The detective story, as we recognise it, like some impossible labyrinth made only of centres, returns always to Poe. The three influential Dupin mysteries, are signposts within the maze, opening up avenues for the genre to follow. However, another of Poe's stories, lesser known and immeasurably more intense, extracts and manipulates the method of the investigator and transposes it onto the life of the lonely intellectual. Here we see the detective move further into his self with every step he takes of his pursuit. Here the detective, gazing at the suspect before him, sees only the back of his own head in a mobius strip of self-interrogation.
The narrator of Man of the Crowd describes the various types of people who pass in front of the London club in which he sits. Gazing through the 'smoky glass', out narrator, recovering from an undisclosed illness, takes an unnatural interest in the crowd flowing by. The narrator's analytic mind is capable of classifying the crowd into convenient types. However, he is unable to place a crook'd old man who passes the window. His instant fascination with this man of the crowd is arresting. Night has descended on London like a net, the narrator, from his well lit vantage point, in scrutinizing the old man, must simultaneously be looking at his own illuminated image in the glass. From the outset, our man is someone else. It is his desire to analyse this refraction of himself that drives the narrator from the club and onto the labyrinthine London streets in pursuit of this unplaceable other.
Our narrator almost immediately assumes a 'craving desire' to keep the man in view, as if trying to confirm his own reflection in a continuation of the doubling we expect from Poe. He maintains the stance of the detective, following closely, yet unobserved, processing possibilities and variables through his well reasoned mind. The narrator is searching for some motive, following the man for more than twenty-four hours through London's warren-like network of alleys and lanes, focussing solely on the hidden purpose of the old man, oblivious to his own. As he pursues the old man in a spasm of existential crisis, we too, equally without motive in this story without reason, pursue the narrator in a chain of curiosity linked by the most tenuous of suspicions.
The crime in this story sets the cautious, fractious tone of stories to come. The narrator circles some crime of the soul, some escalating metaphysical panic, following himself in practical isolation, finding the process irresistable and all absorbing. Our investigator grows 'wearied unto death' in the course of his all night chase, arriving back to the very point where he began, having learned nothing of the old man, concluding only with what he already knew: 'er lasst sich nicht lessen' - it does not permit itself to be read. The impenetrability of the mystery functions like some merciful barrier beyond which lies the dark realm of this 'genius of deep crime'. As the story ends, it seems possible that our narrator, drawn in as if self-doubt were magnetised, has transcended this essential barrier and become, himself a man of the crowd.
The detective figure is inextricably implicated in that which he describes, a likely, self-involving, feature of the existential detective story. In Jorge Luis Borges' two major contributions to the genre, The Garden of Forking Paths and Death and the Compass, the detective himself is the last clue, the final piece of the puzzle he is trying to solve. In both cases, the crime cannot exist without the intervention of the curious investigator. Death and the Compass presents us with the Dupin-like figure of Lönrott, the world's greatest detective. Lönrott's very role as a brilliant detective, attempting to stop a series of three murders, leads himself into the trap of becoming the fourth and ultimate victim of a vengeful plot designed solely for that purpose. Lönrott's instinctively critical, investigative mind works against him in an act of intellectual self-murder, unable to sustain itself in what we are told is the most perplexing of all labyrinths, that which is an endless straight line. Lönrott's complex mind, so used to inter-connecting narratives and motives, collapses under the open, self-effacing obviousness of the hideously straight labyrinth.
The Garden of Forking Paths takes the detective's participation in crime one step further. Our narrator, a German spy during WW1, can find no other way to communicate to Berlin the name of the city that the British are planning to bomb than to murder, and be hanged for the crime. In being executed, his very name, Stephen Albert, is broadcast as the name of the city to be bombed. The detective figure crystallises himself into clue, crime and solution - detective, victim and criminal in a maze of hazy implications.
