cambridge-crime-fiction

Detection and literary fiction
‘a monograph (in German) on the Tetragrammaton; another, on the divine
nomenclature of the Pentateuch’: ‘Indifferent to the police investigation, he
dedicated himself to studying them’. 38 He locates connections between a
note found at the scene of the crime – ‘the first letter of the Name has been
uttered’ – and the teachings of the Cabalistic texts, which revolve around
the name or names of God.
After a third murder is committed, Lönnrot receives a note informing him
that the sequence is complete; the triad of the murders is perfectly finished
in its equivalence to a temporal sequence (the murders are committed on
the third of the month) and a spatial one (the locations of the murder form
‘the perfect vertices of a mystic equilateral triangle’). Lönnrot’s researches,
however, lead him to read the note as a bluff, and he travels to a lonely villa in
search of the solution to the murders, believing that Yarmolinsky was killed
by Hasidic Jews searching for the secret Name of God. In the house, interior
spaces are doubled or multiplied in mirrors, and a spiral staircase leads
him to Red Sharlach, his sworn enemy, who reveals that he has entrapped
Lönnrot (the ‘rot’ or ‘red’ of whose name is an echo or mirroring of Sharlach’s
own, as Red Sharlach translates into Red Scarlet, the doubly red or, perhaps,
‘read’) by weaving a labyrinth around him: ‘I have woven it and it is firm:
the ingredients are a dead heresiologist, a compass, an eighteenth-century
sect, a Greek word, a dagger, the diamonds of a paint shop.’ 39
All these signs indicate quadruples rather than triads (‘the Tetragrammaton
– the name of God, JHVC – is made up of four letters’). Sharlach’s web
has led Lönnrot to look beyond the triangle of the three murders, and he
now occupies the fourth corner, the missing point, in which he, the detective,
will be killed by Sharlach’s bullet. 40 Lönnrot has followed the path or map
laid down for him to, in Sharlach’s words, ‘the point which would form
a perfect rhomb, the point which fixes in advance where a punctual death
awaits you’. 41 Yet, as Borges wrote in a note to the tale: ‘The killer and the
slain, whose minds work in the same way, may be the same man. Lönnrot is
not an unbelievable fool walking into his own death trap but, in a symbolic
way, a man committing suicide.’ 42
Alain Robbe-Grillet’s first published novel, The Erasers (Les Gommes)
(1953), also plays with the concept of the mirrored selves of detective and
criminal, working towards a dénouement in which the special investigator,
Wallas, becomes the killer of Daniel Dupont, whose apparent murder
he is investigating. Dupont has in fact only been injured; he returns to his
home, to encounter Wallas, who, waiting for the man or men whom he believes
responsible for Dupont’s murder, shoots him dead. This variant on the
Oedipus narrative, which shifts the ‘crime’ from past to future, is accompanied
by numerous references to the Oedipus myth, including a picture of
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