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The “Whodunit” as a System

   Published Date: June 10, 2025  Leave a Comment on The “Whodunit” as a System

This post contains a notable spoiler for The Tokyo Zodiac Murders by Sōji Shimada. I have used a spoiler cover accordingly.

It also contains minor spoilers throughout regarding:

  • Ulysses By James Joyce
  • A generic description of multiple Ellery Queen novels
  • An element of an S. S. Van Dine novel, but no title is given
  • An element of a John Dickson Carr novel, but no title is given

(AI audio summary [slop] for TL;DR people)

The “paramodern” style

W. H. Auden’s account of puzzle-mystery fiction highlights the fact that in such stories, “the decisive event, the murder, has already occurred. Time and space therefore are simply the when and where of revealing either what has to happen or what has actually happened.”1 He then utilises the role of predetermination in the structure of puzzle-mysteries to draw a parallel to the similar themes of fate and destiny in classical Greek tragedy. This is an apt comparison up to a point. But puzzle-mysteries and classical literature are not unified by anything so narrow as their understanding of the meaning of destiny. They instead share an aesthetic orientation towards formalisation as such.

The earliest forms of written literature share their lineage with the much older traditions of oral storytelling. Before the emergence of sophisticated printing technology and the bureaucratic tendency towards education, the sociological barriers to literacy and the labour involved in transcription were prohibitive to the widespread adoption of literature as an artistic medium. The main use of literature, once it did develop, was for the storage and transmission of these oral legends among a narrow class of the highly educated. As a result, our earliest known classics of literature, such as Homer’s foundational duology of epic poetry—The Illiad and The Odyssey—were composed in a style that was intended to be transmitted via the spoken word. For example, beyond just being an aesthetic style, the dominance of verse developed in such works precisely because rhythm, rhyme, and similar poetic tools facilitated their memorisation.

Beyond the tendency towards memorisable language, the stories and characters of oral narrative were themselves shaped by a similar reduction to transmittable forms. Put another way, just as the use of poetic verse ensured communicability without reference to a written record, particular tropes and methods were used to ensure that the audience could follow the characterisation and flow of a complex story even under the constraints of oral storytelling.

These considerations were a driver of the heavy use of symbolic context and formalisation in classical literature. These stories transmitted information through clearly signposted and recognisable categories, and to this end, they made extensive use of stock characters. In the context of the physical theatre, these characters were marked by corresponding props and costumes; in classical Greek drama, actors wore specific costumes—traditionally, well-known forms of footwear—to symbolise their association with established character archetypes. Similar tendencies continued in performance storytelling throughout European history—most famously in the Italian commedia dell’arte, where recurring stock characters wore standardised costumes to communicate their narrative role. Comparable techniques can further be found in non-Western theatrical traditions, such as the use of archetype masks in Japanese kabuki.

Puzzle-mysteries utilise similar techniques of formalisation, but in a radically different artistic and historical context. For Willard H. Wright, “the detective novel does not fall under the head of fiction in the ordinary sense, but belongs rather in the category of riddles: it is, in fact, a complicated and extended puzzle cast in fictional form. … The reader is immediately put to work, and kept busy in every chapter, at the task of solving the book’s mystery. He shares in the unfoldment of the problem in precisely the same way he participates in the solution of any riddle to which he applies himself.”2 The end point of this process of gamification is the melting away of the messy ambiguity of so-called ‘novelistic’ high literature. Therefore, Wright’s own famous dictum that “a detective novel should contain no long descriptive passages, no literary dallying. … They hold up the action, and introduce issues irrelevant to the main purpose,”3 extends far beyond the style of its prose. The puzzle-mystery genre encloses itself within a structure of rules and procedures, colloquially known as ‘fair play’, which delineates a sharp distinction between what is possible and what is impossible as a matter of convention. To define the concept more fully: “the idea of fair play is grounded in the notion that the reader should, at least in theory, be able to solve the crime at the heart of a story of detection, and for this reason should have access to the same information as the fictional detective.”4 This distinctive capacity for audience participation and its sense of gamification through fair play together rely on a distinction between the interior rules of the genre and the impermissibility of its exterior.

