The question before us is: who is the suspect? What does it mean to suspect, to be suspected—or, as the official euphemism has it, “a person of interest”? How is suspicion organized into specific forms: the manhunt, the chain of evidence, the paper trail, the DNA scan, the crime-scene reconstruction? Forms of organization that generate truth from their methods; whose truth, as so often is the case, is determined by those very methods.

Such organization may be assumed, as we say, ex hypothesi in any pursuit. May be assumed, must be assumed. For hypothesis is the key to all suspicion, its proposed (presupposed) structure, the answer determined by the kind of question we ask. Hypo-thesis: from the Greek, hupo, meaning “under.” Under consideration. Under review. Under suspicion. The groundless assumption that gets any theory off the ground. The rhetorical question that instigates the search for the answer.

Or rather, the question that becomes the answer, was the answer all along. And not just when the hypothesis is confirmed, brought out from under; even the rejected hypothesis, like the detective story’s false solution or trail of red herrings, the conjectured and refuted narratives, encountered only in order to be discarded, underwrites the assumed logic of the pursuit.

Even, or especially. Again like the detective story, the correct solution, when it is arrived at, forcefully reasserts the order of things that was temporarily suspended or breached by the rupture of mystery. A puzzle solved offers libidinal release, punishment for the guilty, exoneration for the innocent, the joy of structure resumed. Justice, beyond a reasonable doubt.

Who is the suspect? To ask is to answer.

The essay? Organized suspicion in pursuit of a quarry. The quarry? The answer. The principle of organization? The question.

You are the detective.

Detection always begs the question of causality. Who is the suspect? But first: what has been done, and how? What is the chain of events? In Looking Awry, Slavoj Žižek contrasts two kinds of detective story and the different ways in which each avoids “the real of desire.” In the Sherlock Holmes story, typically short, the detective performs a sort of latent content analysis of a fractured narrative. Consulted or confronted by a strange sequence of events, he enters an oneiric puzzle after the fact. The redheaded man. The dog that did not bark. The one stolen shoe.

In each instance, there is an element of the story that jars just enough for Holmes, with his powerful deductive mind and bowls of stimulating pipe tobacco, to turn the key and unlock the mystery from above, often without leaving the comfort of his armchair. To be sure, sometimes he rushes into movement or sends round one of his Baker Street Irregulars; but with a few exceptions, in particular the novella-length The Hound of the Baskervilles and the fatal confrontation with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls, Holmes prefers to stay out of the action, aloof and alight.

The solution, when reached, is revealed as simplicity itself, such that onlookers and the faithful amanuensis and stooge, Dr. Watson, often feel inclined to hit themselves on the head and wonder how they could have missed it. We are, of course, meant to do the same. How could we have been so stupid? How could we have missed the significance of the clue?

The genius of the Holmes solution is that it is not, despite his many claims to the contrary, deductive. Deduction proceeds from major premises and established logic, via minor premises, to a conclusion. This is deduction:

(if) All men are mortals. (and) Socrates is a man. (then) Socrates is mortal.

The conclusion is foregone, in the sense that it cannot come out any other way once the terms and relations are understood. As Wittgenstein said, in logic there are no surprises. That is not to say that we onlookers cannot be surprised by a result, if we are inattentive or feeble-minded, only that there can be no arguing the case based on claims of counterintuition. If your intuitions run counter to deduction, they are wrong.

But Holmes is not inductive either. Induction moves from particular cases to general conclusions, proceeding, we might say, bottom-up rather than top-down. This is induction:

The sun has risen every morning. The sun rose this morning. The sun will rise tomorrow morning.

Though it is the basis of many a routine claim of fact, not to mention all of empirical science, induction has a fatal flaw, as Stevenson’s fellow Scotsman, David Hume, demonstrated. Induction is fallacious; it relies on a suppressed major premise that effectively begs the question. That is, namely, that the uniformity of things is demonstrated by our experience of things. Such an idea may seem uncontroversial, but this premise is the very conclusion that induction is trying to demonstrate. Thus a crippling circularity emerges. You cannot show that the natural world exhibits uniformity by first assuming that it does so, then refer back to that assumption as evidence for your claim that natural events are uniform. We can presuppose that the sun will rise tomorrow—indeed we probably should—but we cannot prove it. Events are not a chain; events are not even events, in the sense of knowable chunks of experience.

