Abstract

For example, in the traditional "who done it" , the basic pleasure is in the creation and solution of the riddle itself - somewhat akin to the pleasure of solving a difficult crossword puzzle. In such works the riddle itself must be sufficiently ingenious to surprise us but never so labyrinthine as to destroy the illusion that we may beat the professional to the solution. In no case may necessary clues be withheld for, failing to solve the riddle ourselves, we must at the very least see how we should have been able to solve it with the same information as the professional; given an unreliable narrator, we will feel deceived rather than pleasantly surprised. It is clear that in such instances the value judgments, as opposed to the riddle, should be as unoriginal and conventional as possible. The agents or agent whose initial act caused the riddle might best perform an act of murder for obvious gain or because he wants to replace a current wife with a beautiful mistress. Complexity of thought and judgment must never reach the point where it distracts our attention from the pleasure of the riddle itself; ethical values must merely be minimally consonant with our desire to see the riddle solved in terms that prevent moral indignation. The detective in turn may be given minimal idiosyncrasies that define him as a character, but again since, in this kind of work, the alteration of circumstances of who commits the crime is merely pro forma—usually he is merely caught and his future in prison or the electric chair is unstressed—the traits possessed by the detective are almost solely restricted to those that allow him to solve the riddle that we should have been able to solve ourselves. It is this kind of work that is frequently advertised by plaintive requests "please don't reveal the ending." We rarely read such works a second time. We are completely remote from the pursuit of Lew Archer