Doing Hard Time: Narrative Order in Detective Fiction

abstract:Detective fiction has long served as a rich source of examples for illustrating myriad ways of disordering narrative time. But while theorists have routinely made detective stories their go-to genre for discussing temporal inversions such as flashbacks, flashforwards, and delayed exposition, none of them has done a full study of narrative order for any specific detective story. We have developed a method for tracking narrative order throughout complete narratives with simple graphs displaying the relation between story order (fabula) and text order (syuzhet). Our present purpose is to utilize a series of such “time maps” for the detective stories most often cited by critics in order to test and refine the theoretical claims commonly made about time in detective fiction. We close by applying our observations about detective fiction to a brief examination of order in Jane Austen’s Emma and William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!, both frequently compared to detective fiction.