The Man of the Crowd and Borges' short stories give trembling voice to the 'other who turns out to be me' theme that defines the existential detective story. A true example of this technique can be found in Beckett's Malloy in which the detective is abstractly transfigured into the very man he pursues. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy continues to explore this endemic notion of the detective's split identity further still.
Each of Auster's Chinese-box trilogy revolves around Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story of disappearance, Wakefield. Wakefield is a man who 'absents' himself from his wife as a brief prank but finds, having stepped out from his life, he cannot return. He spends the rest of his life investigating the empty space he has left behind. It is a particularly urban puzzle of a man who loses himself in a crowd. Hawthorne opens a theme conquered by Auster: the complex loneliness of the city. The detective figure, whose thought processes are linked by alleys and streets like synaptic nerves, moves through the city of his mind, wearied and decentred by some dissolving equation, some lost motive.
Auster takes his cue from Wakefield's self-imposed existential dilemma. Quinn and Blue become obsessively engaged, like Poe's compulsive narrator, in voyeuristic surveillance whilst Fanshawe pounds desperately on the door of the tantalisingly locked room. Manipulating the detective genre's fixation with closure, Auster’s anorexic investigators gaze hopelessly into a maze of their own making, denying themselves any morsel of satisfaction. The reader too is left starved by the narrative as each tale manages to unfold beyond its final word, unsolved, fully chewed yet undigested. Abstinence, in Auster’s work is a lunge for clarification; detection as selective consumption, sifting through clues, codes and signs for something to satisfy their needs once and for all. Quite often it is total destruction.
In Ghosts a man is in such ontological despair that he hires a detective to watch him constantly, as if existing only in the other's perception, reading detailed reports of his own behaviour. As seems to be the case in these metaphysical shoot-outs, the detective, so relentless in his scrutiny, begins to see no further than his own eyes. Auster uses the detective's method against the detective himself, like some cunning move in an infinite endgame.
As in the world of Borges, the solution destroys the solver. Quinn, as fraudulent detective, is obliterated by his own mesmerising construction, caught within himself, he learns that serious detection is no game. Auster's metaphysical reading of missing persons and investigative methodology make the detective figure seem like some rare breed of vigilant truth seeker, scratching at the core of some essential revelation without ever breaking the skin.
Ultimately, Auster's detectives are obsessed with nothing. Like Wakefield their fascination is excited by absence. Auster shares, with Thomas Pynchon, the ability to captivate his detective heroes with obscure signs and codes that lead nowhere but into complicated, multiplying darkness. In The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa Maas circumnavigates the mystery of the Trystero - an all-encompassing, transparent cipher that leaves her on the edge of breakdown. Auster and Pynchon abandon crime for intrigue, the obsessions of their investigators masking an empty centre - a locked room never to be opened. They have identified something intrinsically odd about the professional detective, a person who is paid to know and to find out. They are obliged to witness and to validate. In discovering something two things are called into question: the thing itself and that which identifies and perceives the thing. The more ambiguous and blurred the case, the more uncertain and in despair the detective. If the thing ceases to exist, the missing person never found, the code never broken, then what becomes of the detective? He is left stranded, like an outstretched arm, without a body.
The tangled web of Auster's reflexive New York Trilogy arrives at the same conclusion of Jaques Tourneur's mazey PI classic Out of the Past, whomever it is you are paid to follow, in such a lonely and voyeuristic profession, you are only ever really chasing your self.
