The
Crime Fiction Chessboard:
The
Strategy and Tactics of Crime Fiction
by Moez
Lahmédi
Translation:
Claire Gorrara
Moez
Lahmédi is 29 and a French teacher in Haffouz (Kairouan,
Tunisia) and is studying for a doctorate in the Faculty of
Arts and Social Sciences of Sousse University. As well as
crime fiction,
his research interests encompass the sociology of literature.
He is affiliated with the Department of Communication Studies
at UCL (Belgium).
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Photo
de J. van der Hulst et E.Borgers
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One of the
preferred options for crime fiction authors when creating a narrative
structure is to adopt a ludic writing strategy. We know,
of course, that, from its beginnings, the crime novel has been conceived
of as a game with rules that are modelled on chess: Van Dine’s
twenty rules were predicated on this ludic logic and identified key
characters ‘with simple pieces on a chess board: the
king, the queen, the joker etc. Each piece has a “value” and
can only move in a pre-determined pattern – the same can be
said for the detective, the killer and the suspects’1.
This association
between the crime story and the game of chess explains in part
why the crime novel has been undervalued during
the twentieth
century. Reduced to a simple game of narrative permutations, the
detective story has unjustly been deprived of any literary worth: ‘I
would prefer to play at twenty questions which at least avoids
having to digest hundreds of appallingly badly written books’ wrote
Edmund Wilson in an article entitled Who Cares Who Killed
Roger Ackroyd?’.2
Today, to talk
of reading a crime novel or a literary novel as a game is no
longer to judge crime fiction negatively. Writers
and
contemporary critics have come to recognise the eminently ludic
nature of not only the crime novel but all narrative activity.
The literary
text, as Barthes tells us, is ‘an exceptional object
whose linguistic form underlines a certain paradox: it is immutably
structured
and yet infinitely renewable: something like the game of chess’.3
Michel Picard
and Umberto Eco also conceive of the text as a ludic and strategic
space. From this perspective, reading becomes a sort
of intellectual duel between two strategists, the author and the
reader. To understand the text is to understand the writing strategy
around which the narrative is woven: ‘To generate a text
is to implement a strategy that takes into account the future possible
moves of another – as with all strategy. As with battle strategy
(or that of chess; or any gaming strategy), the strategist has
in mind the model of an adversary’.4
In the domain
of crime fiction, the textual game is often represented as a
metanarrative through reference to the game of chess. Poe’s
Maezel’s Chess Player, Hubert Monteilhet’s The
Return of the Ashes, Christie’s The
Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Pérez-Reverte’s
The Flanders Panel and The Fencing
Master and Raymond Smullyan’s
The Chess Mysteries of Sherlock Holmes are all grounded, in a structural
sense, in ludic schemas. The games of chess played at the heart of
each novel are generally metatextual (one could even say ‘metaludic’)
representations of the textual game itself.
The characters
who excel at chess are often sly and devious individuals whom the
reader and
detective should mistrust. Throughout The Return of the
Ashes by Monteilhet, we follows a ludic confrontation between two excellent
chess players: Stan who wants to seize the fortune of his Jewish
wife, a woman whom he believed to have died during the Second
World
War and Elisabeth Wolf (his wife who is unrecognisable after
having undergone cosmetic surgery) who, for her part, wishes to
win back
her husband’s love. The last game of chess described in the
novel demonstrates the superior intellect of Mme Wolf (the narrator)
who remains unbeatable even after her death, because the journal
she had kept becomes a prime piece of evidence pointing to her killer:
-
What do you want to do with me?
- What do you deserve? I answered.
- I really don’t know… I don’t know
I would really like to invent a new punishment for myself, one that
would give you some pleasure. But I can’t make it out clearly… I
feel that you would need to be at least a kind of god to judge me.
You must know better than me what I need.5
The crime novel is therefore, by definition, a ludic space, the
arena for strategic battles and tactical manoeuvres both intra (between
characters) and extra textual (between the reader and the writer).
