Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [86]
"I've no doubt a great deal of care and time were taken. But I think I know how it was done."
He described his theory. Sergeant Masterson, cross with himself for
having missed the obvious, said:
"Of course. It must have been done that way."
"Not must, Sergeant. It was probably done that way." (186; emphasis
added)
We are not to learn, until time is very ripe, what Dalgliesh's "theory" was. After having thus reminded us who is really in charge of the novel's mind-reading, James then reverts to generously elucidating Dalgliesh's surmises for another sixty or so pages. Then she slides in yet another "mind-closing" sentence. Speaking with one of the novel's multiple suspects, Sister Brumfett, Dalgliesh asks a seemingly irrelevant question and immediately apologizes:
"I'm sorry if I sound presumptuous. This conversation hasn't much to do with my business here, I know. But I'm curious." It had a great deal to do with his business there; his curiosity wasn't irrelevant. But she wasn't to know that. (245; emphasis added)
Neither are we to know for many pages what Dalgliesh's question had to do with the issue at hand and how it fed into the "theory" that James had casually dangled in front of her readers earlier.
Other writers have made a point of never obscuring the mind of the detective from us, as have, for example, Sue Grafton in her "alphabet" novels and Sarah Paretsky in Burn Marks and Bitter Medicine. Here is a characteristic passage from a whodunit emphasizing the so-un-Sherlock-Holmes transparency of the detective's thought processes. Presenting a rather stark contrast to Raymond Chandler's previous novels, such as The Long Good-Bye, The Big Sleep, and Playback, it comes from Poodle Springs, the last "Marlowe" story, revised and finished after Chandler's death by another author, Robert B. Parker:
I lay back down on the bunk. . . .
I did some deep breathing.
And where was the picture? Lola would have kept a copy. It wasn't in
her house. If the cops had found it, it would have led them somewhere.
They were as stuck as I was, stucker because they didn't know the things
that I was stuck about. Could be in a safe-deposit box. Except where was
the key? And whiskey-voiced old broads like Lola didn't usually keep safe-
deposit boxes. Maybe she stashed the negative with a friend. Except
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
whiskey-voiced old broads like Lola didn't usually trust friends with valu
able property. The simplest answer was Larry again, and the simplest
answer on Lippy was Les. And Les was Larry.
I did some more deep breathing. (191)
Approaching the detective narrative from a cognitive perspective helps us to understand why writers can, if they wish, abandon the Sherlock-Holmesian grandstanding and reveal to the reader every or almost every thought of the detective. It turns out that it does not really matter whose minds we are reading as long as there are some strategically concealed minds to read and as long as the topic of such a reading is highly focused (e.g., on a murder). It appears, then, that the writer's decision of whether or not to leave the thought processes of the detective open throughout the narrative correlates, at least on some level, with the length of the story. The narrative economics of the short story, which necessarily limit the number of minds that could be read and misread, makes it convenient to posit the detective's mind as one of the "mystery" minds, along with that of the main suspect. In a novel, where a larger number of minds can be contemplated, the mind of the detective does not have to be one of them.
Note that this is not some kind of absolute rule. There are plenty of novels in which the mind of the detective is closed off to us along with the minds of the suspects, especially those written early in the twentieth century, during what could be characterized as a cultural transition from the short story to the novel as the main medium of the genre. It seems that by exploring the new mind-reading possibilities of the longer form, writers have gradually