Popular Culture Association in the South

Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy", Adam Ross's "Mister
Peanut", and Martha Grimes' "The Old Wine Shades"
Author(s): Bennett Kravitz
Source: Studies in Popular Culture, Vol. 36, No. 1 (FALL 2013), pp. 45-61
Published by: Popular Culture Association in the South
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/23610151
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Bennett Kravitz

Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in

Paul Auster's New York Trilogy,
Adam Ross's Mister Peanut, and
Martha Grimes' The Old Wine
Shades

The Anti-Detective Genre

What stands out as a defining characteristic of the anti-detective is
the impossibility of discovering "whodunit." Before discussing the three
novels I have chosen, each of which represents a different type of the
anti-detective genre, I would like to offer a brief sketch of the term's his
torical horizons and provide a description of what constitutes the anti-de
tective. The anti-detective is never able to unravel the conundrum, get
to the bottom of the mystery, and/or establish who is responsible for the
crime or crimes committed. Patricia Merivale and Susan Sweeney pre
fer the term metaphysical detective, yet they claim, as I do about the an
ti-detective, that the "metaphysical detective stoiy is a text that parodies
or subverts traditional detective-story conventions" (2). Another possible
description of the genre is that of Jamie Dopp, who is most comfortable
with "postmodern detective" (108), while Stefano Tani uses "metafictional
anti-detective" (40) and William Spanos simply "anti-detective" (48). The
anti-detective story, the term that I prefer, reverses the conditions we have
come to expect from the whodunit, as set out by Tzvetan Todorov in "The
Typology of Detective Fiction." The latter argues for a rational course of
action and direction that the whodunit must follow:
This type of novel contains not one but two stories: the story of the
crime and the story of the investigation. In their purest form, these
stories have no point in common .... The first story, that of the
crime, ends before the second begins. But what happens to the second?
Not much. The characters of the second story, the story of the investiga
tion, do not act, they learn. Nothing can happen to them: a rule of
the genre postulates the detective's immunity. We cannot imagine
Hercule Poirot or Philo Vance threatened by some danger,

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Bennett Kravitz

attacked, wounded, even killed. [In] the hundred and fifty pages
which separate the discovery of the crime from the revelation of the
killer ... we examine clue after clue, lead after lead. The whodunit
thus tends toward a purely geometric architecture . . . .Each story
has a status which is the converse of the other. The first, that of the
crime, is in fact the story of an absence: ... it cannot be
immediately present in the book. In other words, the narrator
cannot transmit directly the conversations of the characters who are
implicated, nor describe their actions: to do so, he must necessarily
employ the intermediary of another (or the same) character who
will report. In the second story, the words are heard or the actions
observed. The status of the second story ... has no importance of itself,
[and] serves only as a mediator between the reader and the story of
the crime .... We are concerned then in the whodunit with two stories
of which one is absent but real, the other present but insignificant.
(44-48)
Todorov, as a modernist, was unable to imagine the postmodern continu
ation of his thought. Just as Euclidian geometry transformed into a multi
plicity of geometries, so too did the whodunit evolve into the anti-detec
tive genre and sub-genres. The latter violate just about every one of the
premises posited by Todorov in the passage above. The three texts under
discussion, then, will not conform to and even "transgress" against Todor
ov's rules.

The anti-detective, therefore, cannot be neatly broken down into

two separate stories, but rather there is a flow between commission and
investigation of the crime, if indeed a crime has been committed at all.
The first story (the story of the crime) does not necessarily end before the
second story (the stoiy of the investigation) begins, as the two display a
symbiotic relationship while the plot develops. The investigators are not
passive, as Todorov would have it, but become active players in a web
that captures them as much as it secures any other players of the drama.
Of high importance in Todorov's scheme is the notion that nothing can
happen to the detectives. But because the anti-detective novel has the in
vestigators caught in a conundrum, they must act to survive. The detective
is far from immune from the consequences of the puzzle; he or she is

