1Is short crime fiction a popular or a serious genre, or perhaps both? Writers and readers often seem not to take the form too seriously. From the start, writers have parodied it even in practising it. The form has tended to include ironic distance, to accept itself as a primarily popular genre. Meanwhile readers, especially literary critics, have generally seen it as of limited intellectual interest. I myself have been guilty of this. In my twenties, a serious fellow interested in “serious” literature, I wrote book reviews for Books and Bookmen. For a while, before its demise, Books and Bookmen was shortened to Books. Now free in newsagents, its purpose was simply to sell books. It stopped being a place for “serious” discussion. I was asked to review Mary Higgins Clark’s While My Pretty One Sleeps, a work of crime fiction that left me pompously unimpressed. After all, Clark had already sold fifteen million books in the United States alone, and this novel about the murder of Ethel Lambston, a bestselling New York novelist about to unleash a fashion scandal, had been top-listed for six weeks. How could it be any good? When the magazine came out, there was a laudatory profile near the front, and near the back my snotty little review in which I stated that “the interest generated” by the novel “centres almost exclusively on two things: whodunit, and who’ll get done before the truth is out.” Clark, I pontificated, is a “dab-hand at slick plots . . . but the ‘suspense’ rarely grips because the characters are as lifeless as the clothes in Ethel’s closet” and “verbal and situational clichés stick out like out-of-date shoulder pads” (15). I ended by quoting an editor in the novel who, asked his view of a manuscript, replies, “frightful, but it will sell big” (16). Prejudices confirmed, I moved on to an illustrious career as a writer of academic books that sold rather less well than the novels of Mary Higgins Clark.

2Regardless of the merits of Clark’s novel, I was completely wrong about crime fiction in general, short or long. Formulaic as a certain kind of it has always been, there are numerous examples of crime fiction that are great literature in the sense that a serious young reader wants them to be. From “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” to Crime and Punishment to many works by Joyce Carol Oates to stories I read in preparation for this presentation—notably Josh Pachter’s “iMurder” and Jennifer Gifford’s “I Am Nightmare”—crime fiction is clearly far more than a genre of popular entertainment.

*

3Nevertheless, the inclination to parody aspects of the genre has always been there. When the culprit in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” turns out to be an Orangutan, and the supposed crime motiveless, ironic distance is evident even as the genre is born. When, in “The Purloined Letter,” Poe gives us a process of deduction that is complex to the point of absurdity, we see again his distance from the whole notion of deduction. When we read Mark Twain’s “The Stolen White Elephant,” in which teams of detectives are deployed in search of a gigantic, hungry, highly visible, slow-moving beast, we witness a total spoof of the detective genre. To an extent the same is true of “Lord Arthur Savile’s Crime,” in which Septimus R. Podgers, a palmist, or cheiromantist as Oscar Wilde calls him, tells the eponymous hero that he will commit a murder. He spends the story trying unsuccessfully to do so before eventually murdering Podgers by pushing him into the Thames. In the present day, ironic distance is a likely reason why Oates has mostly published crime fiction under the pseudonyms Lauren Kelly and Rosamond Smith. It signals that such novels are more about entertainment than weightier matters.

4The impulse to parody remains in me, too. In suggesting why, I may indeed, albeit with a serious final point, be mildly parodying the process. For instance, in planning this enquiry, I have felt a little like an amateur detective—not all that qualified (no specialist in the genre) but certainly as curious as a Holmes, a Dupin, a Marple or a Lupin. I have been seeking clues and answers to what short crime fiction is, why it gets written, and why it is so popular. Having what neuroscientist Anil Seth calls the power of “a strong prior belief” (101), I understood something of the nature and circumstances of what I was about to explore, and perhaps solve, but I needed to do some investigation.

5Unable to locate an introduction to short crime fiction, I started with the next-best equivalent of a Detective’s Handbook, Richard Bradford’s Crime Fiction: A Very Short Introduction, along with a collection of classic and contemporary short crime fiction, Martin Edwards’s Crime & Mystery Short Stories: Anthology of New and Classic Tales, in which I found “iMurder” and “I Am Nightmare.” Bradford reminded me that short crime fiction is not a niche genre at all. It pervades great literature as well as being a source of mere entertainment. He cites Hamlet as crime fiction, and rightly so.

