- Title
- Clues
- Creator
- Gulddal, Jesper
- Relation
- The Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction p. 194-201
- Publisher Link
- http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9780429453342
- Publisher
- Routledge
- Resource Type
- book chapter
- Date
- 2020
- Description
- The clue is by general consent a constituent feature of crime fiction; it is the means by which the detective solves the mystery, the device that keeps the plot together, the interface that draws in the reader. However, as in other cases of overfamiliarity, we often fail to scrutinise this feature and instead put our faith in intuitive or commonplace understandings. This is true also of crime fiction scholarship, which tends to take the presence and narrative significance of clues for granted, but has rarely, with a handful of notable exceptions, made the clue an object of analysis in its own right. More problematically, the standard use of the term conflates two distinct meanings, one referring broadly to all the different types of information that a detective might use to further the investigation, the other denoting a specific type of information closely tied to specific investigative practices. In the latter, more technical sense, which is the one used in the present context, the clue is a textual enigma and needs to be solved by the detective by means of interpretation.
- Subject
- clues; object of analysis; investigation; textual enigma
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1461002
- Identifier
- uon:46083
- Identifier
- ISBN:9780429453342
- Language
- eng
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