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Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Adam
Ross's Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades

overwhelmed by it. The "geometric structure" of the whodunit, proceed

ing from clue to clue, leads to no solution in the anti-detective. Todorov
would have it that the crime is only an absence, as the narrator can only
describe the actions of a killer through another character as intermedi
aiy. However, since the crime in the anti-detective may take place after it
was thought to have been committed, this rule, too, falls by the wayside.
Finally, in Todorov's hierarchy, the first story is "real but absent," while
the second is "insignificant." In the anti-detective those descriptions and
artificial boundaries collapse. The first story may not at all be real and is
certainly not absent, while the second story, which shows the impossibility
of solving the crime, is far from insignificant.1
Therefore, as Stefano Tani argues, the anti-detective genre is not a
continuation of but rather a "transgression" against detective fiction, spe
cifically against the whodunit. Conventional oppositions such as true ver
sus false, real versus imaginary, and present versus past are indeterminate.
The anti-detective genre is less interested in the detectives' psychological
drives, but rather concerned with the unfathomable schemes of determina
tive social and political systems. Quite possibly, the anti-detective detects
detective writing more than anything else. William Spanos, the first to
call this type of writing the anti-detective genre, sees a clear relationship
between the former and postmodern thought. Both postmodernism and the
anti-detective lack an anchor in clear cause-and-effect machinations. That
is to say, uncertainty is the name of the game (Spanos 48).
The anti-detective is not limited to the three novels that I have
chosen, although they strike me as particularly significant. A book-length
manuscript would do justice to the topic as a whole, and need not be lim
ited to literature. This study might include an investigation of works such
as Seven (1995), Angel Heart (1987), Black Mirror (2011- ), Midnight in
the Garden of Good and Evil (1994), Fight Club (1999), Memento (2000),
Chinatown (1974), The Usual Suspects (1995), Pledge (2001), Primal
Fear (1996), Insomnia (2002), The Singing Detective (1986) and many
other novels, television series, and films. What these works all have in
common, however, is the inability of the detective to bring the case to a
satisfactory conclusion, because he or she is unable to step out of the post

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Bennett Kravitz

modern system in which he or she operates, and either cannot conclude

with certainty whodunit, bring the criminal to justice, or even determine if
a crime has been committed.
As far as I have been able to determine, the anti-detective genre
begins with Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49 (1965), in which
Oedipa Maas is named the executrix of the estate of one Pierce Inverarity,
a former lover. Try as she might, Oedipa is unable to pierce the inverarity,
the untruth, so to speak, of the complex world of this 20th-century robber
baron and cannot determine whether or not the United States is being run
by a group of secret conspirators. What separates this early novel from
later versions of the anti-detective is that it is most often a dark comedy,
not to be taken seriously. Moreover, it ends, as comedies should, opti
mistically, with Oedipa having learned the one lesson possible in such an
impenetrable conundrum: that is, to keep the ball bouncing, profiting from
the journey of her quest rather than reaching any viable solution.
A more modern version of the anti-detective is the 1974 film Chi
natown, in which Jack Nicholson, playing the role of the classic gum
shoe J.J. Gittes, is unable to bring the mystery to a satisfactory conclusion.
"You may think you know what you're dealing with, but believe me, you
don't," admonishes John Huston in the guise of the murderous water bar
on Noah Cross .That proves to be the ominous anti-detective lesson of
Chinatown, Roman Polanski's critically acclaimed film. Gittes may have
some idea of how events came to be, but he is totally unprepared for the
shocking dénouement. He has been unable to rescue his client and, rather
than emerge victorious from his struggle with the powers that be, he is
overwhelmed by and sucked into the whirlwind of circumstances and left
broken, embittered, and confused. This suggests that in anti-detective fic
tion the truth promises neither to resolve the mystery nor to influence the
course of events in the a priori postmodern context.
Perhaps Humphrey Bogart in the film (based on Dashiell Ham
mett's 1930 novel) The Maltese Falcon is the original precursor to the an
ti-detective because the object of desire, the falcon, is never recovered and
the "whydunit" supersedes the "whodunit." But Bogart, unlike Nicholson,
is mostly amused by his plight and suffers no crisis of identity because of

