Why We Read Fiction_ Theory of Mind and the Novel - Lisa Zunshine [93]
FIGURE 5. "When one in your organization gets killed, it is a bad business to let the killer get away with it—bad all around, bad for every detective everywhere." Sam and Brigid after he realizes that she killed Archer.
investigator Sam Spade falls in love, is one of the suspects in the case of the murder of his partner, Miles Archer. The criminal and the romantic aspects of the novel are so intertwined that if Brigid is concealing the truth about her role in the killing of Archer, it means she is lying to Sam about her feelings for him, for had she really loved him, she would not have kept him in the dark about the story of the crime (figures 4 and 5). The romantic mind-reading thus nearly completely overlaps with the mind-reading oriented toward the detection of the crime.25
Here is what is particularly interesting about this frugal "two-for-one" scenario. On the one hand, I have argued above that because, at least on some level, the romance plot and the detection plot "feed" their respective information into different adaptations within our Theory of Mind module (i.e., the mind-reading adaptation geared toward mate selection and the mind-reading adaptation geared toward predator avoidance), writers may generally have a difficult time when they want to combine the two plots so as to give them an equal emotional weight within the story. Hammett, however, seems to have circumvented this difficulty by merging the two plots into one. To understand some of the emotional effects of such a merger, think again of my earlier examples of the cultural images of "maneater" and "ladykiller" that emphasize the danger of falling in love with a predator. The detective story in which the investigator's love interest is also one of the suspects exploits the suggestive cognitive ambiguity of such a situation. Such a story derives titillating emotional mileage from making the readers mix the inferences from the mate-selection aspect of mind-reading with inferences from the predator-avoidance aspect of mind-reading.
Misreading the mind of the predator by approaching him/her with the view of romantic relationship may result in a personal disaster, as so happens in Hammett's Maltese Falcon, Paretsky's Bitter Medicine, and Hitchcock's Vertigo. On the other hand, the love interest may turn out to have been unjustly suspected of predatory tendencies (as is Vivian Sternwood in the Hollywood version of Chandler's The Big Sleep or Linda Loring in the original The Long Goodbye). In a very mild variation on the two-forone scenario, Karen ¥>\)cws)tis Alley KatBlues, the policeman-boyfriend of the female investigator, Kat Colorado, gets entangled with a woman implicated in the crime that Kat is trying to solve. By solving the murder case, Kat thus also gets to figure out the feelings of her boyfriend who has been acting strangely lately. Alley Kat Blues is significantly more invested in romance than many of the detective novels discussed above (though it does not approach the level of Stoner McTavish or Something Shady), and
4: Always Historicize!
it pulls it off precisely by creating a situation in which the mind-reading oriented toward solving the crime overlaps with the mind-reading oriented toward figuring out the feelings of the romantic partner. In other words, unless used too often and thus rendered predictable, the conveniently economic focusing of the two different kinds of mind-reading on one person can work for writers who are intent on opening up that "very tight little box" of the classic detective story.
Note that by construing a spectrum, on the one end of which there are detective stories with the minimum of romance and, on the other, the stories in which romance overwhelms detection, with a variety of other narratives gravitating toward either end of the spectrum, I do not intend to pronounce on the aesthetic value of any of these books. Nor do I make any sort of prediction about their chances for survival in what Franco Moretti calls the "slaughterhouse" of the long-term literary market. Instead, I suggest that by articulating