Scène et piste : spatialité du récit d’enquête

Abstract

Detective novels give readers the opportunity to embark on reading adventures, and concurrently feature characters who try to build stories. This metanarrative dimension turns the investigation into the deconstruction and reconstruction of a story configured like a closed space. From the initial mystery, presented as an impossible story, to the solution revealed by the detective in the final scene, procedures of opening and closing allow us to describe detective novels in terms of spatiality. The same applies to the typical activities of the detective: observation may be analysed as a form of fragmentation, and reasoning as a form of displacement.