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By Root 612 0

I have made so far. On the one hand, it is possible that detective stories tease our metarepresentational ability by taking to the extreme our cognitive capacity to, first, store information under advisement and, then, once the truth-value of this information is decided, to think back to the beginning of the story and to readjust our understanding of a whole series of occurrences. On the other hand, storing information under advisement, particularly if the information concerns one character's manipulation of the state of mind of other characters, could be cognitively "expensive" because lying does not simply add an extra level of intentionality to the given situation. Instead, it frequently has a "cascading" effect, demanding from us a readjustment of what we know about other characters' knowledge, the knowledge that they in turn may have used to influence the states of mind of other characters, and so forth. Thus, a story whose premise is that "everybody could be lying" is a narrative minefield, and turning it into an enjoyable reading experience may require a particular set of formal adjustments.

Such adjustments include the drastic narrowing of the focus of the story. A whodunit allows that anybody and everybody can be lying (and, famously, in Christie's Murder on the Orient Express, that actually turns out to be the case), but the threateningly expanding universe of information about the characters' mental states that we thus have to store under advisement is mercifully constrained. Everybody's lying tends in the same direction, focusing on his/her relationship with the murdered Roger Ackroyd; or on that string of pearls that went missing from Mrs. Penruddock's household (in Raymond Chandler, "Pearls Are a Nuisance"); or on those hate letters that have been disrupting the quiet life of Shrewsbury College (in Sayers, Gaudy Night). If I am correct in considering lying in fiction as potentially cognitively "expensive," then the narrowing of the focus of a

3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story

story insisting that any of its characters may turn out to have been lying to everybody else is not even a matter of choice for the author. It is rather an absolute prerequisite of making this story cognitively manageable. Again, I am speaking here about the kinds of detective narratives that currently dominate the genre; future generations of writers may develop ways of circumventing or reorienting this prerequisite.

(b) There Are No Material Clues Independent from Mind-Reading

Let me restate the key point of my argument. Whereas any work of fiction engages our Theory of Mind, detective novels engage our ToM by experimenting in a particularly strenuous fashion with certain aspects of our metarepresentational ability. By creating a narrative framework in which everybody could be lying, such novels push to its furthest limits our ability to store information about our own and other people's mental states under advisement.

Given what we know now about our mind-reading capacity, we should thus be quite wary about advancing any interpretive framework that either ignores the "Theory-of-Mind" aspect of a detective narrative or insists on separating the analysis of the "material" clues present in such a narrative from the analysis of the states of mind of its protagonists. Witness a recent work of Ronald R. Thomas, who argues that the emergence of "detective fiction as a form" coincided "with the development of the modern police force and the creation of the modern bureaucratic state." The detective story has thus participated in the "cultural work performed by the societies that were increasingly preoccupied with . . . bringing under control the potentially anarchic forces unleashed by democratic reform, urban growth, national expansion, and imperial management." As the new forensic technology was a crucial means in identifying and controlling the potential deviants, the fledgling genre became particularly apt at reporting the clues that would allow the investigator to "read" and manage the "criminal body."3 Following