For the Japanese critic, Kiyoshi Kasai, this formalism represents a rupture from the history of literature prior to the puzzle-mystery. Kasai therefore posits that:

Precisely because the heightened interest of the third wave [shin-honkaku] era has proven the fresh creativity and vitality of the detective novel form, the formalist significance of that form must now be rigorously reexamined. Through this process, it should also become evident that the detective novel is not just “a so fantastic offshoot of literature,” but rather a “paramodern” novel that deviates from the instituted structure of the modern novel. This endeavour will also serve to shatter the foundations of the shallow critiques of detective fiction offered by the purists of 19th century literature as well as by postmodernist critics.Kiyoshi Kasai, Detective Novel Theory: Introduction

Kasai’s major step forward is to not just interpret fair play as a happenstance genre trope, but as the product of an aesthetically distinct “paramodern” style. It is easy to get lost in the many attempts to define the famously elusive buzzwords of “modernism” and “postmodernism.” And for the most part, we do not have to resolve this problem here. Nonetheless, a proper understanding of what Kasai means by “paramodern” requires a rough sketch of the contrary modernism that it can be compared to.

The aesthetic logic of modernism

The aesthetic effects of modernist art, as traditionally understood, “arise from its technique of juxtaposing heterogeneous, unrelated pieces of reality torn from their context.”5 In a literary mode, “we can diagnose the ‘modernist object’ … along these two dimensions: of a provoking new idea and of an original technique. … it is the ideas of cultural comparison and simultaneity which are made possible by a technique of allusion within the text.”6 But in the visual dimension, this aesthetic develops according to a comparatively subtle logical sequence:

The elimination of all the superfluities from art is but a part of the striving toward defecation. Since the true test of painting lies in its subjective power, modern artists have sought to divorce their work from all considerations other than those directly allied to its primary function. This process of separation advanced hand in hand with the evolution of new methods. First it took the form of the distortion of natural objects. The accidental shape of trees, hills, houses and even human figures was altered in order to draw them into the exact form demanded by the picture’s composition. Gradually, by the constant practice of this falsification, objects became almost unrecognisable. In the end the illustrative obstacle was entirely done away with. This was the logical outcome of the sterilising modern process. To judge a picture competently, one must not consider it as a mere depiction of life or as an anecdote: one must bring to it an intelligence capable of grasping a complicated counterpoint. The attitude of even such men as Celesti, Zanchi, Padovanino and Bononi is never that of an illustrator, in no matter how sublimated a sense, but of a composer whose aim is to create a polymorphic conception with the recognisable materials at hand.Willard H. Wright, Modern Painting: Its Tendency and Meaning

This “sterilising modern process” in visual art is nothing other than the spatialisation of the same underlying logic as the modernist “comparison and simultaneity” which, in turn, follows from the “technique of juxtaposing heterogeneous, unrelated pieces of reality torn from their context.” That is, we can broadly sketch out the logic of modernism in terms of the creative-destructive powers of comparison and conflict. When two radically separate forms are placed side-by-side, the boundary between them simultaneously becomes indistinct and absolute. Modernism brings the barriers of formalism to the front of the work in order to speak through this paradoxical secret of the form-as-liquid. Therefore, as an exemplar of this process, “the history of modern art is broadly the history of the development of form by the means of colour—that is to say, modern art tends toward the purification of painting. Colour is capable of producing all the effects possible to black and white, and in addition of exciting an emotion more acute.”7

In the traditional chronology of art history, the modernist exemplification of forms was followed by the postmodernist disintegration of forms. The distinction between this disintegration (or, as it is most often called, deconstruction) and the earlier-mentioned phenomenon of modernist liquidation may at times seem unclear, but it has a logical throughline. Modernism uses the boundaries between things as its artistic object, and thereby queries the integrity of those boundaries. Postmodernism, by contrast, queries its object’s appearance as a homogeneous mass under the supposition that the boundaries between things have no solidity to begin with. This distinction is, in essence, the “wrapping” function of postmodern space which was identified by Fredric Jameson. His application of the concept to architectural forms makes for a particularly useful case study:

The cube and the slab (of corrugated metal): these ostentatious markers, planted in the older building like some lethal strut transfixing the body of a car crash victim, clearly shatter any illusions of organic form that might be entertained about this construction (and that are among the constitutive ideals of the older modernism). These two spatial phenomena make up the “wrapper”; they violate the older space and are now both parts of the newer construction and at distance from it, like foreign bodies.Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism

In abstract terms, this is to say that the postmodern gaze tends towards a unified space that integrates “foreign bodies,” which have been freed from the separateness of modernist formalism, while nonetheless preserving—or in fact, universalising—their foreignness. To put it simply, postmodernism deconstructs and then wraps together. While this mechanism is deeply tied to the identity of postmodernism as a reaction to modernism, it is distinct from a mere intensification of modernist logic, which is always constructing boundaries with one hand even when it is stripping them of validity with its other hand.

This intimate connection between the modern and postmodern has been a stubborn challenge for theorists who wish to think beyond their combined structure. Every assertion of a ‘post-postmodernism’—metamodernism, transmodernism, pseudomodernism, supermodernism—has tended to automatically transfigure the whole structure into a simple linear sequence. Asserting a ‘third-stage’ following from modernism and postmodernism retroactively defines postmodernism as a naked reaction to modernism, and the third-stage itself comes to be the ‘reaction to the reaction’ to modernism—anti-anti-modernism, in effect. The particularities of each of these theories of anti-modernism therefore melt away in favour of the structural implications of their place in the overall system.

The puzzle-mystery and the 20th century

In this light, the most useful feature of Kasai’s invocation of paramodernism is that it side-steps the periodising and teleologicising temptations of other theories of anti-modernisms. Paramodernism is a partial alternative to modernism, and can therefore operate as a kind of ‘answer’ to the postmodern critique of modernism. But it very specifically remains within the historical boundaries of modernism itself. Its relationship to the system is nothing like a straight line or a dialectical triangle; it represents the capacity to think through alternative ruptures or breaks from within the modernist tradition that stand apart from the path towards the eventual victory of postmodernism as the later cultural dominant of late capitalism. It is something like a side road or a scenic route, and in that capacity it escapes many of the usual traps of intellectual periodisation.

As per his usage of the term, Kasai identifies paramodernism almost exactly with the logic of the puzzle-mystery. Resultantly, we can treat the break between puzzle-mysteries and literary modernism as symptomatic of paramodern aesthetics. What, then, is the decisive difference between paramodernism and the tendencies of literary modernism? To answer this fully, we must situate them both in their overlapping political and historical contexts. The history of modernism has two broad phases: Firstly, there was the modernism of the long 19th century, which served as the cultural dominant of imperialism. Subsequently, there was a second modernism corresponding to the crises of imperialism from the First World War through to the Second. The difference between these phases is mostly a matter of degree, not kind. This is to say that a fundamental homology remained between the pre-war movements—expressionism, impressionism—and the inter-war avant-garde movements—surrealism, cubism, dadaism, futurism. The relevant conceptual line in the sand here is quite simply that the latter efforts were far more radical in their application of the characteristic techniques of modernism.

The chronology of the puzzle-mystery precisely tracks that of modernism. The 19th century coincided with the birth of both modernism and the puzzle-mystery. However, the high-point of the genre’s popularity, that is, its so-called “Golden Age,” was exclusive to the inter-war years of the 20th century. On a conceptual and thematic level, the puzzle-mysteries of the Golden Age share their foundation with the earlier puzzle-mysteries of the 19th century. Nonetheless, the inter-war strain displays a slight shift in emphasis, as well as an increasing conceptual radicalism. In its original incarnation, the relationship between puzzle-mysteries and the aspirations of scientific rationalism was largely sincere and direct; “the backbone of the detectives of the nineteenth century is positivism. They thought that the truth exists and that they could get to that truth by experience, observation, and presumption.”8 However, the same post-war crisis in meaning that motored the avant-garde movements of  inter-war modernism, and their tilt towards increasingly anti-traditional forms of expression, introduced a wedge between the rational aspirations of the puzzle-mystery and the unassimilability of the 20th century’s immediate political reality.