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Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Adam
Ross's Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades

the outcome. He is left intact and ready to resume battle another day, even
if the falcon remains at large.
Paul Auster
Such is not the case, however, in Auster's, Ross's, and Grimes'
works. In Auster's trilogy, especially in Ghosts, the detective is given a
impossible task and is thus unable to fulfill his mission. Instead, he los
es what Auster would call his narrative thread, and is completely over
whelmed by the case he has taken on. Clues become pointless becaus
whether or not the detective puts them together will have no bearing on
the ultimate result. The very notion of self comes under attack. As Steve
Alford says of Auster's work, "If the self is a text, and if text's knowabi
ity is endlessly deferred, referring within the cognitive process to other
texts (be they physical texts or other selves), then 'true' self-knowledge
is impossible" (21). Thus, following this line of logic, I would ask, ho
can Auster's detective, Mister Blue, succeed in following Mister Black on
the orders of Mister White if Mister Black and Mister White are the same
person? It seems that White would like to have a tangible explanation
of who he is and what he does, yet he has no intention of allowing Blue
to complete his mission. In Ghosts, then, the narrator relies on what one
might call a conspiracy of language to create a conspiracy of the self. Ali
son Russell discusses the inability of language to posit truth in the novella,
and by extension in life itself (71-84). Beginning with the names of the
characters, Auster portrays the impossibility of the detective's mission.
Mister Blue, our anti-detective, will learn that his written reports of Mister
Black's activities are inadequate. "For the first time in his experience of
writing reports, he discovers that words do not necessarily work, that it is
possible to obscure the things they are trying to say" (147-48). Blue tries
to find solace in the certainty of language, but to no avail:
Blue looks around the room and fixes his attention on various
objects, one after the other. He sees the lamp and says to himself, lamp.
He sees the bed and says to himself, bed. He sees the notebook and says
to himself, notebook. It will not do to call a lamp a bed, he thinks, or a
bed a lamp. No, these words fit snugly around the things they stand for,
and the moment Blue speaks them, he feels a deep satisfaction, as though

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Bennett Kravitz

he has just proved the existence of the world. (148)

The key words of the last sentence are, of course, "as though." Blue's
Cartesian strategy—"I name therefore I am"—will not provide him with
the solution to his quest. Blue cannot rely on language to establish proof
of anyone's or anything's existence, least of all his own. In effect, even
his client does not exist in a world of certainty, since Mr. Black, whom
he must follow, and Mister White, the man who has paid Blue to follow
Black, are one and the same.
As Blue learns is the case with language itself, he will discover the
arbitrariness rather than the proof of the existence of the world. Indeed, the
conspiracy of language is best represented in the first part of the trilogy,
The City of Glass. Auster creates an interesting combination of scenarios
with one common foundation: language can neither supply the key to real
ity nor make sense of the world. To the contrary, language, because of its
elusive nature, conspires actively against us by obscuring the meaning of
things. We encounter, for example, Daniel Quinn, a writer with the same
initials as Don Quixote, who is mistaken for the owner of the so-called
Paul Auster detective agency, an entity that exists neither in fiction nor
fact. Yet Quinn believes that he can do a better job of detecting than Max
Work, the fictional detective that Quinn has created under the guise of his
nom de plume William Wilson, taken from Poe's short story of the same
name. Confused? I would certainly hope so. The reader needs to acknowl
edge the impossible task of getting to the bottom of things, when even the
names of the characters are so challenging.
As will occur in Ross's Mister Peanut, Quinn assumes that the
writer will certainly do a better job of detecting than anyone else does,
because, as a writer, he controls language. All he has to do, he reasons,
is to keep an accurate record of things in his red notebook, to unravel the
whodunit with which he is presented, a plot, no less, which centers on the
Babylonian fall of language. However, that he religiously records events
does nothing to influence the dénouement of the novel, which, uncannily,
seems to have a mind of its own.
Moreover, the persistence of the doubling technique, reminiscent
of the Freudian "Uncanny," gives the reader—this one, in any case—a

