Introduction

Before we even start dealing with detective fiction, we should take a look at some
definitions of this genre and consider them as general guidelines for the upcoming story.

"The detective story is a genre of fiction in which a detective, either an amateur or a

professional, solves a crime or a series of crimes. Because detective stories rely on logic,
supernatural elements rarely come into play. The detective may be a private investigator,
a policeman, an elderly widow, or a young girl, but he or she generally has nothing
material to gain from solving the crime. Subgenres include the cozy and the hard-boiled
detective story."1

"Detective fiction is a branch of crime fiction that centers upon the investigation of a
crime, usually murder, by a detective, either professional or amateur. It is closely related
to mystery fiction but generally contains more of a puzzle element that must be solved,
generally by a single protagonist, either male or female."2

"A hard-boiled detective novel is a gritty detective story with a street smart professional
investigator at its core. These realistic novels are generally set in a world permeated by
violence and corruption."3

These three definitions are the basic definitions related to the detective fiction genre.
There are many prominent writers who wrote detective fiction, among them Arthur
Connan Doyle, Sidney Sheldon and many others. However there is a basic difference
between writers coming from Great Britain and writers coming from the United States.
While writers from Britain mainly focused their novels on unweiling the mysterious way
of deductive thinking (namely Sherlock Holmes), American writers focused on the effect
that a certain story leaves on the reader. This effect that American detective fiction
writers try to awake within a reader, comes from the forefather of the short story and the
founder of detective fiction, Edgar Allan Poe, who created the theory of the unity of
effect.
We can honestly say that throughout the 19th and 20th century, this genre went through a
lot of changes. From the romantic period through modernism, all the way to
postmodernism, this genre developed and slowly gained popularity among the readers,
though it never gained the status of belonging to the mainstream until Paul Auster made a
transformation that changed the point of view of the readers on detective fiction.
In his novel The New York Trilogy he presented a stories which deal with the
disintegration of people in urban space, yet he used a detective story as the framework,
background and essence of the story.
There are three stories told in The New York Trilogy, all three dealing with the same
problem: the disintegration, disappearance of humanity in urban surroundings.

1
http://fictionwriting.about.com/od/glossaryofmysteryterms/g/detectivestory.htm
2
http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&hs=NDo&defl=en&q=define:Detective+fiction&sa=X&oi=glossary_definition&ct=title
3
http://fictionwriting.about.com/od/glossaryofmysteryterms/g/hardboiled.htm
In the words of Richard Swope: "In one way or another, all three are detective fiction -
though they have also been called anti-detective fiction by some critics. However,
everyone agrees on the fact that Auster included elements of traditional detective fiction
in the trilogy, but used them for unconventional ends."

When we mention the term "detective fiction", we wonder how this term ever came into
literature. Let us be the detective for the moment and try and trace back where this term
came from.
Many critics agree that the forefather of the detective story is Edgar Allan Poe. He wrote
five stories, beginning with The Murders in the Rue Morgue which set down the basic
principles of the detective genre. There were many writers who followed in his footsteps
and appreciated the ground breaking effort he made to introduce something new into
literature.
Poe created his detective, August Dupin, who was French, well educated and a little bit
unconventional. Based on this character, Arthur Connan Doyle later created Sherlock
Holmes, but he decided to make him more likeable to the audience, more conventional.
Eventually, detective fiction became popular and widely read, however, it was never
considered serious enough to be included into academic studies. The same thing
happened to the adventure genre as well. In the 20th century, there were a couple of
writers who decided to change things and introduce various popular genres into
mainstream literature. Just to mention a some of them, Graham Greene managed to
modify the adventure novel, incorporate its elements into his writing, remain recognized
by many critics of his time and still remain widely read and popular even today. Which
brings us to Paul Auster, the author of The New York trilogy, the writer who incorporated
elements of the detective story into his writing and changed the perception of the readers
on the detective fiction forever. However, before we leap into the world of Paul Auster's
detective fiction, we should look at some of the basic elements we can find in the
traditional detective story.