Considering the parallels in their historical trajectories, it may appear as though puzzle-mysteries and modernism are just different manifestations of the same aesthetic logic. And to a degree, they are clearly related. Kasai, however, highlights an important geographical, if not temporal, distinction between their respective histories:

Most of the major movements associated with modernism—for example, formalism, surrealism, dadaism, and expressionism—originated in countries like Russia, Germany, and France, where battles had actually taken place in front of their very eyes. Whereas, you don’t find these sorts of drastic artistic movements occurring in countries like America and England, which didn’t experience the war firsthand. Then what did happen in America and England? The fad of serious mystery novels! Let’s take a serial story in a magazine or newspaper. Before the war, at least one person per day or per week or per month was killed in those stories. The way death is presented in those works reflected the way people thought about death before the war—it was routine, very easy: people simply died, very quickly, with almost no fuss at all. But in a serious postwar mystery novel, death doesn’t happen so easily: the murderer scrupulously plans the killing in detail and carries out the crime with every due respect to the victim. Even after the murder, the detective works very hard to find out who had done it. This is almost like a double-authorization of the victim. The death of the individual is made very meaningful—perhaps in order to give it meaning in art that’s no longer possible in real life.A Meaning in Art that's No Longer Possible: an Interview with Kiyoshi Kasai

This particular formulation from Kasai is a little broad, but its central point stands up to scrutiny. Moreover, if we investigate the specifically aesthetic structure of the puzzle-mystery in greater detail, we will see the sense in which it departs from the corresponding logic of modernism. That is, we will reach something closer to the aesthetic core of paramodernism.

The function of mystery “rules”

The chief aesthetic object of modernism is the paradoxical quality of formal delineations. To this end, the modernist approach attempts to retrieve the essence of things by circumscribing their structure. This procedure chiefly brings the qualitative distinction between entities to light. However, it also reveals that it is exactly at the point of formal juxtaposition where things lose their historical givenness, and therefore where modernism develops towards its characteristic encounter with the radical liquidity of form.

The puzzle-mystery is made up of an assemblage of rules that limit the horizon of possibilities within its fictional world. The overarching principle behind these boundaries is the interactivity of fair play. By way of an example: the third of Ronald Knox’s “ten commandments” of puzzle-mysteries reads, “not more than one secret room or passage is allowable. I would add that a secret passage should not be brought in at all unless the action takes place in the kind of house where such devices might be expected.”9 This commandment is not absolutely binding—authors as famous as S. S. Van Dine and John Dickson Carr have risked breaching it. Yet, the spirit of the rule—that secret rooms must be foreshadowed—is something that the reader of a puzzle-mystery can generally rely upon even without any specific prior knowledge of Knox’s codification. This is because the expectation of fair play can be established purely through the experience of reading puzzle-mysteries, even without any explicit contract between author and audience. The functional demands of fair play as a basic experiential goal prescribe the practical limits of puzzle-mysteries qua interactivity. The experiences of these novels are then codified in the wider culture as the socially accepted definition of the genre.

This observation may seem trivial, but in practice it is the source of the puzzle-mystery’s break with the rest of modern literature. In a work of art that has ‘novelistic’ aspirations, that work withholds the right to define its own boundaries; this possibility was categorised by the formalist theorists as the “hermetic autonomy”10 of literature. Reconciling, firstly, the interactivity and participatory nature of the puzzle-mystery with, secondly, their structural need to obfuscate certain features of the basic reality of their fictional world, requires that the puzzle-mystery’s boundaries be set ahead of time—most practically, this is generally done at the collective level of the genre. Fair play also cannot reasonably appear in toto as an abstract intention within one novel. The limitations on what an author can do without breaching the structure of gamification are generally established by an implicit comparison on the part of the reader to the experience of reading other ‘successfully’ gamified novels. Therefore, puzzle-mysteries are never truly read in isolation. The structure of fair play imposes intertextuality upon them.

