Plot, and the illusion of its importance, is one of the greatest deceptions detective fiction has employed. That detective fiction requires the specific machinations of its plot in order to unfold is untrue; contrary to appearances, plot is not the driving force in this genre. Instead, other devices function as controlling and structuring forces within the text, manipulating the two ‘stories’ in Todorov’s model so that any real interaction between them is impossible. Because the interaction and tension between Todorov’s two ‘stories’ is often perceived to produce plot (Brooks 12), this lack of interaction manifests as an absence of plot in Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories, the BBC’s Sherlock – a more recent variation on the Doyle stories – and Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy.
Two stories – the visible and the hidden, the primary and the subordinate, the sjužhet and the fabula – are in the genre of detective fiction pulled apart and made separate. The detective story dramatises the illusion of their intersection when there is in fact no real contact between them. They are inevitably separate by design, and any perceived relation between them is never necessary but only contingent on the existence of a narrative framework. That is, “just as a story may have more than one discourse, so may a discourse have more than one story. The story of the discourse may not be simply or exclusively identifiable with the discoursed story.” (Hodgson 347) ‘Discourse’, besides having no necessary relation to the ‘story’, has no genuine link to it. Any interaction the two stories have in the text is merely the semblance of a meeting. The falsity of this appearance is apparent where the text dismantles or exceeds its own logic. What this amounts to is a rejection of plot as a legitimate organising principle, one that is enacted within the text – either by dismantling the logic of sjužhet and fabula, or by exceeding it. With both strategies of resistance, the impulse against plot may be evident in the formal structures of the text as well as in its normative underpinnings.
This argument implicates all of detective fiction, insofar as the Holmesstories may be treated as adequately representing the classic realist detective novel. There is, of course, a certain implausibility about the expansive nature of the claim, given that it will only be demonstrated as being present in the workings of three texts – but this generalising impulse can be justified by the status of one text in the canon of detective fiction, and the argumentative slant of the other. Auster’s The New York Trilogy, read as an anti-detective novel, presupposes an existing prototype of the detective story in order to make its counter-claim.
Todorov’s two-story model provides the starting point from which an eventual delegitimisation of plot as a narrative device becomes evident. The term ‘story’, which suggests the presence of ‘two stories’ in the ideal detective novel according to Todorov’s argument, is imprecise, particularly because the English counterparts of the Russian Formalist distinction between sjužhet and fabula can be rendered as ‘discourse’ and ‘story’. [1] The fabula (‘story’) is the raw material from which the text is eventually constructed while the sjužhet (‘discourse’) is the arrangement of this material into the order in which it appears. This distinction is not unproblematic, as Culler notes: there is always a tension between the two ‘stories’ with regards to which came first – while the fabula is by definition presumed to have come before the sjužhet, the significance of the fabula depends on the order in which the events within it come. Therefore, the sjužhet in fact creates the fabula: without the sjužhetthere would not be meaning in the ‘story’. The events in the fabulacannot retain their primacy if they are at the same time treated by the sjužhet as “products of meanings” (Culler 124). Todorov explains the paradox of the two ‘stories’ being simultaneously present through the “special status” of each: “one… is absent but real, the other present but insignificant” (46). The first story can thus never be directly present, and the second story is its mediating presence.
Formal Repudiation of Plot as Device: Camp in BBC’s Sherlock
However, what we see in BBC’s Sherlock is a rejection of the notion that the second story is a reliable mediator of the first. The rejection of plot as a mode of formal understanding manifests as a camp aesthetic in Sherlock, turning the energies that would otherwise be used to fuel the machinations of plot to fulfilling another purpose: the emphasis of “texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content” (Sontag 3). The camp aesthetic employed in Sherlock runs contrary to traditional notions of plot, which emphasise the content of happenings, as well as the impulse that many types of detective fiction are assumed to possess, that of going beneath the surface and of uncovering a natural (or naturalised) order of the world. In Sherlock, camp is used to reject the notion of this deep order, and to inflect differently the double structure that Todorov posits. In “The Abominable Bride”, plot happenings in the ‘real’ world are negligible: the episode is largely set within Sherlock’s head, and is focused on the externalisation of internal conflict – the presentation of an interior self in terms of objects and persons existing externally. It is the furniture of this presentation that matters, the paraphernalia and decoration of the Victorian version of himself that Sherlock imagines himself to be: he is “pure reason toppled by sheer melodrama” (“Abominable Bride”). Ostensibly, he embeds himself into this fiction in order to solve the mystery of Moriarty’s return, but perhaps only ten minutes have passed in ‘real’ time, with barely any impact in the ‘real’ world. This stasis of real action and of forward-moving plot is attributable to the divergence of the episode’s principle of organisation from the typical two-story structure.
