"It is very curious but the detective story which is you
might say the only
really modern novel form that has come into existence gets
rid of human
nature by having the man dead to begin with the hero is dead
to begin with
and so you have so to speak got rid of the event before the
book begins.
There is another very curious thing about detective stories.
In real life
people are interested in the crime more than they are in
detection...but in
the story it is the detection that holds the interest and
that is natural
enough because the necessity as far as action is concerned is
the dead man,
it is another function that has very little to do with human
nature that
makes the detection interesting. And so always it is true
that the
master-piece has nothing to do with human nature or with
identity, it has
to do with the human mind and the entity that is with a thing
in itself and
not in relation."
Bill Hagen
<billha@ionet.net>
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