6There are of course characteristics we can observe in classic crime fiction as it develops. As Bradford notes, Tzvetan Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction” provides a framework: classic crime fiction, including short crime fiction, is made of two stories. The first usually occurs before the narrative opens with a murder or some other criminal act. The second involves characters who disclose aspects of the first to the reader through methods of detection or unwitting revelations. Looking at some of the works of short crime fiction discussed at the Lille Study Day that led to the current volume, we see that William Gay’s “The Paperhanger” starts with a daughter’s disappearance that turns out to be a murder. The rest of the story involves the mother seeking clues to the mystery. By the end, we know the horrible resolution that she will wake to discover. In Raymond Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home,” a wife learns that her husband and friends have discovered a murdered girl in water while on an angling trip they have chosen to take far from home, even though there are plenty of fishing options nearby. They camp overnight before reporting their find. Given the husband’s character, attitude and response, we as readers, like the wife, are suspicious. The story remains open-ended, but we accompany the wife to her implied conclusion that her husband is either guilty or capable of being so. Even Joyce Carol Oates’s very short narrative, “Slow,” opens with an event that has already happened and closes with the wife’s feeling that nothing will ever be the same again. Once more, we try, like the wife, to understand what is going on.

7Still, even as I did my research, sifting evidence to discover the nature of short crime fiction, Bradford reminded me that its path has never run smoothly. He writes that “while we might treat Poe as the founder of a tradition of problem-solving detectives we should also recognise that what appeared after him was very different from his idiosyncratic precedent” (7). He points out that “The Purloined Letter” is “almost as implausible” as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and that Poe diminishes “the believable and the familiar at the expense of a very perverse meditation on our capacity to comprehend other human beings and their traits” (10). Poe cannot, for Bradford, therefore be considered the true inventor of the genre of classic detective fiction, where reader and detective share perspectives and objectives: to solve crime and identify the perpetrator. Rather, he notes, Balzac’s Père Goriot, six years before Poe’s first story, has all the hallmarks of crime fiction except that it centres on the social aspiration of Rastignac. Balzac’s friendship with chief of police Eugène François Vidocq, whose 1827 memoirs are alluded to by Sherlock Holmes by the name of Lecoq in A Study in Scarlet, led Balzac to create his master of disguise, Vautrin. Bradford may have a point, but Rastignac and Vautrin, while first appearing in the relatively short Père Goriot, are primarily recurring characters in Balzac’s novelistic enterprise, La Comédie Humaine. Poe is therefore more obviously the father of short crime fiction in its modern form, and it is to him as the genre’s initiator that I will return.

*

8If the search for a resolution remains a fundamental pattern of crime fiction, short or long, it often involves not just a search for the truth but, as Bradford discusses, a pursuit of meaning against what otherwise looks like a random world. This pursuit involves “logic and deduction”: “how a sequence of apparently unrelated clues and events can be shown to be a narrative of motivation, cause, action, and eventually disclosure” (62), but solutions are as likely to be found through intuition as through reason. An aspect of this is that narrative tension is often “generated less by whodunit than by whydunit” (30). We are in pursuit of a motive as much as a criminal. But here, too, this staple of the genre is frequently subject to subversion. The pursuit of truth is laced with irony. The urge to subvert to the point of parody remains. Beyond Poe, a later example of this is Jorge Luis Borges’s “Death and the Compass.” Borges reverses the traditional plot so that the murderer creates a trail of murders for the detective to follow. Having finally explained this to the detective, the murderer then shoots him dead. The whydunit, or motive, turns out to be a desire to mock the detective’s raison d’être to the point of making the detective the victim.

9Joyce Carol Oates’s postmodernist detective novel, Mysteries of Winterthurn, though itself lengthy, is influenced by a work that we can call short crime fiction, Kafka’s The Trial. Both Kafka and Oates are interested in the limitations of the idea of the “mystery solved”: that solutions are the ideal and must be sought. Mysteries of Winterthurn is told in the manner of the genre but the hero-detective, Xavier Kilgarvan, chases the suspected killer down a labyrinth which increasingly suggests that the detective is complicit in the events he examines. Linda Wagner-Martin observes that Oates “gives the reader the most rational of frameworks,” including “the separate, three-part mystery structure” and “a sane narrative voice that describes a seemingly sane detective figure” but that none of this leads us to a solution (208). Since Winterthurn ironises the genre it purports to adopt, we cannot approach it like a conventional detective novel without becoming versions of the defective detective or his fictional precursor, Joseph K. It is a Kafkaesque maze: to seek to escape it is to be like Kafka’s heroes, whose frenzied activities seal their fate. Xavier’s gradual insight into the limitations of the notion of an individual hero-detective “solving” mysteries is what allows him to become his own saviour.