In Daniel Pennac’s The
Fairy Gunmother (collection Folio,
Gallimard 1987), the author makes reference to Stefan Zweig’s
The Chess Player (p.176) as a kind of palimpsest and in so doing
underlines the importance of the chess playing analogy for the narrative
economy of his novel: each chapter is in some way a narrative ‘blitz’ that,
once reintegrated into the chain of events of the story, leads to
the defeat of the guilty party. From this perspective, the narrative
progression of the plot is but the succession of moves that bind
the two main players, that is to say the criminal and the detective.
We could therefore say that in the (crime) fictional universe, the
game of chess constitutes a metaphorical micro-representation of
the battle between Good and Evil, between black and white, between
the truth and lies.
On the white
pages of the literary object, black print seems to suggest
the outline of an ‘ink chessboard’6, a chess
board on which each character plays the role allotted him. We
must recognise, like Muñoz in The Flanders Panel,
that ‘there
are many similarities between the game of chess and criminal
investigations’.7
The fictional universe of the crime novel can only be understood,
it seems, as a textual chess board on which characters, like
excellent actors, mime the narrative model of the ludic chess
game. When he
spoke of this similarity between the real chess board and the
textual chess board, George Steiner stated:
‘Perhaps as the model of a cosmos that encloses it, the game
of chess invariably offers the advantage of appearing as a whole
fraction of the world, as a small mirror with circumscribed content,
as a finished object, as a totality despite the infinite number of
permutations that it is able to generate. Such a model is likely
to be ‘applicable’ to any non anarchic world and particularly
to the literary text.8
A one and the
same ludic logic regulates therefore the internal workings
of both the game of chess and the literary object: the finite
nature of the ludic space or what Michel Picard calls ‘the
play area’ and the infinite number of ludic scenarios.
These two principles can be said to be variations on the Nietzchean
dichotomy
(Apollonian/Dionysian)9, and effectively guarantee the pleasurable
outcome for the player who must be extremely vigilant when
playing a (textual) move because, as we have already noted,
each move or
interpretative gesture can quite literally invert the course
of the game. In the crime novel, nothing is therefore lost
because everything
is open to interpretation.
When speaking of a narrative instance that centred on a surveyor
climbing a tree, G.K. Chesterton remarked:
[…] the reader who plays at hide and seek with the author
must always, like this, follow his instinct and be suspicious, must
always be saying to himself: ‘Yes, I know that a surveyor could
climb a tree; I am aware of the fact that there are trees and that
there are surveyors but what are you cooking up with these two facts?
Why are you making this particular surveyor climb a tree in this
particular story, you warped little fellow?10
The chess player,
the book character and the reader-player are, from this
perspective, all true artists who must act in order for
the ludic project to have meaning. As Boileau-Narcejac admirably
said: ‘The creator invents the chessboard, the
serial writer invents the moves.’11
1 Boileau-Narcejac,
Le Roman policier, coll. ‘Que sais-je’ PUF, p.
55. | back |
2 In
Autopsies du roman policier,
ed. Uri Eisenzweig, 10/18, 1983,
p. 96. | back |
3 Le
Plaisir du texte, Seuil, Paris, 1973, p.83. Emphasis
my own.
| back |
4 Umberto
Eco, Lector in fabula,
Grasset, 1985, p. 65. | back |
5 Editions
Denoël, 1961, p. 175. | back |
6 See Echiquiers
d’encre. Le jeu d’échecs
et les lettres (XIXe- XXe siècle),
edited by
Jacques Berchtold, Droz, 1998.
| back |
7 Pérez-Reverte,
trans. Jean-Pierre Quijano, J.–Cl, Lattès
1993, Le Livre de Poche, p. 218. | back |
8 See Echiquiers
d’encre, op.cit,
p. 20. | back |
9 Marc
Lits, Le roman policier:
introduction à la théorie
et à l’histoire
d’un genre littéraire,
Editions de C.E.F.A.L, Liège
1993, p. 123: ‘the
crime novel is but the reflection
of the Apollonian and Dionysian
principles already elaborated
by Nietszche. They endlessly
oppose one another in us as readers
and make us sometimes opt for
a desire for order and sometimes
feed our appetite for disorder’. | back |
10 'Comment écrire
un roman policier' in Autopsies
du roman policier, op.cit,
p.48-49. | back |
11 Quoted
by
Marc Lits in Pour lire
le roman policier, Bruxelles-Paris,
De Boeck-Duculot, 1989, p. 7.
| back |
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