Action and Consequence: The Psychology of Detective Stories

Action and Consequence: The Psychology of Detective Stories Why are detective stories so fascinating? Typically, a crime is committed, and a detective is introduced: perhaps someone in the police, a private consultant, a lawyer, occasionally an amateur, or an ordinary person who is searching. What are these people doing? And what are we doing, reading about them, and watching them in films and television series? This book is a detective story in which we track down what is going on. Each chapter has an underlying concept, starting with clues, plot, and character, with the progression taking us deeper into the underlying issues. A central insight was offered by one of the world’s best detective story writers: P. D. (Phyllis) James. Her mother was institutionalized with mental illness when Phyllis was in her teens. Her father was repressive. She wrote with intimacy, able to engage in this way with us, her readers, probably better than her parents had managed with her. Here’s what she wrote in Talking about detective fiction (2009). … the detective story proper … fundamentally is concerned with bringing order out of disorder and the restoration of peace after the disruptive eruption of murder (p. 13). As James explained in a talk that she gave some years earlier, a murder tears a jagged hole in the fabric of society. What is needed, she said, is someone who will identify this hole and repair it so that we can—again—live with each other. Where does the word “detective” come from? In Killers of the flower moon, the Osage murders and the birth of the FBI, by David Grann (2017), we read this: The term “to detect” derived from the Latin verb "to unroof," and because the devil, according to legend, allowed his henchmen to peer voyeuristically into houses by removing their roofs, detectives were known as “devil's disciples” (p. 57). Grann goes on to say that Allan Pinkerton opened and ran the first American private detective agency. In advertisements there was a large wide-open eye; it seems to have been this that gave rise to the idea of private eye. There have been excellent histories of detective stories. These include Julian Symons’s (1972) Bloody murder: From the detective story to the crime novel, a history, Rex Burns and Mary Rose Sullivan’s (1990) Crime classics: The mystery story from Poe to the present, and Martin Edwards’s (2022) The life of crime: Detecting the history of mysteries and their creators. There is also the reflective book by the poet David Lehman: The mysterious romance of murder: crime, detection, and the spirit of noir (2022). His theme is that the detective story is potentially a work of art and a metaphor for the whole of human life with its urges to do what is right, and sometimes to do what is wrong. He quotes Helen McCloy as saying: ”’the construction of a plausible hypothesis’ within the narrow limits of a crime puzzle is ‘a mental exercise as strict, and therefore a stimulating, as the composition of a sonnet.’” Leyman’s book is witty with enigmatic poetic quotations from noir films of which he is fond. Here’s an example from his page 53, from the movie Gilda, A cop has been watching Gilda and Johnnie quarrelling, and then says: “You two kids love each other terribly, don’t you?” “I hate her,” Johnnie replies. “That’s what I mean,” the cop says. This book that you are now reading is an investigation of the psychological reasons for engaging in detective stories. In 2000, Frank Hakemulder called fiction a “moral laboratory.” Here we take some steps towards a theory that extends the psychology of how we might all live together. Detective stories reach towards issues that are fundamental for what it is to be human, and to live in society with other people some of whom are like and others unlike ourselves. Perhaps the Twenty-First Century’s most important psychological discovery, is that a fundamental development in human evolution has been our ability to cooperate with each other; it’s become humans’ deepest trait. By comparing humans with our closest animal relatives, chimpanzees, Michael Tomasello and his research group discovered that in physical abilities such as being able to search for something not immediately visible, human children aged two-and-a-half years and chimpanzees of any age are similar. In contrast, human infants are hugely better than chimpanzees in all social abilities, including cooperation … This ability to cooperate seems to have evolved a few hundred thousand years ago, along with the coming of language (also dependent on cooperation). It seems likely to have happened in two phases. The first was our ability to make arrangements with each other and to complete them, with “we” becoming more important than “I.” Tomasello calls this “shared intentionality.” A basic example was, and continues to be, the sharing of food at meals, which chimpanzees do not do. The second phase is called “collective intentionality,” the formation and taking part in cultures, sharing understandings, tending towards doing what is good and avoiding doing what is bad, which can be thought of as morality. One of the reasons why detective stories are so fascinating is that they are about the opposite: non-cooperation, that’s to say inter-personal conflict. They are also, sometimes, about what we might do about it. One aspect of a culture is often a religion, or a religion-like system of communal understanding. It seems likely that the first society, and the first religion, to distinguish between good and bad, and to encourage its members to do what is right and to avoid doing wrong was Persian, perhaps around three thousand years ago. It’s possible that the reason people find detective stories so fascinating is the resonance they have with religious principles, either to accompany a person’s religious beliefs and practices or, for some, to replace them with corresponding secular thoughts and actions.