10In “Kafka’s Paradise,” Oates argues that “the more Kafka’s heroes strive for victory, the more violently their intellects demand explanations, the more inevitable their doom.” Kafka’s heroes, she argues, are not meant to be identified with but to be seen as models of how the intellect can be the enemy of the individual. She provides a direct link between Kafka’s world and the world of detective fiction that Kafka’s novels also parody. “Kafka said, in explanation of his dislike for detective fiction,” she writes, “that in real life mystery isn’t hidden in the background.” On the contrary, “every-day is the greatest detective story ever written” (291). It has long been tempting to interpret The Trial as anticipating the horrors of twentieth-century European totalitarianism, but to see Kafka’s actual worldview, rather than interpret that novella retrospectively, all you need do is read The Trial in the first rather than third person. Influenced by Taoism, Kafka’s perspective is that Joseph K. is responsible for his own fate. He commits a crime against himself.

11Beyond the problem of the pursuit of solutions, there is the problem of the pursuit of meaning. For we have the question of the crime without motive. This idea is used in longer form by Stendhal in The Red and the Black, in short crime fiction by Flannery O’Connor in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” by Bruce Springsteen in his crime-story-in-verse, “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come),” and evident in life itself in the tragic story of the Entwistles. All are examples of crimes seemingly without motive. In The Red and the Black, Julien Sorel shoots his former lover, Madame de Renal. Given that the act destroys everything he has worked for, it is never clear why he does so. Critics of Stendhal might say that the abbreviated ending is typical of his slapdash approach. But Stendhal was subtle about human behaviour. The novel offers the possibility that there is no clear motivation. Julien commits the act and then rationalises it.

12Contemporary science has caught up with Stendhal. Psychologist Helen Phillips, in a 2006 New Scientist article, “Every Day Fairy Tales,” wrote that “there is certainly plenty of evidence that much of what we do is the result of unconscious brain processing, and that our consciousness seems to be interpreting what has happened rather than driving it.” She cites experiments “suggesting that a signal to move a finger appears in the brain several hundred milliseconds before someone consciously decides to move that finger.” She thus challenges the notion of free will, suggesting that maybe “all our consciousness ever does is dream up stories in an attempt to make sense of the world” (32-36).

13When it comes to actual life, aberrant behaviour without evident motive disturbs us all the more. In The London Review of Books from 2008, Jonathan Raban wrote about the case of Neil Entwistle’s 2006 murder of his wife, Rachel, and their baby daughter. Entwistle, from Yorkshire, met Rachel and they moved to Massachusetts. Four months into their American life, he took a gun from his in-laws’ cabinet in Carver, Massachusetts, drove several miles, shot his wife and daughter dead, drove back to her parents’ house, replaced the gun and flew to Britain. Phone-interviewed by American police, his responses suggest a state of mind remarkably similar to Julien’s after shooting Madame de Renal. “Julien stood motionless with unseeing eyes,” Stendhal tells us. “‘Fancy that, it’s all over,’ he said out loud when he came to his senses” (468). Entwistle is recorded as saying “I haven’t even cried yet.” “You haven’t even cried?” asks a police officer. “No, not properly,” Entwistle replies. “I think it’s because I’m here. It almost doesn’t seem real. It’s just a void.” No one has ever been able to explain why Entwistle did it. Lead prosecutor, Michael Fabbri, asked about a motive on MetroWest Daily News, replied: “Sometimes, you just don’t know why. . . . No ‘why’ would really explain this. There is no why” (Raban 9).

14In short crime fiction, O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find” confronts this possibility that a violent act might be inexplicable: that the quest for meaning and truth, the very staple of the genre, might be an inadequate approach to the world. It depicts a grandmother, parents, son, daughter and family cat, travelling from Georgia to Florida. When they detour to find a mansion that the grandmother remembers, the cat escapes its box, causing the car to roll into a ditch. A psychopath named “The Misfit” finds them. Recognised by the grandmother from newspapers, he and his companions slaughter the entire family. The story is shocking for more than just the violence. The detour was pointless; the grandmother realises too late that the mansion is not in Georgia, but Tennessee. The children, thrilled to be in a real accident, are shot along with the adults. The Misfit picks up the cat at the end and says, “It’s no real pleasure in life” (132). The Misfit is not just a misfit in life, but in short crime fiction, where whydunit is supposed to matter.

