cambridge-crime-fiction

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chess and crossword puzzles, arguing that the pleasures of the detective novel
were, for the modern reader, almost entirely ‘ratiocinative’. The concept of
‘fair play’ in the construction of detective narratives suggested an ethical
dimension, but was rather more important as a way of emphasising the
ludic aspects of the genre, central to the theories of writers on detective
fiction such as Roger Caillois, whose work has had a significant influence
on postmodern theory. Caillois was fascinated by the role of games and
play in culture and, as Jorge Luis Borges noted in his review of Caillois’s
Le Roman policier, analysed the role of detective fiction as ‘rational game,
lucid game’. 69 More generally, detective fiction, as Dennis Porter has argued,
constructs an ‘ambience of play’ in the form of the ‘surprise of crime’, which
emerges in, for example, the use of the most unlikely suspect and the most
improbable detective figure, the classic example of whom is Agatha Christie’s
Miss Marple. 70
Detective fiction was of central interest to the Oulipo, (Ouvroir de
Literature Potentielle), founded by the experimental writers Raymond
Queneau and François Le Lionnais in 1960 to explore the ways in which
abstract restrictions could be combined with imaginative writing (as in
George Perec’s novel La Disparition (1969), written without the letter e).
In 1973, LeLionnais inaugurated the Oulipopo (Ouvroir de Litterature
Policière Potentielle); its first projects were analyses ‘dissecting many known
or possible combinations concerning situation and character in the mystery
story’ (Analytic Oulipopo), proceeding to ways ‘to discover, distinguish, or
invent procedures or constraints that could serve as “aids to imagination” of
writers of detective stories’ (Synthetic Oulipopo). 71 Oulipopian experiments
included ‘Haikuisation’ – ‘A version of the Oulipian procedure whereby the
first and last sentences or phrases of a detective novel are alone retained,
these being traditionally the most significant in works of this genre’ – and
the writing of a detective novel in which the reader is guilty. The Oulipopo
group were fascinated by the construction of rules for composing detective
fiction, particularly those of S. S. Van Dine and Ronald Knox, turning
these early twentieth-century attempts to define the conventions and limits
of the detective genre into literary games that combined surrealism and
structuralism. George Perec’s final novel 53 Days (2000), unfinished at his
death and completed from his notes by Oulipians Harry Matthews and
Jacques Roubaud, is a ‘literary thriller’ which inscribes, among other texts,
Stendhal’s The Charterhouse of Parma (the 53 days of Perec’s title refers to
the time taken by Stendhal to dictate his novel), Agatha Christie’s And Then
There Were None (1939) inwhich, in Perec’s words, ‘nine unconvicted culprits
are executed . . . by a judge who makes it seem as if he is the tenth
(but not the last) victim’, and a short story by the crime writer Maurice
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