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By Root 5341 0

response he received from those who rushed to defend them. What particularly struck him was how these readers seemed to be addicted to detective fiction, as if to a drug, yet seemed to find it remarkably difficult to explain why they liked it so much. One of Wilson's central observations, in his essay `Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?', was how banal, in strictly literary terms, is the style in which most detective stories are written. The characters are just two-dimensional cardboard cutouts, manipulated round a board to serve the story's central purpose, which is to set up what is usually some wholly artificial, improbable puzzle for the detective to solve. Once this conundrum has been solved, or its answer revealed, the story and its characters are of no further interest; any more than is a crossword puzzle once the last clue has been filled in.

The point of detective stories is that they derive from that part of the human psyche, the ordering function of the mind, when this becomes split off from those feminine principles of feeling and intuitive understanding which can connect it to the reality of the living world. It then operates on the level of a fantasy or daydream. This is why such stories are so beguiling to those who, unlike Edmund Wilson, are susceptible to their charms. They create a neat little makebelieve world, hermetically sealed from reality, in which the ordering function can set up its riddles, simply by the trick of withholding the information the reader needs to solve the riddle until the author is ready to reveal it. Such is the fantasy realm into which we, the readers, can then have the pleasure of escaping. We first enjoy the frisson of seeing some peaceful, ordered little `kingdom, such as a traditional English village, a country house or an Oxford college, being upset by a dark and mysterious irruption of evil. We then enjoy the reassuring spectacle of the all-seeing detective moving inexorably, clue by clue, towards the point where the cause of this disorder can safely be pinned on some villainous figure who never really belonged to such a respectable, law-abiding world in the first place. We finally see law and order restored, much as in a story where the values of the Self have eventually triumphed. Except that here the genuine state of allresolving wholeness represented by the Self plays no part.

The drama has been conceived on that same sentimental level we have seen giving rise to other types of story, where the ego can fantasise about enjoying the rewards of the Self without having to go through the deeper processes required to achieve it. The detective figure is a particular projection of the human ego, or `super-ego, whose exhibitionistic display of rational intelligence is made morally acceptable because it is serving the wider purpose of ensuring that darkness is exposed and light is victorious. Just as James Bond's indulgence in sex and violence is sanctioned by the fact that he is defending `our side' against some wicked super-villain, so Sherlock Holmes's outrageous assumption of intellectual superiority (not to mention his indulgence in cocaine) appears entirely acceptable, because he is using it to expose evil in the name of law, order and truth. We the readers can thus share vicariously in the sight of him showing off in this way, knowing it is all in a higher, righteous cause. And what gives us even more a sense of shared superiority in identifying with the all-seeing central figure in detective stories is that he is always surrounded by those other characters, such as the dimwitted police, who expose the inferiority of their intelligence by invariably jumping to the wrong conclusions. The role of the Watson-figure in acting as a bumbling foil to the detective's brilliance is similarly to reinforce this sense of our hero's awesomely superhuman powers.

All this may seem as harmless a form of self-indulgence as completing a crossword puzzle. But so little does the unravelling of these self-referential conundrums have to do with the real world, and so much do they rely on