15Influenced by O’Connor, Springsteen has produced several songs that amount to short crime fiction. One is “Nebraska,” based on a true story dramatised in the film, Badlands. The narrator and perpetrator of a pointless series of murders has no explanation except: “I guess there’s just a meanness in this world.” Another is “From Small Things (Big Things One Day Come).” The song’s thrumming energy belies a curious tale. The protagonist leaves high school to serve hamburgers. In a letter to her mother, she writes the phrase that forms the song’s title. At first, she is suggesting that the most menial job might lead to bettering oneself. But the phrase changes meaning through the song. She marries a customer named Johnny and they have a son and daughter. Years pass. Restless, she runs off to Tampa with a new man, again writing the phrase home to her mother. Perhaps she now means that flirtation led to a grand passion, or maybe she considers life with her lover an improvement on housewifery. But suddenly, shockingly, she has shot her lover dead. Arrested and asked why, she says “she couldn’t stand the way he drove.” Sometimes, indeed, there is no whydunit—no solution to the mystery of human behaviour.

16Another way short crime fiction subverts its own premise of asserting categories and clear solutions is by collapsing them even as it creates them. This happens all the way from Poe to Josh Pachter’s highly self-referential “iMurder,” a contemporary spoof targeting both traditional patterns of short crime fiction and our dependence on social media. (The protagonist states that “if this was fiction, a detective story I was writing for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine or some other periodical that pays authors by the word, I would now launch into a lengthy description of how I use the app” [321].) Detectives, to use the term loosely, are often outsiders, whether the upper-class eccentrics in the so-called golden age of detective fiction in Britain, or the gritty outsiders of American hard-boiled crime fiction. They might even, as in “Death and the Compass,” be the victims. In crime fiction in general, criminals can be detectives, and vice versa. In Crime and Punishment for instance, Porfiry, the examining magistrate who investigates Raskolnikov, is not at all, as Bradford would have us believe, “the most balanced, disinterested figure in the novel” (72). He may be a father confessor but, with his tricks, games and strategies, his bustling around in his dressing gown talking about haemorrhoids and swallowing flies, and in the general excited pleasure he gets from Raskolnikov’s discomfort, he is definitely a kinky sadist. The aberrant tendencies of numerous detectives allow them empathic understanding of the criminal mind. Collapsing oppositions also include doubles and disguise—not least in Dostoevsky, from “The Double” to Crime and Punishment, where Raskolnikov’s name means “schism”—but also, for instance, in Joyce Carol Oates’s Rosamond Smith crime narratives, such as Lives of the Twins (1987), in which a woman embarks on an affair with a man before discovering that he has an almost identical (but evil) twin.

*

17So I gathered evidence and found my solution to the mystery of what crime fiction is, why it gets written, and why the short form in particular is so popular. I am no more than an amateur detective—or, so far as study of short crime fiction is concerned, an outsider—and I am no scientist, but my answer has to do with the science behind it. That science, in turn, resurrects Edgar Allan Poe as its true pioneer, just as he is the founding link between the detective story and the Gothic. When Bradford claims Poe undermines his status as the genre’s founder with his “perverse meditation on our capacity to comprehend other human beings and their traits” (10), he unwittingly pinpoints why Poe is in fact so important to what short crime fiction has always been about. Poe invented detective fiction, and not least its Gothic element, not despite his interest is the way the human brain works but because of it. His basic pattern, to consider phenomena and then to interpret that phenomena, is the fundamental learning pattern of the human brain. This means that short crime fiction is both profound, in that it is about the human need to search for meaning, and inevitably distanced from itself and subject to parody. It is almost always treated, by both writer and reader, as a puzzle that is not life itself, not a real dilemma, but a simulacrum of life, designed to satisfy our natures rather than solve actual problems. Most fundamentally, therefore, it is a form of brain exercise.

18Why the short form in particular? Often, with a puzzle, we just want to dip in, or have it, like life, as episodic, self-contained—as epitomised by the episodic narrative that makes up the Sherlock Holmes stories. The short form is especially apt when we are dealing with puzzles, with parodies, with ironic awareness that we and the author are involved in a game that is finite each time, that can be entered quickly and quickly left behind to pursue, if we wish, another such game. Like all games it has rules, though it is often most interesting when the rules are stretched or broken. It is a rare piece of short crime fiction, such as Jennifer Gifford’s “I Am Nightmare,” that penetrates our minds beyond engagement with the puzzle. The central incident of Gifford’s story is comically horrific. Switching on a hairdryer, a girl awakens hundreds of tiny black spiders, the shocking sight and feel of which send her slipping over a staircase railing onto “the hardwood floor of the farmhouse with a sickening thud” (193). But the perpetrator—the killer—is a phenomenon personified, and that phenomenon, Nightmare, is something that will occur in everyone’s life. The story thus addresses a disturbing, inescapable fact. In general, though, we try to solve whatever puzzle is presented without taking it seriously.

