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the genre is relatively young, and we have access to the feedback received by the experimenting authors. That is, we know what initially caused an uproar in the audience but gradually became widely accepted and what, on the other hand, continues to constitute a problem even as generations of authors have tried their hand at circumventing it. The larger point that underlies such an investigation and that carries over to our thinking of other genres is that literary history as a whole could be better understood if we considered our cognitive predispositions as an important factor structuring the individual author's attempts to break the mold of what constitutes an acceptable and desirable literary endeavor of their own day.6

In what follows, then, I consider four features of the detective story and, in some cases, their respective changes over time. I suggest that these features acquire a new psychological and cultural significance when approached from a cognitive perspective. The first subsection of my argument, "One Liar Is Expensive, Several Liars Are Insupportable," examines the care with which any writer of fiction treats the destabilizing presence of a lying character, the proliferation of potential liars being, of course, a trademark of the detective story. The second, "There Are No Material Clues Independent from Mind-Reading," emphasizes the detective story's ultimate goal of reconstructing the state of multiple minds populating the scene of the crime. The third, "Mind-Reading Is an Equal Opportunity Endeavor," addresses the genre's practice of strategic obfuscation of selected minds. The fourth, "Alone Again, Naturally," offers a cognitive reading of the old rule according to which, in an effective whodunit, the detective should be either celibate or married.

3

METAREPRESENTATIONALITY AND SOME RECURRENT

PATTERNS OF THE DETECTIVE STORY

wo points of clarification are in order. First, in the rest of this Part III,

I use the term metarepresentation interchangeably with the term metarepresentationally framed information, meaning, in both cases, "information (or representation) stored under advisement." For example, when in one of my case studies, Maurice Leblanc's "The Red Silk Scarf," the police inspector concludes upon observing the behavior of two suspicious men in the street that they must be "plotting something," I call his interpretation a metarepresentation because it is "good for now," that is, it provides a temporarily useful explanation of the states of mind behind the suspicious behavior, but it can be adjusted, confirmed, or discarded any moment once more information comes in. In other words, I take it as a given (even though I do not say it again and again in every such case) that this explanation is stored with some sort of metarepresentational "tag," such as "the inspector thinks" or "we think," and that it is the implicit functional presence of such tags that makes it possible for us and for the

3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story

inspector to revise our interpretations as we go along.

Second, I use here more insistently than in the previous sections such expressions as a "strong" and a "weak" metarepresentational framing to indicate that there are different degrees of advisement under which we "store" representations. For example, if I say to you that the rest of this section is divided into four parts, you have no particular reason to distrust me, and so you store this information with a "weak" metarepresentational tag, "Zunshine says that. ... " If, however, you are reading a detective story, you are encouraged by the laws of the genre to store nearly every attribution of the mental state behind each character's behavior with a very "strong" metarepresentational tag. If, for example, a potential suspect, "Flora," says that she left her room on the night of the murder because she wanted to get some water, the "Flora says" part of the representation—that is, its source tag—ensures that we still take her explanation into account, but we are strongly prepared to find that it is not