The two ‘stories’ in “The Abominable Bride” split the fiction in a manner that renders the traditional story-discourse dichotomy irrelevant. Instead, the narrative divides into artifice and an attenuated form of ‘meaning’: it is concerned with the doubleness of meaning (“the thing as meaning something, anything”) against artifice, rather than the “split-level construction of a literal meaning… and a symbolic meaning” (Sontag 5). The roles of the hidden and the visible are reversed, as where the hidden ‘story’ was previously the primary event, made visible by the subordinate ‘discourse’, the ostensibly hidden story (the Moriarty question) serves as the artifice that obscures the ‘meaning’ of the apparent discourse (exploration of self’s interior). The solution to the hidden story is, ultimately, unimportant to the overall structure and tenor of the narrative, as the same conclusion lies at both the beginning and ending of the mystery – Moriarty is dead. Similarly, earlier in the series, Sherlock’s faked death and his return are initially presented as a puzzle to which a solution will presumably be offered, only to be dismissed as an entirely irrelevant question, as demonstrated in “The Empty Hearse”. Increasingly ludicrous scenarios that purportedly explain Sherlock’s trick are presented in succession, but the solution that occupies the terminal position in this sequence is no more plausible or authoritative than the rest. In this way, Sherlockundermines the hierarchy seemingly inherent in time-sequencing, by placing an unnatural and exaggerated spin on the presentation of the otherwise realistic analepsis.
Furthermore, any interaction between the two stories is accordingly circumscribed or made impossible, and they fail to interact in the way Todorov propounds. The problem defined by the first story (the crime or the puzzle) is rendered irrelevant by the second, which presents itself as being largely independent of the first. One ‘story’, as embodied by the artifice of the imagined Victorian existence in “Abominable Bride” and the extravagant false solutions of “Empty Hearse”, obscures rather than uncovers the other. Even this obscuring takes place in an indirect, distant fashion, further conveying the gap that exists between the two stories. The Victorian case (the titular abominable bride) obscures the modern-day puzzle (Moriarty’s return), which in turn obscures the question of the constructed artifice of Sherlock’s outward persona. It is suggested that the act of distancing is what allows Sherlock to solve the ‘real-world’ mystery, hence this Victorian universe he constructs rests on its differences from his real world rather than on any particular feature being symbolic of an element of the real. The implication is that Sherlock is now able to see the situation more clearly by imagining it to be distant from its present context: “sometimes to solve a case, one must first solve another” (“Abominable Bride”). This incidentally goes against the metonymic tendency of most detective fiction, where the context is all, and the contextualised detail is necessary for puzzle-solving. Moreover, the second story, typically subordinate to the first, is given the same standing in a curious reversal where the Victorian Holmes tells Watson he imagines himself on a jet, as the narrative shifts between Sherlock in the present-day and his ostensibly imagined counterpart. Here, another disruption of the hierarchy of ‘stories’ within the text occurs: the sjužhet (Victorian Holmes), which exists to make sense of the unsolved puzzle of the fabula (present-day Sherlock), is suggested to have an existence prior to and independent from the fabula, its supposed source.
The rejection of plot as device is also evident when what is presented as ‘plot’ functions primarily outside the text rather than within it. Several of Doyle’s Holmes stories take this form: the crime within the text is misdirection rather than the text’s true focal point, and the real concern of these stories can instead be found in the meta-story, in which the “literal clues” of the story are “features not of an actual scene, but of a textual one” (Hodgson 343). In “The Adventure of the Speckled Band”, for instance, the implausibility of much of the plot and the motif of the disguised object – the dummy bell-pull and ventilator as well as the safe that contains danger – signal that these elements are not merely part of the story that contains Holmes as the detective, but that they play a more crucial role in constructing the meta-story that includes the reader-detective (Hodgson 343). Therefore, they are not merely red herrings: the complications of their disguise far exceed the typical impulse to dismiss them as distractions. The “speckled band” is both misdirection and solution (Hodgson 342): Holmes’ initial association of the “band” with the gypsies is erroneous, but Roylott’s end – the snake “bound tightly round his head” (Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes 324) – reveals this reading to be correct, albeit imprecise. There are multiple reversals and revisions of its status as a signifier. The “speckled band” begins as clue and is interpreted to mean the “spotted handkerchiefs” of the gypsy band (313); it is mirrored in the dummy bell-rope, which suggests the tenor of the solution, if not its precise shape. It is then revealed to be a red herring, since the gypsies are not in fact involved in Roylott’s scheme, and finally, it turns out to augur Roylott’s death by serpent. This final element of signification functions outside the text – it is not a real clue, since within the story it is fortuitous that Roylott meets his end in that particular way. It does not follow from any chain of logic that could be thought up by the detective existing within the strictures of the text. What seems to be in the story proper hence functions primarily as an element outside it, residing instead in the discourse that organises itself according to reversal and repetition. This plays the two elements of narrative – story and discourse – against each other and reveals them to be fundamentally incompatible. Reading “Speckled Band” as a meta-story requires that one acknowledges the failure of the second story (of Holmes as detective) in order to adequately uncover the first (Roylott’s scheme), since the true solution lies outside the reach of both stories.