19This may well have a scientific basis. The neuroscientist I mentioned earlier, Anil Seth, argues in his book about consciousness, Being You, that the way the human brain adapts its model of the world is by discovering that which has not occurred before and thereby coming to a new way of seeing the world. If Seth is right then crime fiction appeals to a very basic aspect of how our brains are wired. The way the brain works, according to Seth, is that it receives the latest sensation, and deduces a slightly altered reality from that. “What we call reality” comes from this process (87). He explains that “at any one time we have precisely one conscious experience out of vastly many possible conscious experiences.” Given this, “every conscious experience therefore delivers a massive reduction of uncertainty, since this experience is being had, and not that experience, or that experience, and so on, and reduction of uncertainty is—mathematically—what is meant by information” (53). To align this more obviously with crime fiction: our brain asks what has gone wrong and why, and how it can make sense of this by finding a purpose (or motive) behind it.

20The brain, of course, is blind. It simply interprets the signals it receives. “Really try to think what it’s like up there,” Seth goes on,

sealed inside the bony vault of the skull, trying to figure out what’s out there in the world. There’s no light, no sound, no anything—it’s completely dark and utterly silent. When trying to form perceptions all the brain has to go on is a constant barrage of electrical signals which are only indirectly related to things out there in the world, whatever they may be. (75)

21“The idea that the brain is a ‘prediction machine,’” he notes, goes against “a commonsense view of perception” that “there’s a mind-independent reality out there” (76). But his larger claim is that what we experience

is a reaching out from the brain to the world, a writing as much as a reading. The entirety of perceptual experience is a neuronal fantasy that remains yoked to the world through a continuous making and remaking of perceptual best guesses, of controlled hallucinations. You could even say that we’re all hallucinating all the time. It’s just that we agree about our hallucinations, that’s what we call reality. (87)

22Seth cites eighteenth-century philosopher Thomas Bayes’s “Essay Towards Solving a Problem in the Doctrine of Chances.” Bayesian reasoning is “abductive” (Seth 97); it is about “finding the best explanation for a set of observations, when these observations are incomplete, uncertain, or otherwise ambiguous” (98), as opposed to deductive (solution by logic alone) or inductive (extrapolation from a series of observations). Seth argues that perception is “a rolling process, not a static snapshot” (102). If we apply these insights to short crime fiction, Seth is essentially saying that our brains are involved in detective work. We literally cannot see the truth, but our brains receive sensations and we guess at reality by assessing that data. We never have a final answer, though our brains seek one. Instead, our brains are involved in an on-going narrative. Again, the puzzle is ironic. It explains why crime fiction has rarely been taken seriously as literature, and why it often does not take itself seriously. Within it is the acknowledgement that it is a game: a brain exercise. It is a genre about the process of living. “My ultimate object is only the truth,” says Dupin in “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (261). But truth, from Poe through Conan Doyle to Oates and Carver, is an elusive thing. Nor is “solution by logic alone” sufficient. We, as detectives, also need to find explanations, à la Thomas Bayes, from abductive as well as inductive reasoning. Intuition is as vital as logic, maybe more so.

23Dr. Watson observes that Holmes, like many a later sleuth, uses something more than logic. He is creative. Holmes says to him, in “The Blue Carbuncle,” that while he sees everything, he is “too timid” in drawing his “inferences.” Watson is too pedestrian, too unimaginative, even too scientific. Unlike Holmes in “The Stockbroker’s Clerk,” he does not keep “his cigars in a coal-scuttle, his tobacco in the toe-end of a Persian slipper, and his unanswered correspondence transfixed by a jack knife into the very centre of his wooden mantelpiece” (396). He does not, as Holmes does in “The Blue Carbuncle,” solve a problem while sitting “upon five pillows” and consuming “an ounce of shag” (150). Basically he does not do enough drugs and is altogether too healthy to have the insight that Holmes has.

