The Long Wait: Timely Secrets of the Contemporary Detective Novel

Literary criticism’s enduring interest in the figure of the detective is no great mystery. “[T]he detective,” in Shoshana Felman’s famous account, “is only a detective in his (her) function as a reader” (176). To read like a detective is to read in a very particular way: the detective works “to extort the secret of the text, to compel the language of the text . . . to confess” (192). In the past decade, however, the language of forced confession has made literary critics increasingly suspicious of such a suspicious stance toward literature. Introducing a special issue of Representations on “the way we read now,” Stephen Best and Sharon Marcus contend that reading like a detective is not always the right way to read, prone to miss at least as much as it unearths: “[W]hat lies in plain sight is worthy of attention but often eludes observation—especially by deeply suspicious detectives who look past the surface in order to root out what is underneath” (18). In their conclusion to The Way We Read Now, Emily Apter and Elaine Freedgood similarly argue that it is necessary to “mov[e] away from ‘beneath’ and ‘behind’ (those most beloved tropes of a hermeneutics of suspicion) in favor of ‘beside’“ (145). To rise from the depths back to the surface—to replace a suspicious investigation of what lies “beneath” with a credulous mapping of what lies “beside”—means renouncing the kind of reader who keeps faith in the existence of buried, disguised, or concealed meanings; the reader who, as these critics see it, acts like a detective. I want to suggest, however, that there is something more at work in detective work. In detective fiction, the mystery is not simply a projection of hidden depths; it is also an expectation, a promise, which takes time to be fulfilled. Secrecy is not just a static structure—a timeless choice between surface and depth—but a temporal dynamic. The temporality of detection complicates the familiar hermeneutic