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Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Adam
Ross's Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades

headache. Daniel Quinn can be no more successful in his quest than was
Don Quixote, and both will be stymied by madness, real or affected. Paul
Auster is the author, a character in The City of Glass, and the owner of a
detective agency that does not exist within or outside of the novel. And
Quinn's fictional detective, who is a meta-creation of Paul Auster, the
"real" author of the trilogy, is able to solve crimes in a fiction within a
fiction because Max Work, his fictional within a fiction detective, "works."
But Quinn's assuming the nom-de-plume William Wilson, because the lat
ter destroys his double and thus himself in Poe's short story, suggests that
the final discovery of any detective is the no-win encounter with the "oth
er" side of one's self. This is the sophisticated technique that Auster uses
to create an uncanny maelstrom of non-detection.
Although Auster does not create exact physical doubles of his
characters, he does employ uncanny repetition of names and events. And
in the third part of the trilogy, The Locked Room, the narrator acquires a
double existence by replacing his friend Fanshawe to live the latter's life.
(He has a triple existence if we consider Hawthorne's novel of the same
name.) Once again, it is through writing, as he completes Fanshawe's un
finished manuscripts, that the narrator is overwhelmed by the world of the
uncanny. Fanshawe, an initially friendly double, seeks to destroy the best
friend whom he asked to take over his life. The narrator, acting as a detec
tive, is unable to bring Fanshawe's mysterious disappearance, a whydunit
rather than a whodunit, to a satisfactory conclusion.

Adam Ross
While Paul Auster most often relies on uncanny doubling and the
impossibility of clarity in language to fuel his thrice-repeated anti-dete
tive, Adam Ross founds his plot on the failure of narrative. Multiple ch
acters relate their life stories in such a way that it is impossible to dist
guish among victim, perpetrator and detective.
One would be hard pressed to create a more interesting opening to
a novel than Mister Peanut's—one that superficially suggests we are de
ing with a conventional, if not mundane, homicidal crime. Thus, Miste
Peanut begins as follows:

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Bennett Kravitz

When David Pepin first dreamed of killing his wife, he didn't

kill her himself. He dreamed convenient acts of God. At a picnic on the
beach, a storm front moved in. David and Alice collected their chairs,
blankets, and booze, and when the lightning flashed, David imagined
his wife lit up, her skeleton distinctly visible as in a children's cartoon,
Alice then collapsing into a smoking pile of ash. He watched her walk
quickly across the sand, the tallest object in the wide-open space. She
even stopped to observe the piling clouds. "Some storm," she said. He
tempted fate by hubris. In his mind he declared: I, David Pepin, am wiser
and more knowing than God, and I, David Pepin, know that God shall
not, at this very moment, on the very beach, Jones Beach, strike my wife
down. God did not. David knew more. (3)
In this, and in various other imaginary death scenes that David creates,
he is indeed guilty of hubris. As both frame novel writer and protagonist,
he has far less control over events than he imagines, as will be the case
with everyone involved in his wife' seeming demise—possibly a murder,
possibly not. The anti-detective novel, then, is distinguished for its refusal
to provide closure.
We are never given a sufficient explanation as to why David,
deeply in love with his wife throughout their thirteen-year-old marriage,
cannot resist contemplating her destruction. So when Alice, his spouse,
apparently ends up dead, he is both overwhelmed by grief, secretly grat
ified, and suspected of her murder. The detectives who are called in to
investigate the crime do not possess the pedigrees one would expect from
officers of the law. One of the investigating detectives, Ward Hastroll, has
a mysteriously bedridden wife; her condition leads him to think of putting
an end to her existence. And nothing guarantees the reader that he is not
responsible in some tangible way for her affliction. The other member of
the investigating team, Sam Sheppard, has been in almost the same un
canny situation David finds himself. Sheppard had been sent to jail for the
murder of his wife, only to be exonerated for the crime and reinstated to
the force. Throw in the philosophical hit man Mobius, possibly suffering
from Mobius Syndrome (the inability to follow objects with one's eyes),
metaphorically and/or physically, and the reader, along with all the other
characters, faces an impossible task in determining exactly what happened

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Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Adam
Ross's Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades

to Alice, if anything. This is a crime, if indeed there is one, which cannot

be solved by the ratiocination of the modernist detective. We are left with
numerous possibilities to explain Alice's fate. Yet the only reliable con
clusion is that no one can know another person or her motivations fully.
Moreover, the ideals of love and marriage come into question if their mir
ror images are hatred and death.
David Pepin has created a novel, within Ross's novel, about the
murder of his wife, Alice. Yet Mobius, the uncontrollable hit man within
the novel, as well as the man whom Pepin may have hired to kill his wife,
refuses to accept his secondary role in both (314). That is, of course, if
David actually hired a hit man. Mobius, then, undermines the traditional
hierarchy of the detective novel. The real struggle, it seems, is between
two narratives in the book, that of David and that of his surname, Pepin:
Alone now, Pepin wrote:
There are two of us, of course. David and Pepin, interlocked and
separate and one and the same. I'm writing my better self and he's
writing his worse and vice versa and so on until the end. A good reader
—a good detective—knows this by now. If you don't,look in the mirror.
That's you and not you, after all, because the person in your mind isn't
the person in the world. And if you don't know this already, you will.
(324, emphasis original)
Pepin's ruminations in the text are reminiscent of what Jacques Derrida
suggests in his expansion of Husserl's "principle of principles": to deter
mine a phenomenology of history, which only takes place in the present
even though it happened in the factual past, there must be what Derrida
calls an "originary delay." As Elvira Gabaldón García explains:
A first is only a first by consequence of a second that follows it. The
first is only recognizable as a first and not merely a singular by arrival
of the second. The second is therefore the prerequisite of the first.
It permits the first to be first by its delayed arrival. The first,
recognizable only after the second, is in this respect a third.
Origin, then, is a kind of dress rehearsal.... The original, in that sense,
is always a copy. In this way, Derrida deconstructs Husserl's principle of
principles, which always relied on being able to distinguish the original
from later copies.
We may well then ask, as regards the various texts Mister Peanut presents,

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Bennett Kravitz

how can we know what came first until a copy emerges? And since the
original comes after the second, it is also in some respects a third. In this
case, the frame novel may be the copy of what goes on in the world of the
author's novel, or it may not. A good reader, as deconstructive detective,
must accept the burden of distinguishing between the two without the ex
pectation of unraveling the whodunit. It might be that the novel of Adam
Ross is nothing more than the presentation of the frame novel of David
Pepin. Thus, he might or might not have killed his wife in "real" life. In
any case, the narrator loses control of the hit man, within or outside of
the texts, and is unable to force him into accepting the conclusion that the
frame novelist prefers. David Pepin indeed panics when Mobius, murder
er for hire, escapes the constraints of either real life or those of his frame
novel. After Alice survives a number of attempts on her life, David puts
in a hysterical call to Mobius to call off the hit, but to no avail. Mobius
has decided that he has the right to determine how the book ends: not the
author, not the reader, not the detective. Indeed, once Mobius is captured
he agrees to tell all to the detective if he allows him to examine David
Pepin's manuscript. Rather than keep his word, Mobius literally eats the
novel, imposing his own bizarre ending to the tale. He will not let either
the author or the police detective determine the outcome.
Though we can never be sure whether Alice is dead in the novel,
or within the fiction within the fiction, or has simply left him, David Pepin
has lost his narrative thread. The author titles a subsection, in reference to
David Pepin's frame novel,
HERE'S HOW IT ( ACTUALLY) ENDED

Dear David,

If you are reading this letter, I'm dead.

There was a great deal of concern about my undergoing gastric
bypass surgery, due to potential complications related to my thrombo
philia. The truth is that I was strongly advised against it. But I couldn't
stand the way I was any longer .... What do you say when you come to
The End?

After David finished writing the book he wept.

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Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Adam
Ross's Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades

Because no matter how she died, he thought, in fact or in his

imagination, there was an inescapable feeling of complicity. Art
was no exorcism, at least not for the artist, and these other things
he knew to be true: there were no detectives, no contract killer,
nothing at all. Only nothing. And then, because his wishes had been
fulfilled, there came a much darker realization: he'd never shake
this guilt, would always be stuck in this place. So the David who left
his chair now to walk in the world from here on out, the David who carried
on as if this were past, could only be half-real. An avatar. (333-34)
In a final moment of confusion, for the reader and the detective, the next
titled section in the novel is "HERE'S HOW DAVID'S BOOK ENDED"
(334). How do we reconcile this section's end with the previous one? In
this conclusion Alice comes back to the apartment, reads David's book,
understands that he fantasizes about having her killed, and accuses him
of hating her because of what he had written. David's response was that
that wasn't the ending he had written or had in mind. Alice's reaction is
to grab two handfuls of peanuts off a plate and stuff them into her mouth.
Her allergy to peanuts proved fatal, IF that is what has actually occurred.
No less than in Auster's novel, no one has control of events in
Ross's Mister Peanut. The idea of a good or traditional detective becomes
irrelevant because it is impossible to ascertain the truth of what transpired.
The detective novel is transformed into the anxiety-laden anti-detective
novel, one which has no anchor for reader, author, or detective. And the
rationalist rules of traditional detective novels, whether posited by Todor
ov, Van Dine or others, succumb to the unknowability and deconstructive
manipulations of the anti-detective novel.