A good deal of Holmes’s showing-off is induction in a minor key. The recovered hat shows its owner to be a man of means down on his luck, recently returned from India, with a penchant for kippers and fast women.

This small-scale stuff doesn’t raise the question of reliable knowledge in any obvious Humean way, but it is as susceptible as any inductive claim to Hume’s demolition. It may be the result of method, after a fashion (“You know my methods, Watson; apply them”) but it is not deduction, whatever Holmes may say. And, as induction, it is, like all claims of empirical fact, cracked at the base.

This is even more clearly the case in the increasingly advanced empirical methods of suspicion that Holmes inaugurates, the growing wonders of “scientific” detection as it moves from macro (footprints, broken glass, bloodstains) to micro (hair, semen, DNA). Holmes’s “powerful lens,” the clichéd image of detection via the magnifying glass, is a threshold not just between the visible and the hidden, an interstitial machine for revelation, but also a kind of symbolic, two-way looking-glass marking the line between the Industrial and Atomic Ages; it is a sign of things to come.

The lens reveals the clue: per convention, the fingerprint. The fingerprint the glass preserves is itself a transitional form of trace evidence, the unwitting signature of crime. Nowadays, fingerprints are crude, almost unsought. The exquisite machines of detection today (in fantasy anyway) reveal smaller and smaller bits left at the scene by the suspect: a fingernail, some scraped skin, washed-up blood. Any of these may connect the suspect with the weapon, with the deed, with the guilt.

The advanced extension of Holmes’s glass is television’s successful CSI franchise, with its cast of quirky geniuses combing a confused and bloody crime scene, playing out rival imagined narratives of what really happened. The show trades on the fact that all visual narrative is equally real when presented on screen: the false solution can be as vivid as the true one. Bullets blast through human tissue, blunt traumas are inflicted from above or below, organs are rent apart, and we follow the violence from the inside, as it were, enjoying the weapon’s-eye view. Here, one advanced technology (special effects) is used to illustrate, and celebrate, another one (forensic method).

But more importantly, we see that the total surveillance society is not achieved by such space-age inventions as the geosynchronous satellite or even, closer to the ground, the ubiquitous police camera. It is, rather, a function of the body’s routine garbage, sloughed-off dead skin or random inert proteins in the form of hair or nails. These bits of rubbish are omnipresent, rendering suspicion itself unnecessary. Combined with the pure method of forensic science, there is no need, really, for imagination. Nor, even, for the pervasive suspicion of neighbors and colleagues, the ugly duty-to-inform ethos of Nineteen Eighty-Four or post-9/11 America. The television drama preserves a role for human insight, but its premise gives the lie to this gesture towards faithful observation. Here, science does all the work.

The surveillance of bodily waste is always invoked, crucially, after the fact. It is a leaving conjured from leavings. Like Holmes’s “elementary” explanations, the forensic account is a reconstruction, a story, a narrative of crime and (eventual) punishment. Always, the story we see on the page or the screen proceeds backwards, not in structure but in content, returning us to the beginning of the story we did not see, the violent crime, and walks us through it, through the unalterable past, to isolate the suspect.

That is why we watch. Not to prevent crime, but in pursuit of a pleasure much more shameful and basic: the spectacle of guilt observed.

It is, in the end, all about us, the viewing audience.

Who is the suspect? It’s not who you think it is.

The real logic at work in the typical Holmes story is of a kind more Freudian than rational: it is the logic of the dream. Holmes, in effect, is an analyst who unlocks the mystery by penetrating the narrative and its false solutions (the manifest content) to find the true solution that solves the mystery (the latent content). His smoke-filled study is the crucible for revelation, an analytic situation as controlled and protected as the celebrated couch. It is here that the tale will unfold, the probing mind will take up its playful, yet serious, attitude towards it, and some breakthrough will occur, not from deductive application, but as an emergent property of the situation itself.