Film noir has always lustily invited existential possibilities, her characters locked in a prison of self-doubt. Rudolph Mate’s D.O.A (1949) begins with the ACTORS NAME stumbling into a precinct, wishing to report a murder ‘Who’s murder?’ the night watchman innocently asks, ‘Mine’ growls the troubled hero, presenting the necromantic riddle to the gaping audience. In flashback we see that he has tried in vain to investigate his own murder, trying to find the formless malice that has killed him, slowly poisoned him, to be precise. So, we watch him struggle in a knot of dud clues and dark alleys, resisting what none of us ever will. Edgar G Ulmer, disputed king of the B picture, offers us Detour, about a man whom circumstance points a jagged finger at – perfectly expressing Camus’ view that 'at any street corner, the absurd may strike a man in the face’ – Tom Neal’s only wish is to make it from New York to L.A, hitchhiking to reunite with his jazz singer lover. But his future collapses before his eyes, as the kindly driver offering him safe passage keels over. In a moment of foolish panic, Neal steals the car and drives away, locking himself in as suspect number one and assuming the dead man’s identity while destroying his own. Eventually, he finds himself unable to return to New York and unable to make it to L.A, where the police are looking for him – so he is trapped in constant flight, destined to roam the highways as nobody. Although not a detective film, Ulmer’s Detour illustrates perfectly the suspicion and uncertainty the noir hero has about himself, and how, without vigilance, given the opportunity, he’ll stick the knife in. He has no suspect to pursue. The compulsive investigative desire of the detective’s quest for the truth is wiped out. Noir is filled with these acts of self-betrayal, these ultimate double crossings.
The shadow-western, Pursued, introduces us to Robert Mitchum’s alluring fatalistic dreamer, hounded by images of violence from his childhood, his life seems guided by some perverted force, leading him back to the scene of his nightmares, and the slaughter of his family. He seems predestined to follow an invisible ribbon of violence, offering no resistance, almost willing his own ruin, finally accepting the noose around his neck.
Later films incisively extract this strain of anxiety from the detective noir and work it into razor edged paranoia. Harry Caul, in Coppola’s The Conversation, illustrates how the detective’s very existence is governed by information and how a misreading of this information can lead to a misinterpreted existence. Harry is a surveillance expert, but when he believes himself to be the centre of a corporate conspiracy, the skills which have brought him renown in his field are of no use without any point of reference. So, to make sense of the world, Harry uses himself as a receiver to his own transmissions, sending him into an inward spiral of feedback and frenzy. Harry investigates the case without ever leaving his own skull, in the end imbedding the mystery at a depth to far for him to strip down to, leaving him utterly exposed and vulnerable.
Equally eager to self-destruct is Warren Beatty’s Joe Frady in Pakula’s The Parallax View, vigorously undeterred by the certain fact that he will only truly understand the sinister motives of the parallax corporation at the point at which they destroy him. Frady buries himself under two aliases, and when his only undercover contact is murdered, he finds himself stranded in his own complicated theories, he becomes purely a fictional creation, and without substance he struggles toward the bright light of truth blindly. A figure stands before him, however, intruding on his personal fantasy with a blast of reality, confirming Joe’s suspicions while simultaneously rendering his flickering instant of realization useless, a history known to nobody.
Both Klute and Vertigo drown two vague detectives in a phychosexual whirlpool. Scottie becomes entranced by his own fascination with an onerous doppelganger and John Klute appears to be a man hiding behind his own eyes, peering out at his own voyeurism as his own case unravels of its own accord. These two pursuers isolate the detective’s obsession with following, force themselves into a erotic metaphysical slipstream of passing clues and fleeting connections, without ever knowing what they’re chasing.
Arthur Penn’s Nightmoves gives us the defeatist Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) who tails his own wife on a whim, discovering her infidelity. Like a jaded Wakefield, Moseby never returns and exiled from his own home, he takes a missing persons case that he immediately solves, only to uncover a smuggling plot that leaves him bleeding to death, driving in wide circles. Like the infinite chess move the title refers to, Moseby seems determined to confront himself with the hopelessness of his own actions, a realization that leaves the detective, a man of strategy and logic, literally spiralling out of control, moving off the board.
Other modern texts indicate that the existential detective story continues to thrive. Perez-Reverte's The Dumas Club, in which the literary detective becomes integrated into the very text he is attempting to decipher and Alan Parker's Angel Heart, where amnesiac detective Harry Angel tracks himself down as the corrupted Faustian crooner Johnny Favourite, both function on the inextricability of the detective figure within the crime that he attempts to solve. Angel has spent his time trying to piece together scraps of information about his missing person, ultimately discovering that he himself is the last clue to the solution of the mystery.