The detective story went through many changes during the centuries, but there is one
thing that can be clearly distinguished when it comes to point of view and way of writing.
Writers of British origin, like Arthur Connan Doyle and Agatha Christie are widely
known today for their fictional detective characters, Sherlock Holmes and Hercul Poirot.
If we analyze the way their novels were written, we will clearly see that in these novels,
the detective is the central part of the story. He is the observer, the one who follows the
traces and puts the pieces of the puzzle related to a crime together. The focus of these
stories is the process according to which they come to their conclusions.
While E. A. Poe was more inclined to using philosophy as the basis of his character's
knowledge, A. C. Doyle and A. Christie relied on logic and the basic principles of logic
to explain their character's way of thinking.
To elaborate on that, we should take a closer look on the so called analytic and deductive
methods in logic. According to the analytic point of view, we conclude from something
specific towards something general, whereas the deductive method goes the other way,
from general to more specific.
A. C. Doyle and A. Christie used the deductive method as a basis of their work because it
is more logical and when it comes to solving crimes, it is definitely more effective and
the focus of the story is in the description of this process of deduction. Basically we get
an insight into the mind of the detective. However, when it comes to writers who are
from the United States, we can see a shift of the focus from the process to the effect.
According to Poe's theory about the unity of effect, the most important thing in a story is
the effect it makes on the reader. A lot of contemporary detective fiction writers decided
to follow Poe's theory, so we have a distinction when it comes to detective fiction writers
in the United Kingdom and writers from The United States.
We can take for example Sidney Sheldon. His stories simply consume the reader, making
him forget about everything else but the story he is in at that moment( personal
experience ).
The stories are full of action, the setting changes very often, and in the end we end up
with an ending that is completely different from what we expected, and that is the
strength of this way of writing.
This long introduction is here to introduce the reader into the world of the American
writer, Paul Auster, who managed to merge these two points of view together and set the
basis of the new detective genre and offer us, in the words of Richard Swope: "a
prototype for metaphysical detective fiction, a genre marked by its use and abuse of the
conventions of the classic detective story."4

Reinvention of the detective

First of all, we should take a look at Auster's character, Daniel Quinn, who will take the
role of the detective in the first story called City of Glass, in the novel The New York
Trilogy. It is quite obvious that Quinn differs from the model of the traditional detective
described in the works of the authors previously mentioned in the text. Quinn is an
ordinary man of today. He lives in this mad, chaotic world that surrounds us today. This
fact only makes him a lot different from Sherlock Holmes for example. The ways of
living changed a lot in the 20th century.
Quinn was a quite ordinary man, who had a family, an arranged life until he lost his wife
and son in an accident. From that point on, his life was not the same. He lost his identity
and he is desperately trying to find a new one, but he is doing it in a wrong way. Quinn is
a writer, he writes detective stories, but he never publishes under his own name, he has a
pseudonym, William Wilson. He does not identify himself with this name, he says
himself that William Wilson appears to him as a stranger, like they do not share the same
body. He identifies more with his character, Max Work, a detective in his novels. This
alienation from himself and creation of an alter ego shows Quinn's desire to become
somebody else, to leave his old identity behind, like it never existed. A chance appears
when he receives a phone call intended for Paul Auster – in this case, a detective – and
decides to take up the role of a real life detective instead of a fictional one, like his
character Max Work. However, the coincidences do not stop with this misdirected phone
call, but continue further along in the story. When he accepts the case of finding Peter
Stillman's father, who has an intention of killing his son ( at least that is what Quinn was
told ), strange coincidences start to occur more and more frequently, for example the two
Peter Stillmans on the train. This unusual occurrance of coincidences is something that
Auster based his novel on, and it is there to show to the reader that life can spread in
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many different directions, like the branches of the tree, and we do not have the power to
influence its growth.
Auster created the character of Quinn and set the model for the new detective of the
modified detective genre. Quinn is somebody who is in an endless search for clues, but
each clue pushes him further away from the truth instead of bringing him closer to it.
Instead of becoming the decoder of messages, he finds himself entangled in a web of
coincidences. In this sense, Quinn resembles Oedipa Maas, the main character of Thomas
Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49. Oedipa is also in search of clues for solving a mystery,
however all the clues she finds carry her further away from the truth. The meaning of
clues is changing, they do not signify what they are supposed to because in this chaotic
contemporary world, words no longer carry the original meaning they were attached to in
the beginning. The link between the signifier and the signified is lost, and this is what
leads Quinn into disintegration. For example, when he walks around the city in order to
find clues, as he calls it, and notes down the grid that the streets through which he walked
formed. In these grids, he sees letters that hold a secret message, at least according to his
fancy, when in reality, they can be interpreted in many ways. The "message" cannot be
real, because Quinn's choice of streets is arbitrary, therefore it has no specific meaning. In
the words of Richard Swope: "Auster's detective "becomes a pilgrim searching for
correspondence between signifiers and signifieds" while also undertaking "a quest for his
own identity"."5 Since Quinn is unable to find his identity among the many identities he
created for himself (William Wilson, Max Work, Paul Auster), he eventually disappears,
leaving the only proof of his existence, the red notebook, behind from which the readers
are presented a story of the life of Daniel Quinn.