For the solution is not always obvious. As Freud suggests, often the true solution—which is to say, the valid interpretation—involves reading the dream as if it were a rebus or word-image tangle, often involving puns or shifts in meaning. A simple example, credited to Voltaire, turns on the symbolic system of language itself. Asked if he was ready for dinner, he wrote a note that read, “Ga”—a tangled sign that can be disentangled this way: “G grand, a petit = J’ai grand appetit.”

Žižek notes how one of Alexander the Great’s dreams was fortuitously interpreted by Aristander. Alexander “had surrounded Tyre and was besieging it but was feeling uneasy and disturbed because of the length of time the siege was taking,” the historian Artemidorus recounts. “Alexander dreamt he saw a satyr dancing on his shield. Aristander happened to be in the neighborhood of Tyre. . . . By dividing the word for satyr into sa and tyros he encouraged the king to press home the siege so that he became master of the city” (Žižek 52). The key lies in seeing the satyr not as an image but as a word, and hence a coded message: sa Tyros = Tyros is thine.

More common rebuses mix words and images, so that, for example, a picture of the letter “i” drawn casting a shadow = “eyeshadow.” It will come as little surprise to learn that the word rebus is from Latin res, thing, as in the ablative plural phrase de rebus quae geruntur—i.e., “the things that are taking place,” title of a sixteenth-century collection of riddles from Picardy. “Res” is also the root of “real,” making rebus, as its function as the clue suggests, a trace of the real. No surprise then that the wryly coded name of the detective in a series of superior mystery novels written by Ian Rankin, and set in multilayered, enigmatic Edinburgh, is John Rebus.

With its apparently standard “techniques” of condensation and displacement, the dream, like the rebus, offers a message only in a logic coded at a meta-level. Its base-level meaning is therefore, because of the layering of metacode over apparent code, at best meaningless and at worst actively misleading. If we are to interpret the dream, we must ignore the base-level coding, move to the meta-level, and attempt to tease out meaning there if anywhere.

The dream logic of the Holmes story is carried by the clue, the unresolved remainder in the original narrative, often minuscule, which does not fit, or seems irrelevant or odd. The clue is a restless element, a node of uncanniness. It will not take its place in the chain of events, or, better, in the narrative that is constructed as a sense-making quest through events. Hence the atmosphere of threatening strangeness that pervades many of the stories. We might say that the uncanny serves to disrupt the relation presumed between narrative enchainment and event-sequence, the ancient metaphysical connection between word and object. The narrative is fractured by the restless clue, and that fracturing in turns calls into question the unstated presupposition that events can be narrated meaningfully, that there are, indeed, such things as events, bundled arrangements of cause and effect.

Thus the Holmes story, as a narrative about narrative breach, is itself a dream attempting to recode the very possibility of meaning. When the clue, a “trace of the Real” in Žižek’s Lacanian terms, is followed, then, the rupture of the mystery is healed, the wrinkles of incongruity smoothed over. The pursuit brings its pleasure, just as any narrative does, and the world is restored—until the next mystery excites Holmes’s interest, proves itself worthy of his analysis. The “Real,” though apparently pursued, is avoided: the violence of desire is, despite appearances, obscured rather than exposed.

The subdural instability inscribed in the Holmes stories occasionally rises to the surface. Confronted in “The Cardboard Box” by an apparently meaningless act of grotesque violence prompted by overwhelming jealousy, Holmes—the supreme acolyte of causation, the giver of explanations—is moved to melancholy: “‘What is the meaning of it, Watson?’ said Holmes, solemnly, as he laid down the paper. ‘What object is served by this circle of misery and violence and fear? It must tend to some end, or else our universe is ruled by chance, and that is unthinkable. But what end? There is the great standing perennial problem to which human reason is as far from an answer as ever’” (Doyle 52). In “The Yellow Face,” the story that follows this downbeat denouement, Holmes rather pityingly explains the desperate actions of a mystified man with words that have an ironic relevance to himself: “Any truth,” he acknowledges, “is better than indefinite doubt” (Doyle 69). The various satisfactory solutions, all the “elementary” deductions and guilty suspects justly apprehended, are revealed as quietly desperate avoidance-rituals, ways of dodging the unthinkable.