Such intertextuality can be compared and contrasted to the typically modernist affiliation with “ideas of cultural comparison and simultaneity which are made possible by a technique of allusion within the text.”11 But how can novels register as both autonomous and allusory? The point is that modernist stylisation is exactly what develops a harmony between the two. The most relevant technique for this end is the capacity for modernist novels to enclose themselves in their autonomy, only to then suggestively hint at their exterior through allusion. James Joyce’s Ulysses makes for perhaps the most famous demonstration of this method: in Ulysses, a story autonomously takes place within the realistic confines of Dublin, but this story is then saturated with formal allusions to the Homeric Odyssey—for example, seemingly mundane descriptions are rendered in Homeric poetic verse. The line between Ulysses and The Odyssey becomes the object of the novel precisely by how Ulysses delineates itself apart from the nonetheless highly visible presence of The Odyssey. Ulysses establishes a boundary only to doubt it.

The paramodern puzzle-mystery novel, however, rejects literary autonomy and is instead circumscribed at the genre level. To see what this means in practice, we need to explicate the format’s full structure. The inner world of the puzzle-mystery functions through two different story-forms: “the first—the story of the crime—tells ‘what really happened’, whereas the second—the story of the investigation—explains ‘how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it’.”12 The impetus behind a puzzle-mystery is the disjuncture between the first story and the second. That is, the fact of a mysterious unknown reality at the centre of the novel. Starting from this gap between the world as it appears and the world as it really is, the narrator—the Watson—then witnesses the revelation of the truth that brings these two worlds into unity. The role of the external fair play genre structure is to regulate and place limits on the possible truths and mysteries that can make up this two-world system.

Norizuki’s Queen Theory

This exterior structure of formalisation is a necessary condition for the reconciliation of the two worlds of a puzzle-mystery. This is aptly demonstrated by the novelist and literary theorist Rintarō Norizuki in his famous essay on the topic, Early Queen Theory. According to Norizuki, the relationship between a puzzle-mystery’s interior and exterior can be analogised to Alfred Tarski’s semantic theory of truth. Tarski’s framework distinguishes between an object language, in which propositions are made, and a metalanguage, in which truth claims are asserted. The power of this distinction lies in how it resolves simple and stubborn paradoxes, such as the classic liar’s paradox of “this sentence is not true.” According to Tarski’s method, the usual form of the phrase that reads “this sentence is not true,” should instead be reconstructed as “X is true if and only if X is not true.” Rendering the claim in this alternate form reveals its essential category error: it uses the truth predicate within the object language, when it properly belongs in the metalanguage, and therefore just repeats two juxtaposed predicates without advancing any coherent relationship between the two.13

There is an interesting aesthetic analogy to be found here. Norizuki identifies the liar’s paradox with a “laddering” problem. A form of this appears quite exactly in the visual art of the surrealists: in his famous painting, The Treachery of Images, René Magritte presents the unambiguous visual form of a wooden pipe next to the similarly unambiguous text “ceci n’est pas une pipe”—“this is not a pipe.”

The basic structure of the work is that these two forms—the visual pipe and the textual non-pipe—appear in perfect juxtaposition, and the overall composition liquefies. As is well known, this painting is one of the modernist works par excellence. What may be less obvious is the extent to which it is roughly equivalent in structure to the liar’s paradox. Both the pipe and the text, “this is not a pipe,” are given roughly equivalent, object-level form within the work. Every interpretative attempt to privilege either form as a predicate can be negated by the other.

Puzzle-mysteries break with this style through their attempt to adhere to a kind of distinction between metalanguage and object language. Norizuki explains this feature by way of Ellery Queen’s famous use of the “challenge to the reader.” In many Ellery Queen novels, the final act of the story is demarcated by a written challenge to the reader from ‘Ellery Queen’—a name which occupies the role of both author and detective. This letter confirms the point at which all of the clues necessary to solve the crime are available to the reader.