Beyond a Machinery of Desire: Displacing Plot
In the end, therefore, the two stories that diverge from or efface each other displace plot as a device and organising structure. As Brooks argues of Great Expectations, at the close of the text “we have the impression of a life that has outlived plot, renounced plot, been cured of it… Plot comes to resemble a diseased, fevered state of the organism caught in the machinery of a desire which must eventually be renounced” (138). This applies a fortiori to the archetypal detective text, and Doyle’s “A Study in Scarlet” in particular. The order sought by the detective story exists beyond the reach of plot as device: where plot is present, so are the crime and criminal that need to be excised. The double logic of story and discourse is similarly insufficient to reach the desired order required for authoritative closure.
In rejecting the legitimacy of plot, detective fiction hence also rejects the use of this double logic: the genre embodies to the point of literality Todorov’s notion of the dual ‘story’, the paired logic of story and discourse, before proceeding to demonstrate the thorough failure of the principles on which the detective narrative itself is constructed. The self-awareness of the second story precludes any real access to the first and causes the suppression of any true plot-based progression. It is not merely that “nothing happens” – since this function of nothing happening in the secondary story is built into Todorov’s model – but that plot has been renounced as a legitimate and legitimising device. Within the detective story, plot is actively being delegitimised as a “condition of deviance or abnormality”, since it originates in the criminal action. Without this deviation from the existing order, the events narrated would be neither present nor significant: it is “the very condition for life to be ‘narratable'” (Brooks 139). Rather untenably, it seems, the detective fiction both depends on and rejects the social deviance that plot brings to the form of the text.
What this means for the detective story is the impossibility of true closure, and the inevitable presence of a self-undermining impulse within the text. The rejection of plot in “Study in Scarlet”, for instance, is comprehensive: the authorised plot is revealed to be “erroneous, unauthori[s]ed, self-delusive” and the deeper plot “criminally tainted, deviant, and thus unusable” (Brooks 136). The authorised plot – the ‘second story’ that is Watson’s account of the investigation – is incomplete both as an account of the criminal’s workings and of Holmes’ methods: the initial end of Watson’s narrative, in which Holmes declares an “end [to the] mystery”, is a false ending which is followed by Jefferson Hope’s first-person account, implying also the omissions that have been made in the narrative that preceded it: “You are very welcome to put any questions that you like to me now, and there is no danger that I will refuse to answer them.” (Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes 51) At the ‘true’ ending of the account – where Doyle’s narrative ends – errors in another official record emerge, with the credit in the newspapers going to the feckless Scotland Yard officials rather than to Holmes. Watson’s alternative, presented as the more ‘authorised’ account to the reader, is itself also full of lacunae. The closing quotation, translated from Latin, suggests the public presentation of Holmes’ investigations inevitably requires a holding back of certain facts, and that despite Watson’s claim that “all the facts” shall be known, the public record is always deficient: “The people hiss at me, but I applaud myself alone at home when I gaze on the coins in my strongbox” (96).
