"Forget it, Number Five, it's Chinatown."

Tony Ellis · 25 Aug 2001, 17:11 · from urth-v0030.mbox · original

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From: "Tony Ellis" <LittleSense at necronomicon.co.uk>
Subject: (urth) "Forget it, Number Five, it's Chinatown."
Date: Sat, 25 Aug 2001 18:11:22 +0100
Message-ID: <urth-v0030-0673 at digest.urth.net>
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Dan wrote:
>Ooh now this gets interesting. How, if the ancients were so sold on
>reason, did they manage to be so ridiculously wrong about the way the
>world was put together?

Would these be the ridiculous Pythagorean scholars who postulated a
spherical Earth moving in a circular orbit about a central fire in the fifth
century BC, or the ridiculous Aristarchus of Samos who did the same thing in
250 BC? :-)

>(and I'm inclined, personally, to think that the ancients
>weren't so ridiculously wrong and the moderns not
>necessarily spot on) ...

Agreed. And I think you're right: broadly speaking, the ancients applied
Reason through discourse, the Moderns through experiment. But then, the
Moderns had access to a whole technology of glass instruments and vacuum
pumps with which to be experimenters.

>My own example of
>postmodern detective lit was going to be film noir but I don't really
>know the genre well enough to give examples.

Off the top of my head:

The Third Man, which just about invents the genre: Holly Johnson, writer of
cowboy stories, attempts to impose his own na=C3=AFve form of narrative on =
post
WWII Vienna. But the solution to his dogged quest to find the Bad Guy who
killed his friend is the discovery that the friend -is- the Bad Guy.

Kiss Me Deadly: Mike Hammer slugs his way right out of the hard-boiled
detective genre and into the terrifying, unsolvable world of the atom bomb,
in of the most jaw-dropping d=C3=A9nouements in the genre's history.

Chinatown: gumshoe Jake solves the murder mystery, but precipitates tragedy,
not a restoration of order.

There you have it: solving the mystery in detective fiction brings order,
solving it in film noir brings the discovery that there -is- no order.

Broadly speaking I would agree with what I take to be the general consensus:
that this is precisely the sort of mystery Gene Wolfe does not write. But at
least one important exception springs immediately to mind: The Fifth Head of
Cerberus. In both the first and the final novellas, the 'detective' far from
solving a mystery becomes ensnared in one. The universe remains corrupt and
unsolved.

In fact it's just hit me: the seedy underworlds of St Anne and St Croix are
pure film noir, complete with criminal kingpin, bent cops, and femmes
fatales. Does anyone else think "Mean Streets: The Fifth Head of Cerberus
Considered as Film Noir" sounds like a good title for a Wolfe essay?

*More Wolfe info & archive of this list at http://www.urth.net/urth/

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