the detective, and
especially the secret agent, possesses skills, and the requisite knowledge,
to frustrate an adversary's efforts to understand him or her. These are
skills of acting and dissembling that render the detective opaque to the
other's best efforts at discovering what he or she suspects or knows or
intends to do. 

From: R Gordon Kelly, Mystery Fiction and Modern Life, University Press of
Mississippi, 1998, 1, 28-29.


Also:

In essence the detective story constitutes a mythos or fable in which crime
as a distinctive problem of bourgeois, individualistic, and quasi-democratic
societies, is handled without upsetting society's fundamental institutions
or its world-view. When he/she solves the crime, the detective reaffirms the
fundamental soundness of the social order by revealing how the crime has
resulted from the specific and understandable motives of particular
individuals; crime happens but is not fundamental or endemic to the society.
In other words, the detective reveals to us by his [sic] actions that
society, however corrupt or unjust it may seem, still contains the
intelligence and the means to define and exorcise these evils. Even in the
more pessimistic vision of some of the hard-boiled of detective stories,
when the corrupt far out-number the innocent, it is still possible for the
detective to accomplish a significant act of justice or vengeance. Of
course, it is precisely this optative and optimistic view of the world that
many postmodernist writers are questioning.

From: John G Cawelti, "Canonization, Modern Literature and the Detective
Story" in Mystery, Violence and Popular Culture, University of Wisconsin
Press, 2004, 286. Elsewhere, in "Faulkner and the Detective Story's Double
Plot", Cawelti discusses Oedipa Maas (270-271).


Cf. Durkheim's take on the normality of crime:

To make crime a social illness would be to concede that sickness is not
something accidental, but on the contrary derives in certain cases from the
fundamental constitution of the living creature.

[...]

Let us make no mistake: to classify crime among the phenomena of normal
sociology is not merely to declare that it is an inevitable though
regrettable phenomenon arising from the incorrigible wickedness of men; it
is to assert that it is a factor in public health, an integrative element in
any healthy society.

Emile Durkheim, The Rules of Sociological Method and Selected Texts on
Sociology and its Method, ed/introduced by Steven Lukes, MacMillan, 1982
[1895], 98. (I don't have access to The Normality of Crime, first published
in the mid-1890s.)