Martha Grimes
Martha Grimes also abandons the traditional rules of the detec
tive novel. Much like Mister Peanut, The Old Wine Shades focuses on
the impossibility of initially determining whether or not a crime has been
committed, who the victim is, and who the perpetrator might be. A signif
icant difference, however, is that this anti-detective novel is not so much
a transgression against the detective novel, but a postmodern parody of
it. The scene is the English country side, the ideal setting for the classical

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Bennett Kravitz

whodunit and the persevering British detective, Grimes' outstanding Rich

ard Jury. But rather than incorporate uncanny elements to make the reader
squirm, the tone of the novel is comical, despite an abundant reliance on
anti-detective elements.
As we note from the opening of the novel (the twentieth in the
Richard Jury series), the focal point will be storytelling, as the first section,
the prologue, is named for the proverbial introduction to a time-honored
tale, "A man walks into a pub . . .." (The prologue's title, to be precise, is
"Man Walked into a Pub . . ..") Thus we already expect to be entertained,
with a touch of irony and humor, through a variation of myriad possibility.
The ellipsis, however, is especially significant, since it does not only sug
gest multiple opportunities of storytelling, but in addition a story that has
no end.
The story begins innocently enough. Jury is told by one Harry
Johnson, who strikes up a conversation with him in an upscale pub or wine
bar, about a friend, Hugh Gault, who lost everything, as his wife, son, and
even his dog simply disappeared. Almost a year later, miraculously, the
dog reappeared. The wife and child, Glynnis and Robbie, simply vanished
on their way to view a house in the English countryside. Apparently, Jury
learns, the house they were renting had a disturbing history, with a man
having murdered his family years before Hugh Gault moved in.
Yet Harry Johnson, in relating the details of the disappearance
over the course of a number of meetings in the bar with Jury, departs from
the traditional tale of whodunit when he begins to speak of Newton's me
chanics and quantum mechanics. Johnson, supposedly a physicist and
friend of fellow physicist Hugh Gault, explains that "Newton believed if
you knew everything in the present—every particle, no matter how many
this meant—then you could predict the future. Quantum mechanics dis
agrees" (Grimes 49). Harry supports the latter view, that no outcome is
predictable and that "things change as you look at them" (49). In effect,
he is telling Jury that there is no point to being a detective, since solutions
are beyond the realm of possibility, especially when Jury's ultimate nem
esis will turn out to be Johnson himself. To strengthen his position, Harry
invokes the ideas of the mathematician Kurt Gôdel, specifically his theory

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Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Adam
Ross's Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades

of incompleteness, which he explains as follows: "There's no proof that

we know all that we think we know since all that we think we know can't
be formalized, which is the incompleteness of proof' (53).
In their cat and mouse discussions, Harry elaborates on his cat,
which just happens to be named Schrodinger. The idea of Schrodinger's
Cat signifies the philosophical notion or thought experiment that nothing
is provable and everything is uncertain. In theory, then, it is impossible to
determine whether the cat is alive or dead within a box in which nuclear
decay will eventually cause the release of cyanide to kill the cat. Thus, as
Jury notes, "the cat's both alive and dead at the same time" (60). The an
ti-detective, in this novel and elsewhere, functions in much the same way.
For much of the novel, we could argue that the supposed victims are both
dead and alive simultaneously. Moreover, it is impossible to determine
to any degree of certainty "whodunit," and the perpetrator of the crime,
even if his identity is intuitively determined, cannot be brought to justice.
What once gave the reader and the detective so much pleasure, reaching a
satisfying conclusion of the mystery, is beyond their reach. As Harry tells
Jury, informed by the theory of Niels Bohr, "in the absence of measure
ment, there's no reality" (61). In the case of our mystery, something could
"be both true and unprovable" (62). The dénouement of the novel demon
strates the validity of that concept.
Even the motivation behind the crime is nebulous. In blaming
Hugh Gault for the crime he insists that his old friend is not mad, but
obsessed, like lago. But as Jury correctly points out, lago did what he did
merely because he could. Thus the solution to any crime committed mere
ly because a perpetrator feels capable of avoiding punishment fits well
with the notion of anti-detective. Specifically, in this case, Grimes takes
the typical modernist detective scheme and trajects it to the postmodern.
And the novel performs a delicate balancing act, between our need to hear
and tell stories and the inevitability of trying to prove whether any story
is grounded in reality. In this story, which Jury's friend Melrose points out
is actually four stories, what begins as ordinary becomes bizarre. Thus, a
woman, her child, and their dog disappear on a routine trip to see a house,
but months later the dog returns alone (85). Harry, apparently, is telling