There are things which do not permit themselves to be read and there are detectives, those who must read them.
The narrator of Man of the Crowd describes the various types of people who pass in front of the London club in which he sits. Gazing through the 'smoky glass', out narrator, recovering from an undisclosed illness, takes an unnatural interest in the crowd flowing by. The narrator's analytic mind is capable of classifying the crowd into convenient types. However, he is unable to place a crook'd old man who passes the window. His instant fascination with this man of the crowd is arresting. Night has descended on London like a net, the narrator, from his well lit vantage point, in scrutinizing the old man, must simultaneously be looking at his own illuminated image in the glass. From the outset, our man is someone else. It is his desire to analyse this refraction of himself that drives the narrator from the club and onto the labyrinthine London streets in pursuit of this unplaceable other.
Our narrator almost immediately assumes a 'craving desire' to keep the man in view, as if trying to confirm his own reflection in a continuation of the doubling we expect from Poe. He maintains the stance of the detective, following closely, yet unobserved, processing possibilities and variables through his well reasoned mind. The narrator is searching for some motive, following the man for more than twenty-four hours through London's warren-like network of alleys and lanes, focussing solely on the hidden purpose of the old man, oblivious to his own. As he pursues the old man in a spasm of existential crisis, we too, equally without motive in this story without reason, pursue the narrator in a chain of curiosity linked by the most tenuous of suspicions.
The crime in this story sets the cautious, fractious tone of stories to come. The narrator circles some crime of the soul, some escalating metaphysical panic, following himself in practical isolation, finding the process irresistable and all absorbing. Our investigator grows 'wearied unto death' in the course of his all night chase, arriving back to the very point where he began, having learned nothing of the old man, concluding only with what he already knew: 'er lasst sich nicht lessen' - it does not permit itself to be read. The impenetrability of the mystery functions like some merciful barrier beyond which lies the dark realm of this 'genius of deep crime'. As the story ends, it seems possible that our narrator, drawn in as if self-doubt were magnetised, has transcended this essential barrier and become, himself a man of the crowd.
The detective figure is inextricably implicated in that which he describes, a likely, self-involving, feature of the existential detective story. In Jorge Luis Borges' two major contributions to the genre, The Garden of Forking Paths and Death and the Compass, the detective himself is the last clue, the final piece of the puzzle he is trying to solve. In both cases, the crime cannot exist without the intervention of the curious investigator. Death and the Compass presents us with the Dupin-like figure of Lönrott, the world's greatest detective. Lönrott's very role as a brilliant detective, attempting to stop a series of three murders, leads himself into the trap of becoming the fourth and ultimate victim of a vengeful plot designed solely for that purpose. Lönrott's instinctively critical, investigative mind works against him in an act of intellectual self-murder, unable to sustain itself in what we are told is the most perplexing of all labyrinths, that which is an endless straight line. Lönrott's complex mind, so used to inter-connecting narratives and motives, collapses under the open, self-effacing obviousness of the hideously straight labyrinth.
The Garden of Forking Paths takes the detective's participation in crime one step further. Our narrator, a German spy during WW1, can find no other way to communicate to Berlin the name of the city that the British are planning to bomb than to murder, and be hanged for the crime. In being executed, his very name, Stephen Albert, is broadcast as the name of the city to be bombed. The detective figure crystallises himself into clue, crime and solution - detective, victim and criminal in a maze of hazy implications.
The Man of the Crowd and Borges' short stories give trembling voice to the 'other who turns out to be me' theme that defines the existential detective story. A true example of this technique can be found in Beckett's Malloy in which the detective is abstractly transfigured into the very man he pursues. Paul Auster's New York Trilogy continues to explore this endemic notion of the detective's split identity further still.