The hard-boiled detective story, by contrast, does not work according to deduction, nor in the service of some presumed, if illusory, causality of suspicion. Instead, detection proceeds via immersion: Sam Spade or Philip Marlowe enters a cycle of violence that is not yet over, and which typically affects them directly—even if they begin pursuing a mystery at some distance from what will turn out to be the principal one. Here, the detective cannot remain aloof or in any way suppose that he is above the action. Hence, among other things, a crucial shift in person. While the Holmes story is related in the first person by Watson, it effectively renders the narratorial “I” into a third-person narration of Holmes’s investigations. The hard-boiled detective’s “I” is a true first-person, the literary equivalent of film voice-over. Voice-over may be derided as a cheap narrative device—notice, for example, the second-order mockery in the film Adaptation, where an aspiring screenwriter played by Nicolas Cage muses, in a stream of consciousness voice-over, on the dangers of voice-over—but it is a natural for the hard-boiled detective story, which relies on personal immersion in the action.

Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler’s quintessential hard-boiled detective, takes on the mystery in a thoroughly personal way. He is often in danger, drugged or shot or beaten, on the way to the solution. Here, the solution is rarely a neat tying-up of strange elements; rather, it is a revelation of a pervasive nastiness that the detective is powerless to solve. Though clever, the detective is usually a step or two behind the main flow of action, arriving late on the scene; his often-mentioned tenacity, meanwhile, is a function of quirky pride rather than intellectual discipline. His touchstone is commitment to the client and the solidity of his fee, plus expenses.

What Holmes and, later, Lord Peter Wimsey do for sheer aristocratic pleasure, Marlowe does for money. Against a backdrop of Los Angeleno corruption and fakery—gangsters who talk like movie tough guys, cops who take bribes, women who use sex or guns as the moment demands—Marlowe maintains his narrow integrity by reference to a combination of self-denial and capitalist virtue. He’s not good, because nobody is, but at least he’s straight. And it has very little to do with obeying the law, since the law is already suspect, hence the many tangles Marlowe has with his former colleagues. (It’s worth noting that Marlowe’s “professional” ethic is transferable, without much modification, to the quarreling thieves of Reservoir Dogs.

The Marlowe story is gritty, urban, and sexual in a way that Holmes stories never are. Holmes’s London is never very threatening; it even enjoys some of the foggy nostalgia of a Dickensian Christmas card. There is heterosexual tension here and there in the Holmes corpus, and a celebrated love, but it is hard to take seriously—hence the perverse desire to sexualize the Holmes–Watson relationship, or the Holmes–Moriarty pairing. In the Marlowe tales—significantly, novels of a length suitable for immersion in the corrupt world—the femme fatale character has a starring role.

The femme fatale is this story’s own way of avoiding the Real of desire, the structural equivalent of the uncanny clue. There are clues in Marlowe’s narratives, but they are not disruptive traces or nodes, just bits of a dark, funny tale in which Marlowe risks temptation. By rendering the threat of corruption sexual, the narrative gives Marlowe the opportunity to reject the suspect advance, or at least keep his responses purely physical: the femme fatale comes on to him, but he is wise to her.

This rendering of the feminine as pathological is of course itself pathological. But the more important point is that it works to hold desire at bay. Violence is not sanitized here, as in Holmes or, more to the point, the “cozy” country-house detective stories that come later in the English tradition; it is, rather, transposed into sexual terms, and immediately pushed away. Fear is retooled as self-control, and the overarching ethical structure of straight versus crooked is re-affirmed just as surely as when Marlowe demands his due payment, cash or check.

In spite of the fact that the two forms of detective story are both versions of the literary mystery genre, often enough concerning murder and theft, as well as the fact that they were written just a few decades apart, they offer utterly different textures and motives. The Holmes stories belong to an Industrial Age suffused with scientific optimism, a surface that is, however, broken by an awareness of the illogical workings of their solutions. The Marlowe stories are firmly gripped by twentieth-century pessimism, a kind of amused sadness. The reasonable guy can do nothing to combat the Fall of Man except wisecrack and keep his hands more or less clean. The two forms fuse in the now pervasive form of the “police procedural,” the combination of what we might call a soft-boiled detective, no longer freelance, and a lot of routine policework, and/or, these days, improbable banks of advanced technology.

