Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [87]
(d) "Alone Again, Naturally"
Here is a peculiarly tenacious, though not for the want of writers who have worked hard to undermine it, "rule" of a detective story: "In his sexual life, the detective must be either celibate or happily married."7 W. H. Auden formulated it rather succinctly in 1948, although, of course, he was neither
Part III: Concealing Minds
the first nor the last to notice it. Already in 1836, the brothers Goncourt asserted on first reading Poe's detective stories that they bear "signs of the literature of the twentieth century—love giving place to deductions . . . the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head . . . from the drama to solution."8 Haycraft reports that in 1941, Columbia University Press conducted a survey among "several hundred habitual readers" of detective stories, asking them in particular to identify their "pet dislikes." The aficionados of the genre, both male and female, voted "too much love and romance" to the top of the list of the undesirables.' Several years later, Frederick Dannay and Manfred B. Lee, the joint creators of Ellery Queen, echoed, perhaps unintentionally, this sentiment of the survey participants. In response to Dashiel Hammett's question, "Mr. Queen, will you be good enough to explain your famous character's sex life, if any?" Dannay and Lee suggested that "a wife, mistress or even physical love affair planted on Ellery after all these years would upset readers."10 Again, in 1965, Margery Allingham observed that detective fiction is "structurally unsuited to the steady use of romantic love. It can accommodate a brief encounter, or even a series of them, but anything more and the danger of upset becomes an embarrassment" (7).
Writers fought valiantly to loosen up this "strictly puritan"11 bent of the murder mystery. Allingham herself authored a series of novels featuring her favorite detective Albert Campion that explicitly challenged the rigid construction of that "very tight little box whose four walls consist of a killing, a mystery, an enquiry and a conclusion" with no "room for much else" (11). In Sweet Danger, Campion meets and admires the teenage Lady Amanda Fitton, who clearly "fits" his intellectual, emotional, and social class profile. In The Fashion in Shrouds, he sees her again after several years, admires her some more, and even agrees to affiance her. In Traitor's Purse, he is literally bludgeoned by the author into admitting to himself how ardently he loves and is afraid to lose Amanda to whom he has been engaged for the last eight (!) years. At the end of the novel he finally tells her "let's get married early tomorrow . . . I've only got thirty-six hours leave" (505), to which the ever "real cool" (14) Amanda, who has just gotten over her infatuation with the wrong man, replies "yes, . . . it's time we got married" (505). In all three cases, Allingham attempts to upset and complicate the traditional balance of the detective plot by adding to the main mystery of each novel the mystery of Campion's and Amanda's feelings for each other.
Similarly, Sayers structures her Gaudy Night (1936) so that the question of whether or not the professional detective-story writer Harriet Vane
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
will agree to marry the love-struck detective Lord Peter Wimsey is billed as just as important as the question of who has been wreaking havoc in Shrewsbury College by writing hate letters to the faculty and students and destroying their work. By portraying the criminal as driven by a distinctly antifeminist agenda, Sayers connects the straightforward "mystery" part of the novel with Harriet's tortured mulling