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Bennett Kravitz

this story, with the same motivation that Jury attributes to lago: "because
he could." While telling his story in four installments in the wine bar to
Inspector Jury, he claims that he is beginning to feel "a sense of déjà vu—a
kind of trancelike state" (87). Déjà vu is an invitation to experience the
Freudian uncanny, since we feel as if we are re-experiencing something
never experienced before. Yet, since Harry is the protagonist in this story,
he has indeed experienced it previously.
Apropos of Harry, Jury and the reader must decide about the re
liability of the storyteller. When Jury's associates try to assess Harry's
veracity, the theories of Gôdel once again come into the discussion. All
of Harry's claims are questioned because, as Jury's acquaintance, Trueb
lood, recalling Godel, notes, "no validation of our rationality can be ac
complished using our rationality" (213). In Trueblood's own words, he
concludes that "sanity cannot comment on itself with respect to being sane
or insane, because he has to do it within the system"(213). Gôdel's theory
has implications far beyond this specific story; it is the foundation for the
notion of the anti-detective, as the impossibility of determining what is re
liable and what is not applies to everyone who acts in the world. In our sto
ry, Jury's coterie concludes that in light of these ideas, Jury "won't solve
it (the mystery), you know. He can't" (213). This indeed, is the eventual
result of Jury's investigation. He is left with suspicions rather than proof,
and Harry most likely will get away with murder.
In a parody of modernism, significant portions of the book are
devoted to Mungo, the dog. Sherlock Holmes once solved a case because
the dog didn't bark in the night. And Holmes was well known for his faith
in logic, as Harry recollects: "After you've eliminated the impossible, you
take what's left, no matter how improbable? But nothing was left" (238).
In this postmodern version, Mungo, as detective, becomes a first-person
narrator and knows exactly how to solve the mystery, but is unable to con
vey his thoughts to the pathetic humans so they can figure out what the dog
calls "obvious" (217). The whodunit remains shrouded in mystery.
Even when the body of a dead woman is discovered in an unoccu
pied house in Surrey, the murder clouds rather than clarifies the mystery,
as the dead woman is not, as initially believed, Caroline Gault. Jury dis

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Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Adam
Ross's Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades

covers Hugh and Caroline embracing in the clinic in which Hugh Gault is
recovering from a nervous breakdown. His wife had been away, their son
drowned a year earlier, which led to his breakdown, and they had no dog.
Mungo was Harry's dog. Harry sent his lover along with a "borrowed"
mute autistic boy and Mungo to impersonate the Gault family. Apparently,
Harry was a patient at the clinic where he met Gault (261 ). When Jury and
the chief inspector confront Harry about his totally inaccurate story, his
only response is "What story?" (288). The murderer gets Jury to fill in the
details of a crime he had yet to commit, highlighting the unreliability of
logical thought as we seek to make sense of events through story-telling.
Jury acknowledges as much, confessing "There wasn't one person who
had heard Harry's story, except me. I appeared to be supplying the details
myself' (302).
Ultimately, Harry gets away with kidnapping two children and
murdering his girlfriend. All of his actions were focused on the idea of in
completeness, as what could not be measured, in this case, his guilt, could
not be verifiable. The English countryside detective does not get his man,
even if he knows what has happened and why. The ratiocinative detective
has run into the insurmountable obstacles that the reigning climate of un
certainty has presented.