But both conceits, those of optimism and pessimism, and still more the fusion of the two, are smoke screens for a more searching unease, a fear of literally unspeakable desires that the narratives sweat to hold at bay. What if nothing means anything? What if the suspect is not guilty—not because we are all guilty, but because guilt is a fiction, a form of metaphysical comfort?

And thus the analysis of detection, too, is an avoidance: Žižek’s tale and, yes, mine are revealed as ways of coping, rituals of argumentative evasion, whose desperation is concealed beneath the surface of reason. The pursuit of the pursuit of the suspect only brings us back, again and again, to ourselves. Who else?

Who is the suspect? We are all the suspect.

Narrative, like the essay, is a form of organized suspicion. In the mystery story this fact is obvious, because suspicion, whether aloof and rational or cynical and immersed, is in the foreground. But that foreground, like the base-level code of a dream, is a distraction from the larger point that all narrative pursues, as its quarry, the very idea of meaning. And even when a given narrative rejects this pursuit in particular, this only serves to underline the assumed fact of the pursuit in general.

“[T]he experience of a linear ‘organic’ flow of events is an illusion (albeit a necessary one),” says Žižek, “that masks the fact that it is the ending that retroactively confers the consistency of an organic whole on the preceding events. What is masked is the radical contingency of the enchainment of narration, the fact that, at every point, things might have turned out otherwise. But if this illusion is a result of the very linearity of the narration, how can the radical contingency of the enchainment of events be made visible? The answer is, paradoxically: by proceeding in a reverse way, by presenting the events backward, from the end to the beginning” (Žižek 69). To be sure, such illuminating counterexamples can only be found in time-based media, where we can in fact run the story backwards: such films as Harold Pinter’s Betrayal (1982) or Christopher Nolan’s Memento (2000). Even here, the discrete chunks of narrative, however fractured and rearranged, still must be “run” forward. (An exception is the short opening and closing sequences of Memento, run in slow-motion reverse.) Shifting ending and beginning emphasizes the power of narrative expectation; it does not really challenge it.

The basic impulse of narrative, then, is sequence: this happened, and then this happened. In bare narrative, the sort offered by children or bores, the sequencing lacks consequence and is reduced to mere stated succession: and then, and then, and then. The lack felt in such a tale illustrates Forster’s famous dictum on the difference between story and plot: the queen died and then the king died is a story; the queen died and then the king died of grief is a plot. In adorned narrative, or plot, there must be some demonstrated enchainment of events, the creation of consequence. Only thus is it possible to experience the libidinal release typical of all narrative, and starkly exhibited in the mystery story, classical or hard-boiled.

The essay, since it takes the form of an argument, complicates the illusion of consequence by reversing the polarity. Instead of saying and then, and then, and then, the essay says: and thus, and thus, and thus. (At least, it tries to; many a poor essay may read more like the bare narrative of the child or bore.) The illusion here is that an argument, when valid, possesses that validity all at once. This is the common reading of the Wittgensteinian warning against surprises: you cannot be surprised to have validity demonstrated, because it was there all along. The working out of the argument, whether in a proof or by way of the informal essay, is a mere functional necessity, in the way Socrates demonstrates in Plato’s Meno that the slave boy knew all along, indeed knew innately, the Pythagorean theorem.

We might call this the illusion of innate validity. Just as the narrative presupposes the very thing it hopes to find—namely meaning—the argument does the same with validity. Surely it is a better description of what is happening to the slave boy to say that he is being taught the theorem, rather than, as Socrates would have it, that he is remembering it? Validity has, as a defining feature, the fact that it must be demonstrated. We may think that it can be grasped at a glance, but even for geniuses of logic this feat is rarely possible, except at a very low level of complexity. And in being demonstrated—that is, in submitting to the temporality necessary, not incidental, to all argument—argument shows that its affinity to narrative is very close indeed, closer than some would prefer.

