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By Root 5552 0

been responsible for committing some terrible crime. A great deal of storytelling is concerned in one way or another with the committing of crimes. Although we usually reserve the title of `murder story for mysteries or `whodunnits, much of the great literature of the world is made up of stories in which murders are committed: from the Oresteia to jack and the Beanstalk, from Aladdin to the tragedies of Shakespeare and the four major novels of Dostoyevsky. But rarely in such stories is there any doubt about who has committed the murder. What they are concerned with is the deeper moral circumstances and consequences of the crime for those involved. Is the killing justified? Will the criminal face up to his guilt? Will he have to pay the price with his own death? Will he go through a change of heart and a period of intense suffering and repentance, so that he can eventually be released?

The difference between these sorts of story and the `whodunnit' is that the latter is not concerned with such complex issues. It derives its entire appeal from the simple trick of initially hiding the identity of the culprit and then at the end revealing it. We are not really concerned with the finer points of morality involved, or with the other characters acting out the story. They are primarily there just to present us with the basic materials for yet another demonstration of the hero-detective's extraordinary mental powers. And the real point about this figure with whom we identify as the focus of our attention, is that the person who has committed the crime is always someone other than himself. In following the story, we can invariably rest in the comfortable certainty that it will be someone other than the person we are identifying with on whom the guilt will eventually be pinned.

So much do we take this for granted, since it is the whole point of the formula which has given such pleasure to readers since the rise of the modern detective story, that we may see nothing odd about it.

But let us then consider the greatest `whodunnit' in all literature: a story shaped round the efforts of its central figure to discover who has committed a crime so terrible that it is nothing less than the murder of a king. When we meet the hero, King Oedipus, a fearful curse has fallen on his country, and he is told that it will not be lifted until he has discovered the identity of the man who murdered his predecessor, King Laius. Oedipus sets out, as detective, to unravel this mystery, which of course is only a mystery to him, not to us. He uncovers clue after clue until he is finally brought up against the inexorable realisation that the king's murderer was none other than himself; and, what makes it worse, that the man he killed was none other than his own father.

It is this which places Sophocles's Oedipus Tyrannos (which we shall analyse fully in the next chapter) on an infinitely more serious level than any of the other types of `whodunnit' we have been considering. Instead of just sitting vicarously on the sidelines, cosily identifying with some central figure - Sherlock Holmes, Peter Wimsey, Hercule Poirot - who again and again manages to pin the blame for a crime on someone else, as if by some mechanical formula, we are thrust up against the spectacle of a man going through one of the most profound and uncomfortable experiences any human being can know: having to face up at last to the dark side of his own nature and to recognise his own, irrevocable guilt.

Herein lies the central clue as to why we must consider the modern detective story, and the plot of the Mystery, as in a different category from any other type of story we have looked at in this book. Herein also we may find the reason why even the most devoted readers of detective thrillers often find them ultimately unsatisfying, with a curious sense of flatness each time one of their stories finally reaches its conclusion.

When in 1944 Edmund Wilson famously wrote three critical articles about the passion for detective stories in The New Yorker, he was startled by the virulence of the