Elsewhere, detective fiction may dismantle its own normative framework by presenting the goal of a restored order as unattainable, either with the revelation that the order never existed, or that order did exist prior to the crime – but the exertions of the detective cannot restore it; this inability to return to a state of innocence cannot be overcome. It is an inherent flaw in the method of the detective: of always coming after, of being the secondary story to a primary story to which it purports to have some connection. These limitations of the form are evident in the Holmes stories, where order is exposed as a false or defective telos (“The Hound of the Baskervilles”, “A Case of Identity”) or repudiated as impossible to achieve (“The Dancing Men”, “The Cardboard Box”). In “Hound”, for instance, the security and moral position of the landed gentry – under siege for much of the novel – is never fully restored to its initial state, itself suggested by the intrusion of Stapleton to be already corrupt. The Canadian heir Henry Baskerville becomes the outsider who both taints and redeems the existing social order. Similarly, the impossibility of returning to a state of innocence is suggested in the endings of both “Cardboard Box” and “Dancing Men”, where the absence of a morally and emotionally satisfying resolution insinuates itself into the order-restoring trajectory of the archetypal detective story: “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, which is unthinkable.” (“Cardboard Box”, Doyle New Annotated Sherlock Holmes 448). While a superficially restorative ending is in place in “Dancing Men”, the deaths and near-deaths of each of Holmes’ clients are only nominally resolved by the punishment of the criminal – instead of a sense of calm, a “blank melancholy” predominates (Doyle, New Annotated Sherlock Holmes 879). Further, the self-reflexivity of the opening scenes in “Dancing Men” and “Cardboard Box” creates a self-critiquing loop that questions the authoritative status of Holmes, albeit on the smaller matter of self-presentation. In both these stories Holmes makes deductions about Watson’s state of mind after quietly observing him for a time – precisely the kind of behaviour Holmes mocks in Poe’s Dupin in “Study”: “that trick of his breaking in on his friends’ thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour’s silence is really very showy and superficial” (Doyle, Complete Sherlock Holmes19). This destructive self-reflexivity is also on display in BBC’s Sherlock, where the combination of the detective story with the camp aesthetic represents a corruption of the latter’s innocence as well as a cross-contaminating taint camp brings to the detective fiction, since camp, as Sontag explains, “rests on innocence… discloses innocence but also, when it can, corrupts it” (6).
‘Wherever I am not is the place where I am myself ‘: Exceeding the Double Logic
Auster’s variation on the detective story, The New York Trilogy, moves toward an explicit declaration of the failure of plot as the double logic is entirely dispensed with, rather than merely recast in new terms that reject one binary only to replace it with another. The logic of story and discourse is exceeded, and the secondary story gradually consumes the primary story until it becomes the dominant one. Refusing Todorov’s double logic, Auster formulates a third term to break the dialectic – an absence of plot that is not itself oppositional to the force of plot. Rather than what Brooks suggests – that this third term is one working against the other and is called ‘plot’ – this third term is the space between the two initial terms, the gap between story and discourse. This absence that marks the separation between story and discourse is what by definition has been lost and is unattainable. In some curious way, however, what is lost only becomes a true loss because it is treated as foregone. This resembles also the premise of the detective fiction – that the first story cannot be accessed except through reconstruction, which is by its nature at least once removed from the actual event. It is why the figure of the detective even becomes necessary. The non-interaction of the two stories, and the concomitant rejection of plot, posits narration through absence – and in doing so forces a reconception of the role of the detective within the genre. Investigators themselves become points of interest rather than mere mediators.
The Trilogy proceeds to identify this absence as the figure of the detective who is also the writer: “[t]here is no story, no plot, no action — nothing but a man sitting alone in a room and writing a book” (171). Todorov’s second story, typically depicting the process of the detective, here turns instead on the figure of the detective. The mediating function of both detective and sjužhet-as-discourse is disrupted and the focus redirected to the mediator. The interest, in the end, is in an infinite variation in a concentrated point in the text rather than the forward movement of plot: how the figure of the detective complicates Todorov’s model by existing in multiple levels of the text, across sjužhet and fabula, against the conservative and compartmentalised logic of the two-story narrative.
The possibility of infinite variation in a single theme – and that the three novels in the Trilogy may be versions of the same story (Dr Ang, 25 March 2016 class) – go beyond the resistance to plot seen in Doyle and in Sherlock; here the absence of plot is made visible not only in negative image but in the emptiness of the detective figure. The partial delegitimization of Holmes is made complete; Auster’s detective figure is a hollow one, existing in the gap between story and discourse, not possessing an identity and suggested as voiding the very question. ‘Writer’ is a constantly shifting signifier within the Trilogy – it does not designate a single figure and its precise reference is always uncertain. Within “City of Glass”, ‘writer’ as signifier could conceivably refer to Quinn, his nom de plume William Wilson, Wilson’s fictional detective Max Work, the fictional Paul Auster, or the Paul Auster residing outside the text. The suggestion that the term can apply to all of them at once becomes apparent; there is a growing sense that these separate entities are merging into a single identity: “[Quinn] had, of course, long ago stopped thinking of himself as real. If he lived now in the world at all, it was only at one remove, through the imaginary person of Max Work” (9). Quinn takes on the fictional Auster’s identity, which he likens to “climbing into [another’s] skin” (40). There is thus a sense that identity is always and everywhere a question indefinitely deferred. It is not a stable state but one that demands a constant merging with the Other, as Quinn begins to think of Stillman as a “lost half of himself” (92), and dreams that he displaces Auster to take on his identity, “walking down Broadway, holding Auster’s son by the hand” (106). In the same way that “[f]ood itself could not answer the question of food” (115), taking on one identity cannot provide a definitive solution to the puzzle of the self. Double logic is further shown to be unreliable in the novel – there exists doppelgängers (the two Stillmans), characters with the same names who may not be the same person (the two Henry Darks, in “City of Glass” and “The Locked Room”), and author-character doubles (the two Austers). The distancing of a core self – the very existence of which is of course questionable – from the functional identity adopted for the purposes of solving a mystery also further develops the technique used in Sherlock‘s “The Abominable Bride” to obscure the first story. Just as Sherlock exploits the distance of the imagined situation from reality, ostensibly to solve the mystery, the authors in the Trilogy require displaced, fictional versions of themselves to write and come to conclusions on their respective puzzles (Dr Ang, 25 March 2016 class).