Both adorned narrative and demonstrated argument exhibit a complex structure: not and then, and then or and thus, and thus but rather and then, therefore and thus; and thus, therefore and then. The comparison that favors both is to another time-based medium, music. One may record the notations that indicate music, just as one may record the symbols that encode a narrative or an argument; but the respective logics cannot be exhibited except in the play-ing. The complex structure of the Brandenburg Concertos is fully pre—sent only in the experience of hearing them, pattern and meta-pattern unfolded between one silence and another. And then therefore and thus. And thus therefore and then. The argument runs. The story proceeds.

The specific background irony here, as always, is that Plato himself used narrative techniques to advance arguments in favor of innate validity, a hybridity that everywhere challenges not only the coherence of his thought but any simple distinction between events and arguments, consequence and logic. Plato’s dialogues thus offer themselves as their own kind of rebus, or dream, complete with a fractured and layered logic that serves, ultimately, to raise more suspicions than it lays to rest.

And so we are confronted with another mystery: what is the valid interpretation, the good story, to tell about Plato? How to interpret that odd set of dreams?

Well, perhaps as the music they are.

And so, to conclude, let me tell you a story.

The burglar came in the middle of the night, believing, I thought (not at the time, only later), that the house must be empty.

It wasn’t. I was there, sleeping. Woken by the sound—unfamiliar, out of place—of floorboards creaking in the hallway beyond the bedroom door. An uncanny sound: unheimlich, unwelcome, wrong. I live alone. There should be no sounds.

He ran out the front door when he realized I was there. I lay in bed, shocked into buzzing awareness. What to do? A second or two. Then I jumped up, pulled on some boxers, and sprinted out the front door after him. Running barefoot down the sidewalk, really moving.

At the end of the street, I caught him. He turned, looked at me. What to do? Nothing much. An angry shove. Nasty words. His mute show of empty hands. Now what?

When I went back to the house and called the police, the 911 dispatcher was incredulous. I let him go? Yes, because what else? Because you can’t sit on someone until the police arrive. Because there is not much force in moral suasion, absent the mechanisms of enforcement.

Above all, because the dispatcher, with her headset radio and illuminated grid of the city spread out before her, sees the streets from a false position, a Cartesian fiction. There is no grid, no cross-hatched structure on which everyone can, theoretically, be located by intersection. No set of names to which the law can be summoned.

In the middle of the night, the grid does not exist. It is revealed as the abstraction it is, the merely notional xy space of scientific method. The street is not a space, it is a place. In that place, two men, alone. There is no causality, there is only proximity. At issue, this breach of house, this uninvited threshold crossing, the disruption of the private.

There is nothing to say, nothing to do. I have the suspect in hand. The pursuit is ended. Now what?

The law, summoned, eventually comes. Three cars, six guys. A canine unit, German shepherds, a gung-ho youngster in a blue jumpsuit and body armor. A slow summer night. The suspect is long gone.

They apply method anyway, after a fashion. I describe the suspect. They write it all down. Yankees cap. Gray stubble. Dirty cotton shorts. Torn T-shirt.

We drive past the local diner in a cruiser, firing up the siren to make the heads turn. Maybe the suspect is dumb, or desperately wanted a 4 a.m. coffee after his abortive B & E. The dog sniffs and lifts his nose in the air. Nothing. Organized suspicion. But futile, beside the point, too late.

Later, the detectives come. Suits instead of uniforms, a man and a woman. The man talks about Kierkegaard. The woman spreads dark powder all over the windowsill and frame. Nothing. No trace. No clue. He was never here.

He was here. I cleaned up, but traces of the powder are there still.

Later, the requisite uncanny clue: I discovered something missing, that is, present by its absence. My favorite fountain pen, a screw-action Pelikan, tool of my own legal trace, my signature. Also, maker of arguments, instrument of essays, cause of causal fictions. Gone. Not to be found.

Stolen or just lost? Mere routine misplacement, or a hint of some deeper mystery?

We’ll never know.



Works Cited:

Arthur Conan Doyle (1993) The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes
Oxford: Oxford University Press

Slavoj Žižek (1991) Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan Through Popular Culture
Cambridge: MIT Press

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