Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [92]
On the far opposite end of the spectrum are the detective story writers who overinvest in the romance, an instructive sight. Sarah Dreher's novels feature a shy travel agent, Stoner McTavish, whose emotional energies are focused on winning the heart of the enchanting Gwen and who prevents murders as a way of deepening her relationship with Gwen. The compelling romance part of the story leaves very little room for guessing the states of mind of potential criminals: Gwen is a delightful mystery, but we can easily figure out what the baddies are thinking.
Ironically, although I am not sure if there is any causal connection here, the "real," challenging, metarepresentationally framed mind-reading that we expect from the detective story is substituted in one of Dreher's novels by plain old telepathy. I stopped considering Something Shady a detective narrative after the heroine, locked in the room by the criminals who were getting ready to kill her, apparently sent a psychic signal to her aunt in a different city, and the aunt started calling the baddies' enclave, thus nearly distracting them for a while from their evil designs. (Like Peter Rabinowitz, I feel "entitled to assume that the supernatural cannot intrude" in the detective narrative.22)
Dreher's overinvestment in romantic mind-reading at the expense of "detective" mind-reading provides an illuminating contrast to Allingham's Sweet Danger, The Fashion in Shrouds, and Traitor's Purse, and Sayers's Gaudy Night. Those four novels were just as ambitious in their attempt to break the celibate mold of the murder mystery, but they succeeded where the "Stoner McTavish" series fails,23 and here is why: the "relationship" plots in Allingham and Sayers are engaging enough, but they are skillfully underemotionalized compared to the gripping detective plots of each novel. The mutual attraction of Amanda Fitton and Albert Campion is cute, but, for some reason, we are just as happy to keep their romance unresolved until the next published installment of Campion's adventures, whenever it comes, as are Amanda and Albert themselves. Similarly, in the case of Gaudy Night, we understand early on that Harriet Vane either will marry Lord Peter Wimsey after a requisite amount of soul-searching or will not, but we don't particularly care anyway. By contrast, we do care about the identity of the increasingly violent college malefactor, and we dutifully begin to suspect every innocent middle-aged professor whom Sayers grooms for that wicked role.
In other words, both Allingham and Sayers "advertise" their stories as detective narratives with a strong element of romance by increasing, in particular, the amount of time they spend talking about their protagonists' love interests. Because, however, they do not build in a strong metarepresentational framing for this aspect of the story, that is, they do not make us guess, second-guess, misread, and then head-slappingly correct our misreading of, the characters' romantic feelings, the romance remains a tame "junior partner"24 to their main business of detection.
Hammett's The Maltese Falcon is an important example of yet a different strategy. Brigid O'Shaughnessy, the woman with whom the private
3: Metarepresentationality and the Detective Story
FIGURE 4. "What else is there that I can buy you with?" Sam Spade and Brigid O'Shaughnessy before Sam finds out that she killed Archer.