Norizuki argues that such interventions of meta-narrative into the stories of puzzle-mysteries developed out of necessity, in response to the inherent laddering problem of formalist art. Without such a guarantee, the disjuncture between the first and second story comes to imply that there might be further clues and a further hidden culprit lurking in the first story, beyond the grasp of the audience who remains trapped within the perspective of the second story. In fact, even if all of the clues seem readily accessible on their face, and the solution therefore seems perfectly obvious to the reader, it is possible for the author to suddenly introduce a last minute twist that overturns any apparent reconciliation of the first and second story. Norizuki famously gives the example of a criminal mastermind who merely uses the first culprit as an instrument for the murder and then frames them. And if this mastermind then comes to seem just as guilty, a master-mastermind behind the mastermind can be revealed—and the sequence can then be repeated ad infinitum.

The challenge to the reader seems at first to shatter this structural problem, as well as the other related limits of the formalist mode of narrative. By standing outside of the story and providing guidance on the predicates of the ‘game’ of the puzzle-mystery, such meta-formal structures act as the ‘metalanguage’ to the ‘object language’ of the internal mystery of the novel. Nonetheless, Norizuki then critiques the limits of this very same Tarski-like method: a work of art is at risk of capturing these meta-formal structures and equalising them with the internal story within the work.

(Spoilers for The Tokyo Zodiac Murders)
This is exactly what Sōji Shimada attempts for the challenge to the reader technique in his proto-shin-honkaku novel, The Tokyo Zodiac Murders. In this novel, a traditional challenge to the reader appears at the end of the third chapter with the usual guarantees. But then, a second such challenge is also presented at the end of the following fourth chapter—which reveals that all of the necessary clues were actually present as early as the end of the second chapter. In this manner, the metanarrativity of the challenge to the reader loses its sacred neutrality and enters into the fray of the novel’s subjectivity. In much the same way that Norizuki warned against the possibility that the culprit might turn out to be a mere pawn of a separate true culprit, the first challenge to the reader is used by Shimada as a mere façade for a separate true challenge to the reader.

In this way, we can see how puzzle-mysteries are always at risk of consuming the meta-formal structures on their outside—like a cliff face slowly sinking into the sea.

We can further explain the essence of the break between paramodernism and modernism with reference to this difficulty. It is quite right to say that the puzzle-mystery “is not just ‘a so fantastic offshoot of literature’, but rather a ‘paramodern’ novel that deviates from the instituted structure of the modern novel.”14 However, this deviance is a precarious one. The internal two-world structure of the puzzle-mystery follows many of the general principles of modernist literature, including the radical possibility of its own formal liquidation. However, what marks the paramodern as distinctly paramodern is its reliance on external meta-formal structures that hold up the integrity of its internal formal arrangements. The dependence on, and reference to, a metatextual body gives the paramodern aesthetic a distinctive mode of expression that breaks with the usual artistic conventions of its epoch. We can therefore define paramodernism as the use of intertextuality and metatextuality to transform the ‘shattered image’ of modernist art into a puzzle-like structure that evokes the process of an image being put back together.

Characters and roles

In the course of explaining the formal differences between literary realism and the stylisation of the puzzle-mystery, the poet and novelist Cecil Day-Lewis emphasised “the pattern of the detective-novel, as highly formalised as that of a religious ritual, with its initial necessary sin (the murder), its victim, its high priest (the criminal) who must in turn be destroyed by a yet higher power (the detective).”15 This highly structured network of predetermined roles is the essence of the sense of destiny that drove Auden to compare puzzle-mysteries to the Greek understanding of tragedy. However, the index of this predestination is not the formalism of the Greek morality play. Puzzle-mysteries have their own logic rooted in the paramodernism of interactivity, gamification, and fair play.

We can therefore apply our understanding of the paramodern aesthetic to Day-Lewis’ account of character archetypes. According to Wright, “characters in detective stories may not be too neutral and colorless, nor yet too fully and intimately delineated. They should merely fulfil the requirements of plausibility, so that their actions will not appear to spring entirely from the author’s preconceived scheme. Any closely drawn character analysis, any undue lingering over details of temperament, will act only as a clog in the narrative machinery. The automaton of the cheap detective thriller detracts from the reader’s eagerness to rectify the confusion of the plot; and the subtly limned personality of the ‘literary’ detective novel shunts the analytic operations of the reader’s mind to extraneous considerations.”16 This submission of characters to the needs of fair play leads quite naturally to the role-based structure identified by Auden and Day-Lewis. Just as individual puzzle-mystery novels lack the autonomy to violate the conditions of fair play, the characters within these novels also lack the autonomy to defy the predestination of their genre role: The detective lacks the freedom to not solve the crime, and the culprit lacks the freedom to not commit the crime. This is because the gap between the two divergent story-forms, which is a constitutive feature of the puzzle-mystery’s identity as itself, also inscribes the fact of a hidden crime with a hidden culprit as base conditions of the fictional world. As Kasai puts it:

If, by applying the modern ideal of natural human freedom to the progression of the story, the detective was able to freely shift their role to that of the culprit, and the culprit to the victim, the structure of a detective novel would collapse at its foundations. From start to finish, the detective must be the detective, and the culprit must be the culprit. Even stricter conditions apply to the victim, who cannot stop being the victim in the middle of the story. This firstly corresponds to the reality that they cannot stop being dead. Were a dead person to revive, the premise of the detective novel could not be established. Reviving the dead would run contrary to any rationalistic understanding of death. Moreover, in a world where the dead return to life, the act of murder loses its meaning—especially because, in almost all cases, the essential mystery of the detective novel centres on the culprit, motive, and method of the crime.Kiyoshi Kasai, Detective Novel Theory: Introduction

The character-role system of the paramodern puzzle-mystery can be compared to the “sterilising” function of colour in visual art that was identified by Wright.17 In both cases, the “elimination of all the superfluities from art”18 is necessary for the transformation of a totality into a configuration of interactive forms—that is, into a “polymorphic” composition. However, where the modernist style tends towards a radical destabilisation of its object by way of a certain nakedness of expression, the puzzle-mystery captures and channels its otherwise liquid, internal antagonisms through an external meta-formal structure. In this light, the character-role system takes on an impressive double-function: It, of course, sterilises characters, and produces the formalistic clarity of modernist art. But even beyond this effect, the character-role system, which limits the freedom of characters, also acts as a pillar of the metatextual structure of fair play. It both sterilises the work, in a typically modernist mode, and it stabilises the work, in a correspondingly paramodern one. This versatility marks the method of characterisation present in puzzle-mysteries as one of the most suggestive elements of their composition.

We can trace the centrality of this technique exactly to the historical context of puzzle-mysteries that we laid out earlier. In the 19th century infancy of the genre, when the structures of fair play and intertextuality were comparatively light-handed, characterisation was not nearly so predeterminative. While a tendency towards archetypes did develop gradually throughout this period, the overall mode of characterisation in puzzle-mystery fiction was more in line with its peers in adventure and Gothic fiction, rather than aspiring to the rigidity of the character-role system. It was only during the explosive inter-war Golden Age of the genre that audiences started demanding the extremes of formalistic characterisation that were demonstrated in the novels of Agatha Christie, John Dickson Carr, and Ellery Queen. Given this chronology, it should come as no surprise that the shift from pre-war to inter-war aesthetics was catalysed by nothing other than the war itself. Kasai identifies this shift with his theory of “mass death” and “mass life,” saying:

After the end of the First World War, there was never a return to the stratified civil society typical of the 19th century. Instead, José Ortega y Gasset identifies mass-man as the typical product of 20th century post-war society. In the 19th century, society was configured around the distinct lifestyles and traditions of various roles, such as peasants, workers, the bourgeoisie, and aristocracy. In the 20th century, these distinctions were flattened, and people anonymously appeared en masse in their place. Ortega’s mass-man parallels the anonymisation and banalisation of death of the soldiers in trench warfare, whose corpses became as indistinct as a mountain of industrial waste.Kiyoshi Kasai, Mass Death=Mass Life and the Endless Everyday