Each of Auster's Chinese-box trilogy revolves around Nathaniel Hawthorne's short story of disappearance, Wakefield. Wakefield is a man who 'absents' himself from his wife as a brief prank but finds, having stepped out from his life, he cannot return. He spends the rest of his life investigating the empty space he has left behind. It is a particularly urban puzzle of a man who loses himself in a crowd. Hawthorne opens a theme conquered by Auster: the complex loneliness of the city. The detective figure, whose thought processes are linked by alleys and streets like synaptic nerves, moves through the city of his mind, wearied and decentred by some dissolving equation, some lost motive.
Auster takes his cue from Wakefield's self-imposed existential dilemma. Quinn and Blue become obsessively engaged, like Poe's compulsive narrator, in voyeuristic surveillance whilst Fanshawe pounds desperately on the door of the tantalisingly locked room. Manipulating the detective genre's fixation with closure, Auster’s anorexic investigators gaze hopelessly into a maze of their own making, denying themselves any morsel of satisfaction. The reader too is left starved by the narrative as each tale manages to unfold beyond its final word, unsolved, fully chewed yet undigested. Abstinence, in Auster’s work is a lunge for clarification; detection as selective consumption, sifting through clues, codes and signs for something to satisfy their needs once and for all. Quite often it is total destruction.
In Ghosts a man is in such ontological despair that he hires a detective to watch him constantly, as if existing only in the other's perception, reading detailed reports of his own behaviour. As seems to be the case in these metaphysical shoot-outs, the detective, so relentless in his scrutiny, begins to see no further than his own eyes. Auster uses the detective's method against the detective himself, like some cunning move in an infinite endgame.
As in the world of Borges, the solution destroys the solver. Quinn, as fraudulent detective, is obliterated by his own mesmerising construction, caught within himself, he learns that serious detection is no game. Auster's metaphysical reading of missing persons and investigative methodology make the detective figure seem like some rare breed of vigilant truth seeker, scratching at the core of some essential revelation without ever breaking the skin.
Ultimately, Auster's detectives are obsessed with nothing. Like Wakefield their fascination is excited by absence. Auster shares, with Thomas Pynchon, the ability to captivate his detective heroes with obscure signs and codes that lead nowhere but into complicated, multiplying darkness. In The Crying of Lot 49 Oedipa Maas circumnavigates the mystery of the Trystero - an all-encompassing, transparent cipher that leaves her on the edge of breakdown. Auster and Pynchon abandon crime for intrigue, the obsessions of their investigators masking an empty centre - a locked room never to be opened. They have identified something intrinsically odd about the professional detective, a person who is paid to know and to find out. They are obliged to witness and to validate. In discovering something two things are called into question: the thing itself and that which identifies and perceives the thing. The more ambiguous and blurred the case, the more uncertain and in despair the detective. If the thing ceases to exist, the missing person never found, the code never broken, then what becomes of the detective? He is left stranded, like an outstretched arm, without a body.
The tangled web of Auster's reflexive New York Trilogy arrives at the same conclusion of Jaques Tourneur's mazey PI classic Out of the Past, whomever it is you are paid to follow, in such a lonely and voyeuristic profession, you are only ever really chasing your self.
Film noir has always lustily invited existential possibilities, her characters locked in a prison of self-doubt. Rudolph Mate’s D.O.A (1949) begins with the ACTORS NAME stumbling into a precinct, wishing to report a murder ‘Who’s murder?’ the night watchman innocently asks, ‘Mine’ growls the troubled hero, presenting the necromantic riddle to the gaping audience. In flashback we see that he has tried in vain to investigate his own murder, trying to find the formless malice that has killed him, slowly poisoned him, to be precise. So, we watch him struggle in a knot of dud clues and dark alleys, resisting what none of us ever will. Edgar G Ulmer, disputed king of the B picture, offers us Detour, about a man whom circumstance points a jagged finger at – perfectly expressing Camus’ view that 'at any street corner, the absurd may strike a man in the face’ – Tom Neal’s only wish is to make it from New York to L.A, hitchhiking to reunite with his jazz singer lover. But his future collapses before his eyes, as the kindly driver offering him safe passage keels over. In a moment of foolish panic, Neal steals the car and drives away, locking himself in as suspect number one and assuming the dead man’s identity while destroying his own. Eventually, he finds himself unable to return to New York and unable to make it to L.A, where the police are looking for him – so he is trapped in constant flight, destined to roam the highways as nobody. Although not a detective film, Ulmer’s Detour illustrates perfectly the suspicion and uncertainty the noir hero has about himself, and how, without vigilance, given the opportunity, he’ll stick the knife in. He has no suspect to pursue. The compulsive investigative desire of the detective’s quest for the truth is wiped out. Noir is filled with these acts of self-betrayal, these ultimate double crossings.
