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literary format. Just imagine a narrative that skillfully forces you to anxiously keep track of the thoughts of twelve different people (for any of them, or perhaps all of them, as in Christie's novel, could be involved in that deviously arranged murder) and that also forces you to hang with bated breath on every sidelong look of the heroine who apparently does not want to show her rival that she cares that her beloved has read the letter that the rival has written to him five years ago about that conversation that the heroine and the hero had as children in that garden at their eccentric aunt's estate because that letter implies that the rival is much more emotionally suited to the hero than the romantic heroine herself is, and so on. Clearly, something's got to give. Hence, we have successful detective stories with some romantic elements, but the metarepresentational framing needed to process those romantic elements is carefully calibrated so as not to compete with the metarepresentational framing required to process the detecting elements of the story. Conversely, we have compelling romances with elements of detection, but the metarepresentational framing of the detecting elements is skillfully subdued so as to add some extra level of mind-reading to the story without making it compete with the main type of mind-reading expected from its readers.

Of course, in its present embryonic state, a "cognitive-literary" perspective may not be able to explain why certain combinations of different kinds of mind-reading in the story are more felicitous than others. Still, it points us to the areas of cognitive research to watch. If, at least on some level, the narrative focusing on a romance and the narrative focusing on the detection of the murder may appeal to differently specialized adaptations within our Theory of Mind module (e.g., the one evolved to facilitate mating and the one evolved to facilitate predator avoidance), then the narrative that combines the two by demanding an equally high emotional attendance both to the romance and to the detection of murder overloads some of our attention-focusing and information-processing systems.

Literary history can be thus viewed as a continuous experimentation with recombining metarepresentational units that used to feel overwhelming for our representation-hungry brain-mind but that have come

3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story

to feel pleasurable in new, hitherto-unexpected, ways. Hybrid genres emerge all the time as a testimony to this experimental endeavor.21 Who knows?—in five hundred years, we may have a genre of murder mystery/romance/family chronicle that will hit our Theory-of-Mind "spots" in all the right ways and feel as "natural" as a "pure" detective story feels today. In fact, I would say that because the combination of the equally emotionally engaging detective plot and romance plot remains so challenging today, we have a "guarantee" of sorts that writers will continue experimenting in the direction of integrating the two. The culturally embedded cognitive "limits" (i.e., the limits that became apparent only because of certain paths taken by literary history) thus present us with creative openings rather than with a promise of stagnation and endless replication of the established forms.

Meanwhile, let us take a closer look at the detective mysteries that have indeed incorporated romance into their main plot of detection. First of all, it seems that many writers have learned to skirt the issue altogether by either having their detectives go through regular and not particularly involving love affairs or by keeping them married. Both casual affairs and marriage require a minimal amount of metarepresentational framing involved in figuring out the romantic partner's state of mind.

Thus the thirty-something female detective has a reasonably clear idea of what a college student who ogles her at a party is thinking (as in James's Unsuitable Job for a Woman). Similarly, the newly married, hunky, but unfortunately swamped-with-work Marlowe knows exactly what