‘Death is the sanction’: Endings and the Repudiation of Plot as Ideology
On a larger scale, Auster’s text demonstrates that the illusion of plot rests on a repeatability within the detective text that can be appropriated for the opposite purpose. Instead of repetition facilitating plot progression, this iterability inhibits and stalls it, forcing the narrative to find an alternative to the model of plot, which assumes strict and necessary beginnings and endings. This alternative mirrors the middle section of a conventional plot, which is treated as disposable by the archetypal detective story.
The two stories model, and its assumption that the second story exists to uncover the first, presupposes that the beginning and the end are the most important parts of the narrative. Under this model the middle of the narrative is, strictly speaking, contingent and interchangeable with other possible middles. Since the overall significance of the text is revealed in the recovered first story, meaning is found only at the end of the resolved narrative. Without strong closure, the narrative is stuck in an “excluded middle… having to desire always some first or last event that would resolve life in terms of something or nothing” (Hartman 218). This is the situation in which Auster’s protagonists find themselves: “[s]tories without endings can do nothing but go on forever… My only hope is that there is an end to what I am about to say” (237). If “[d]eath is the sanction of everything that the storyteller can tell” (Benjamin 94), Auster’s texts and protagonists are unable to find actual or formal departure from the story.
The impossibility of an ending in Auster’s Trilogy further reveals latent tensions in the two stories argument, developing from this tension a resistance to plot not explicated in Todorov’s original statement of the principle. In the two stories model, there exists an in-built formal resistance to an ending, despite the general perception that associates the genre with closure. This is because the visible story begins where the hidden one ends (Porter 328), thus an ending is always provisional – there is no telling whether the second story could itself become the first story in a new sequence. The possibility of the continuing sequence is hinted at in the kind of story that incorporates the ongoing progression of the case: in Doyle’s “The Final Problem” and “A Scandal in Bohemia”, for instance, the two stories begin to merge into one, bridging the inevitable gap between the first and second story only through the imperfect doubling of detective and criminal. Where the imperfect double exists (as opposed to the indistinguishable double in Auster), the narrative is suspended in the “excluded middle” – it may not be resolved by the infinite variation in Auster, since it is a flawed mirror. It cannot reach the closure typical of the genre by reconciling the second story with the first, as the end of the second story is always also the potential beginning of another first story.
Finally, that the organising principle of the detective story is an absence rather than the forward movement of plot implicates the underlying assumption of a certain social order. Perhaps the detective story does not require the unity of an internal order only because it draws on the ostensibly stable order that exists outside the text (Knight 18). Where this is the case, “[s]ilences in a text are crucial to its ideological force”, and where there exists “‘fissures’ … moments when the text shows itself [to be] unable to gloss over tensions inherent in even the material that is presented”, the text’s own organising principles come under suspicion (Knight 13-14, paraphrasing Macherey and Barthes respectively). Therefore, to say that the detective story – even in its classical conception – lacks plot is also to question the assumption that it is fundamentally traditionalist and based on impulses that seek to conserve the existing social order. Instead, we may reimagine the detective text as one that makes visible the gap between the ‘first story’ of the assumed order and the ‘second story’ yet to be told, one that is made to reveal its own boundaries, both formal and ideological. This untold second story becomes the event that “must… be wrested from [its] pre-narrative, un-narrated state” (Bloch 249). The absence of a plot and the repudiation of the conventional two-story model frees the genre to spin fictions not determined by seemingly established rules of the genre or the impulse towards closure. It may instead focus on the neglected middle: “[t]he question is the story itself, and whether or not it means something is not for the story to tell.” (Auster 3)
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[1] In the Richard Howard translation of Todorov’s “The Typology of Detective Fiction, fabula and sjužhet are rendered ‘story’ and ‘plot’ respectively. This usage will not be followed here, since plot – as will be subsequently explained – can be understood to include both fabulaand sjužhet.
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