The shadow-western, Pursued, introduces us to Robert Mitchum’s alluring fatalistic dreamer, hounded by images of violence from his childhood, his life seems guided by some perverted force, leading him back to the scene of his nightmares, and the slaughter of his family. He seems predestined to follow an invisible ribbon of violence, offering no resistance, almost willing his own ruin, finally accepting the noose around his neck.
Later films incisively extract this strain of anxiety from the detective noir and work it into razor edged paranoia. Harry Caul, in Coppola’s The Conversation, illustrates how the detective’s very existence is governed by information and how a misreading of this information can lead to a misinterpreted existence. Harry is a surveillance expert, but when he believes himself to be the centre of a corporate conspiracy, the skills which have brought him renown in his field are of no use without any point of reference. So, to make sense of the world, Harry uses himself as a receiver to his own transmissions, sending him into an inward spiral of feedback and frenzy. Harry investigates the case without ever leaving his own skull, in the end imbedding the mystery at a depth to far for him to strip down to, leaving him utterly exposed and vulnerable.
Equally eager to self-destruct is Warren Beatty’s Joe Frady in Pakula’s The Parallax View, vigorously undeterred by the certain fact that he will only truly understand the sinister motives of the parallax corporation at the point at which they destroy him. Frady buries himself under two aliases, and when his only undercover contact is murdered, he finds himself stranded in his own complicated theories, he becomes purely a fictional creation, and without substance he struggles toward the bright light of truth blindly. A figure stands before him, however, intruding on his personal fantasy with a blast of reality, confirming Joe’s suspicions while simultaneously rendering his flickering instant of realization useless, a history known to nobody.
Both Klute and Vertigo drown two vague detectives in a phychosexual whirlpool. Scottie becomes entranced by his own fascination with an onerous doppelganger and John Klute appears to be a man hiding behind his own eyes, peering out at his own voyeurism as his own case unravels of its own accord. These two pursuers isolate the detective’s obsession with following, force themselves into a erotic metaphysical slipstream of passing clues and fleeting connections, without ever knowing what they’re chasing.
Arthur Penn’s Nightmoves gives us the defeatist Harry Moseby (Gene Hackman) who tails his own wife on a whim, discovering her infidelity. Like a jaded Wakefield, Moseby never returns and exiled from his own home, he takes a missing persons case that he immediately solves, only to uncover a smuggling plot that leaves him bleeding to death, driving in wide circles. Like the infinite chess move the title refers to, Moseby seems determined to confront himself with the hopelessness of his own actions, a realization that leaves the detective, a man of strategy and logic, literally spiralling out of control, moving off the board.
Other modern texts indicate that the existential detective story continues to thrive. Perez-Reverte's The Dumas Club, in which the literary detective becomes integrated into the very text he is attempting to decipher and Alan Parker's Angel Heart, where amnesiac detective Harry Angel tracks himself down as the corrupted Faustian crooner Johnny Favourite, both function on the inextricability of the detective figure within the crime that he attempts to solve. Angel has spent his time trying to piece together scraps of information about his missing person, ultimately discovering that he himself is the last clue to the solution of the mystery.
There are things which do not permit themselves to be read and there are detectives, those who must read them.
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