The Wrong Angle

Abstract

The world of the classic detective story is a world of illusion. Real crimes may not involve illusion; the perpetrator may be immediately obvious, or there may simply be no immediate information as to who he or she is, requiring the police to search for clues and witnesses to lead them to a yet unknown person. In the detective story, there is plenty of information, but it needs to be interpreted; the detective has to sort out the relevant from the irrelevant and arrange the relevant information into a coherent pattern. Above all, the detective has to distinguish the true information from the false. Information may be false because the criminal has sought to confuse the trail, because other characters are concealing relevant facts in order to protect themselves, because the investigators expect to see a certain pattern in the circumstances of the crime and expect the wrong one. The story of the novel is the dissolution of illusion; the fascination of the novel is the indulgence of illusion, which produces a mystery and a delightful insecurity. The sense of the unreliability of the perceived world, of the elusiveness of truth and of the fascination of this elusiveness is nicely symbolized by the Zambesi Falls in The Man in the Brown Suit (the more strikingly because the novel as a whole is a thriller narrated in light-hearted tone with little by way of philosophical solemnity) Anne is fascinated by the Falls precisely because they are generally concealed by the spray they produce: they arouse emotional or aesthetic tension because they compel the desire for knowledge (Suit, xxiv).