Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story (review)

Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story. Heta Pyrhönen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999. Pp. viii + 338. $60.00 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Detective stories have presented a curious case to literary theory. Long seen as a lowbrow genre, detective fiction has been aligned with embodied thrills of excitement, suspense, anxiety, and fear, and consequently opposed to the more cerebral delights of "serious" literature. Moreover, as a genre long associated with the "guilty pleasures" of reading, detective fiction has frequently been suspected of inducing a kind of moral weakness that might potentially align its readers with the "criminal" element of the stories they read. In the past thirty years, however, structuralist theories of semiotics and narratology have done much to acquit detective fiction of its moral dubiousness by focusing on its form rather than its content. Such theories maintain that detective fiction, in its foregrounding of textuality, plotting, and epistemological inquiry, provides a model for narrative itself. The critical history of detective fiction thus appears as a split between the genre's morally suspect appeals to embodied pleasure and its edifying challenges to the cogitating mind.

Heta Pyrhönen's Mayhem and Murder tries to reconcile the contradictory testimony of these two schools of thought, arguing that only through a careful analysis of narrative structure can we arrive at an assessment of the moral effects of detective fiction on its readers. Or, as Pyrhönen puts it, we cannot separate the narrative question of "whodunit" from the moral question, "who is guilty?" (4) The detective's process of reading signs--and, by extension, the reader's reading of that process--involves "balancing the judicial code against the moral code in order to arrive at a just decision about the distribution of responsibility and guilt" (18). This reading of the detective's reading "is closely connected with forming a sense of character in terms of ethos, that is, moral makeup, requiring the assignment and appraisal of personal qualities and patterns of action" (27). Pyrhönen, drawing on the work of Martha Nussbaum among others, argues that detective fiction therefore has a particular moral value because it presents a "view of life"; that is, a representation of "how characters work out moral dilemmas in specific, practical situations" (28).

This pairing of narrative and moral questions is provocative, ambitious, and, as Mayhem and Murder proves, extremely difficult to accomplish in a satisfying way. The first half of the book rehearses narrative theories of the detective story from W. H. Auden to Slavoj Zizek, paying special attention to the semiotic analyses of Umberto Eco, the structuralist geometries of John Irwin, and the textual psychoanalytics of Peter Brooks. If this sounds like an omnibus approach, it is. Italicized terms fly thick and fast through the first half of the book, moving through classifications of four kinds of detective fiction (classical, hard-boiled, police procedural, "metaphysical"), three kinds of detective inquiry (abduction, narrative, thematization), three types of semiotic "texts" read by the investigating detective (imprints, symptoms, clues), and six "thematic operations" in which both detective and reader engage (position, suppression, composition, decomposition, generalization, and specification), to enumerate just a few of the schemata that Pyrhönen employs.

As an account of the narrative theories associated with detective fiction and a sort of toolbox from which one might garner a useful analytic concept here or there, the survey is welcome. Yet certain structural problems attend the role of theory in the larger argument of the book. Amid the relentless citation of other theorists and theories, one gets very little sense of Pyrhönen's own voice and perspective. Concept after concept and list after list are trundled out with minimal commentary by the author to contextualize their importance within the present argument. At the end of the first three chapters, the book begins to sag under the weight of its own theoretical edifice. By the time...