Launching our inquiry from this description, we should consider the “anonymisation and banalisation of death” as it applies to characterisation in puzzle-mysteries. When characters in a puzzle-mystery are sterilised, they are cleansed of any novelistic subjectivity. This is not to say that they transform into lifeless automatons; as per Wright, “characters in detective stories may not be too neutral and colorless.”19 Nonetheless, the freedom to be someone utterly unique and to act unexpectedly in the world is incompatible with the demands of fair play. Therefore, their ultimate destiny and functional role in the story is prescribed by way of certain character archetypes. Kasai refers to the resultant style of characterisation as “fetishism”20 precisely in the literal sense of the word, as-in a ritual icon. Such formalistic characters will necessarily be lifted out of the obfuscated context of their personal inner lives; the character-role system means that the characters of puzzle-mysteries must act as signifiers in a symbolic framework before they can exist as fully lived-in persons. This, however, is ironically appropriate, since the context that produced the inter-war puzzle-mystery overlapped so exactly with the conceptual shattering of historical givenness that characterised the radical avant-garde movements. The emptiness of the characters in such novels mirrors the existential emptiness that exploded out the world-historical ruptures of the inter-war era. We can therefore compare the sterilisation of novelistic subjectivity in character to the massification of anonymous corpses in the First World War.

Yet, even the most extreme inter-war puzzle-mysteries are distinct from the modernism of the avant-garde. They remain stubbornly paramodern in their attempt to stabilise the modernist liquidation of form. Puzzle-mystery characters are stripped of their capacity for freedom and for novelistic subjectivity, but they also simultaneously gain a separately symbolic form of character through the character-role system. If we look at how this dual-motion of sterilisation and signification plays out for the role of the victim in particular, the originally subtle political significance of the puzzle-mystery will become apparent. When the victim is murdered under the opaque historicity of the inter-war crises—corresponding to the first story, which is obfuscated from the perspective of the second story—the authentic inner life of the victim necessarily disappears, and they transform into a merely anonymous mass corpse. However, the meta-formal structure of fair play determines that their murder must have a meaning and basis in the concrete actions of a knowable culprit. This much is implied even by the first of Knox’s commandments.21 Even in death, they will therefore take on a symbolic life in the story in their role as the victim. And this symbolic life will further be given its own historicity and meaning during the final denouement, when the detective ritualistically explains the meaning of the events of the story according to the character-role system, and thereby unifies the first story and the second story—solidifying the otherwise liquefied formalism of inter-war modernism.

Notes/reference list

  1. https://harpers.org/archive/1948/05/the-guilty-vicarage/ ↩︎
  2. http://gaslight-lit.s3-website.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/gaslight/grtdtecs.htm ↩︎
  3. https://www.speedcitysistersincrime.org/ss-van-dine—twenty-rules-for-writing-detective-stories.html ↩︎
  4. John Scaggs, Crime Fiction (The New Critical Idiom) ↩︎
  5. György Lukács, Realism in the Balance ↩︎
  6. Christopher Butler, Modernism: A Very Short Introduction ↩︎
  7. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/39886/pg39886-images.html ↩︎
  8. https://www.thefreelibrary.com/A+Meaning+in+Art+that%27s+No+Longer+Possible%3A+an+Interview+with+Kiyoshi…-a089928962 ↩︎
  9. https://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/film/knoxdecalogue.htm ↩︎
  10. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose ↩︎
  11. Christopher Butler, Modernism: A Very Short Introduction ↩︎
  12. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose ↩︎
  13. For more information, see https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/tarski/ ↩︎
  14. Kiyoshi Kasai, Detective Novel Theory: Introduction ↩︎
  15. Cecil Day-Lewis, The Detective Story—Why? ↩︎
  16. http://gaslight-lit.s3-website.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/gaslight/grtdtecs.htm ↩︎
  17. That the same critic—Willard H. Wright—developed theories of both systems is of great historical interest. Even if it does not prove much on its own. ↩︎
  18. https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/39886/pg39886-images.html ↩︎
  19. http://gaslight-lit.s3-website.ca-central-1.amazonaws.com/gaslight/grtdtecs.htm ↩︎
  20. Kiyoshi Kasai, The Redefinition of Detective Novels: Will the owl of Minerva take its flight at the shades of night?, Volume 1 ↩︎
  21. https://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/film/knoxdecalogue.htm ↩︎

Author: Jared E. Jellson

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