24Truth, then, is neither found by way of a straight line nor necessarily discoverable in any final form. In “The Paperhanger,” neither the murderer nor we can be entirely sure of the motive. “Sometimes,” he tells the sleeping mother to whom he has brought her daughter’s corpse, “you do things you can’t undo. You break things you can’t fix. Before you mean to, before you know you’ve done it” (Gay 91). It is not clear why the woman kills in Springsteen’s “From Small Things.” There is no obvious reason why the family are shot in O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” We never know for sure whether the husband in “So Much Water So Close to Home” is actually a killer. And, in real life, nobody knows why Neil Entwistle killed his wife and daughter. “Sometimes there is no why.” No answer to whydunit.

*

25The final question is why “parody” marks short crime fiction as a serious genre. This is the Poe-litics of a Popular Genre. For, if you think about it, it is not all just a game, is it? Or at least, the game is a serious exercise in training us to respond to the world. To parody, to subvert, is to undermine certainty, including pomposity or self-regard. To undermine pomposity is to ironise, perhaps to mock, perhaps merely to undermine foundations—including the foundations of power. In exploring our very brain processes, we are refining our assessment of the sensations that beset us. We are learning to think ever more critically. This can be a threat to those who would control our perceptions. Not only is it the way our brains are wired, but it is also a training of brains into critical thinking, creativity and sharpened awareness about the world’s complexity. In Carver’s “So Much Water So Close to Home,” for instance, the narrator is effectively a detective. She researches the facts, reads the papers, attends the funeral, and speaks to someone who knew the girl. The reader accompanies her like Dr. Watson to Sherlock Holmes or Sergeant Lewis to Inspector Morse. For readers are themselves detectives. When we “teach” literature we train students to be detectives, too. We teach them to scrutinise, to seek clues, either to articulate meanings they can “prove” or to make readings of the text to convince others of.

26The challenge of writers as sharp as Borges or Oates is that they are there before you, just as the lecturer is generally there before the student, leading the student in directions we have often prepared in advance. The agile artist leads the lumbering critic; the experienced professor leads the less experienced student. For William Styron, no critic ever told him anything about his own work he did not already know. For Oates, critics are merely revealing something of themselves. Put in terms of short crime fiction, the criminal knows all aspects of their crime, Lupin might say. Or, for Kafka or Oates, Joseph K. is pursuing nothing but himself.

27So the study of literature is more threatening to authorities with totalitarian tendencies than one might think. Never is this more obvious than in the hostility to literature, and especially crime fiction, of authoritarian regimes. Mussolini decreed that perpetrators in crime fiction must not be Italian. Stalin, writes Bradford, “banned the genre in its entirety” (74), and the Franco dictatorship “effectively extinguished crime writing in Spain for more than a generation” (69). More generally, this is why any political party that dislikes the idea of ordinary people thinking for themselves will dislike and discourage the Humanities as an area of study for anyone below the ruling class. If you are at the top of a society that exploits those beneath you, not to mention if you commit crimes against them, you do not like accountability or scrutiny. Likewise, totalitarian states do not want citizens to be interested in detecting crime, to swallow bite-sized chunks of crime puzzles, for fear that they will see the crimes being committed against them.

28In Antonio Tabucci’s novella Pereira Maintains, Pereira is a journalist and so potentially a kind of detective, yet, as an enemy of the Portuguese fascism of Salazar, it is he who is interrogated. For a detective is the opposite of a dictator. He or she is a questioner in search of what lies behind appearances, whereas what totalitarian regimes want is, in the words of Milan Kundera, to promote their “intelligible lie” (63). For this is the paradox of short crime fiction: it is often about seeking the truth, yet it as often dramatises the fact that real life does not have simple solutions or a Meaning with a capital M. The Trial, as a work of anti-detective fiction, thus fits rather neatly into crime fiction’s seemingly paradoxical dynamic, which is why it still lends itself to a victim-of-persecution reading despite Kafka’s Taoism-influenced worldview.

29Shaped in the way the brain is shaped, short crime fiction inevitably contains within itself the impulse to parody its own constructions and conventions. Intelligent human beings possess irony and are aware of, and feel a self-conscious distance from, our truth-seeking and meaning-searching or meaning-making natures. The study of short crime fiction, therefore, far from being a sideshow, a form of entertainment, mere popular literature, is a deadly serious pursuit, not in and of itself—the mysteries, the puzzles do not necessarily matter in themselves—but in the way it trains our brains, hones our senses, and sharpens our perceptions, as we follow our path as individuals in our societies and in the world. So, there you have it: “Surfing, Submerging, Subverting: The Poe-litics of a Popular Genre.” Just do not tell the authorities that the study of short crime fiction is anything more than diverting entertainment.