Whether because of the Freudian uncanny, as demonstrated in

Auster's New York Trilogy, the text within a text within a text as occurs
in Ross's Mister Peanut, or the philosophical impossibility of proving the
unprovable as designed in Grimes' The Old Wine Shades, the detective be
comes an anti-detective, will not get the culprit, and cannot help establish
meaning in the reader's life through rational thought. Whether we deem
this type of fiction anti-detective, postmodern detective, or metaphysical
detective, the common thread of all three is that the notions of truth, self,
and identity are no longer reliable or determinable.
Bennett Kravitz
University of Haifa

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Bennett Kravitz

Note

1 S.S. Van Dine, in his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detec

tive Stories," also lays out the paradigm for the detective genre, yet once
again the anti-detective novel defies the logic of the accepted formula.
He insists that "the detective himself, or one of the official investigators, should
never be the culprit." Yet that rule is overturned by both Auster and Ross.
As to his insistence that there must be a corpse, there is no way to determine
whether or not anyone has been killed in Auster's or Ross's postmodern an
ti-detective novels. And in The Old Wine Shades, initially there is no corpse,
but when one finally appears, it is not that of the supposed victim. Most sig
nificantly, "the truth of the problem must at all times be apparent," yet this is
never the case in with Auster's, Ross's, and Grimes' works. Finally, while Van
Dine demands that the crime in the detective novel "must never be a suicide,"
this is clearly one of the possible explanations for the death in Mister Peanut.

Works Cited

Alford, Steven E. "Mirrors and Madness: Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy."
Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37.1 (Fall 1995):
17-33. Print.
Auster, Paul. The New York Trilogy. London: Faber and Faber, 1987. Print.
Dopp, Jamie. "Affirming Mystery in Eric McCormack's 'The Mysterium.'"
Canadian Literature 154 (1997): 94-109. Print.
Garcia, Elvira Gabaldón. "Derrida and Deconstruction." Jacques Derrida. N.p.
22 May 2000. Web. 16 July 2013.
<http://mural.uv.es/elgagar/decons.html>.
Grimes, Martha. The Old Wine Shades. 2006. London: Penguin, 2007. Print.
Hammett, Dashiell. The Maltese Falcon. 1930. New York: Vintage,
1992. Print.

Merivale, Patricia, and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney. "The Game's Afoot: On the
Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story." The Metaphysical Detective
Story from Poe to Postmodernism. Ed. Patricia Merivale and Susan
Elizabeth Sweeney. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 1999.
1-26. Print.

Pynchon. Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: HarperCollins, 1986. Print.

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Thoughts on the Anti-Detective in Paul Auster's New York Trilogy, Adam
Ross's Mister Peanut, and Martha Grimes' The Old Wine Shades

Ross, Adam. Mister Peanut. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010. Print.
Russell, Alison. "Deconstructing the New York Trilogy. Paul Auster's
Anti-detective Fiction." Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 31
(1990): 71-84. Print.
Spanos, William V. "The Detective and the Boundary: Some Notes on the
Postmodern Literary Imagination." Boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 147-68.
Rpt. in Spanos, Repetitions: The Postmodern Occasion in Literature
and Culture. Baton Rouge: Lousiana State UP, 1987. 13-49. Print.
Tani, Stefano. "The Metafictional Anti-Detective Novel." The Doomed
Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to
Postmodern American and Italian Fiction. 40-113. Carbondale:
Southern Illinois UP, 1984. Print.
Todorov, Tzvetan. "The Typology of Detective Fiction." The Poetics of Prose.
Trans. Richard Howard. Ithaca, New York: Cornell UP, 1977.
44-48. Print.
Town, Robert. "Chinatown (1974) Movie Script: Third Draft." 9 Oct. 1973.
Screenplays for You. Alex Raynor. Web. 16 July 2013.
Van Dine, S. S. [Willard Huntington Wright], "Twenty Rules for Writing
Detective Stories." American Magazine Sep. 1928. Gaslight. N.p.
Web. 16 July 2013.

Bennett Kravitz teaches American Studies at the University of Haifa, Israel, in

the Department of English Language and Literature. He has a special interest in
popular culture, African-American literature, Jewish-American literature, and the
works of Mark Twain. He is a past president of the Popular Culture Association
in the South. His recent publications include the book Representations of Illness
in Literature and Film.

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