Treatment of space

The meaning of space changed drastically since the creation of the detective genre.
The task of the traditional detective in a traditional detective story is to analyze a certain
space which holds the clues to solving a crime. In the case of Auster's story, the space is
multiplied and it no longer holds straightforward clues to solving a certain problem. The
space is minimized and maximized in the same time and appears on several plains, not
just one. First of all, the vast space of the city, this urban jungle, which holds many
secrets. It provides shelter but also poses a threat to an individual, because a man can just
simply disappear in this vast space, disintegrate into nothingness, which eventually
happens to Quinn. Movement also holds a special significance. Quinn can only think
when he is walking and while he is walking, he is also writing. We can interpret this need
of walking and writing at the same time as an effort to cling to existence. As a writer,
Quinn finds material to write about while walking. He notes down the pattern that the
streets through which he went made and later he is trying to decipher the message it
holds. This is also a very good excuse for him to write, because while he is writing, he
exists.
This brings us to the microcosm of the red notebook, which signifies the writers
existence. The writer exist until his story exists, until his words exist, until his words
carry a certain meaning. When the meaning is lost, when there is no more space left in

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the notebook, the writer ceases to exist. In the words of Richard Swope: "Auster's novel
also explicitly speculates on the nature, which includes exploring the connections
between the production of space and the formation of identity." Quinn's existence and
identity is connected with the length, the space of the red notebook. Also the way he
writes makes us think about the way writers think. Auster likes to deal with the theme of
metafiction in his novels. The ending of this story resembles the feeling of inspiration in
its purest form. Quinn writes about everything that comes to his mind, and through him,
Auster presented us the way of thinking of writers. Franz Kafka once said that there is no
reality while a story lasts. Perhaps there is no reality for the writer after he finishes
writing his story.

Conclusion

We can conclude that words are the key to understanding this new detective story. The
reader is the detective and his task is to decipher the words and find the meaning of the
message that is supposed to be conveyed. The reader is no longer passive, he has an
active role while reading, he needs to engage himself in the action. Space is presented as
a combination of many realities. When Quinn devotes himself to solving the case of Peter
Stillman, he has to observe reality from several different angles. What appears obvious to
him, does not necessarily has to appear obvious to someone else. Quinn pulls the reader
in to this whirlpool of coincidences as he was pulled into it himself. This is very different
from the case we have in traditional detective novels. Everything is presented to the
reader there, the reader has no need to decipher anything. In that sense, this new
metaphysical detective fiction is more demanding, more complex and it is considered
serious and part of the mainstream, because it demands certain sacrifices from the reader.
Auster himself said that he chose the detective story as a basis of this story because in
these kinds of stories, the writer has the control. He can take the action in one direction
and in the end he can surprise the reader with a completely different ending from his or
her expectations. Even in the City of Glass itself, there is a passage where Quinn
elaborates on why he chose to write detective fiction: "What he liked about these books
was their sense of plenitude and economy. In a good mystery there is nothing wasted, no
sentence, no word that is not significant....Everything becomes essence; the center of the
book shifts with each event that propels it forward. The center, then, is everywhere, and
no circumference can be drawn until the book has come to its end." In this sense we can
say that these can be the words of the author himself and his opinion of his own writing.

Finally, I would like to give my personal opinion of this book, and I think the best way
for me to do that is to quote Franz Kafka: "I think we ought to read only the kind of
books that wound and stab us. If the book we are reading doesn't wake us up with a blow
on the head, what are we reading it for? ...we need the books that affect us like a disaster,
that grieve us deeply, like the death of someone we loved more than ourselves, like being
banished into forests far from everyone, like a suicide. A book must be the axe for the
frozen sea inside us."6
6
http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka
Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy had exactly this kind of effect on me. It grabbed my
attention, puzzled me, threw me in disbelief and in the end it wounded me when I
realized that eventually, our lives are like a detective story and we are the authors of it.
We are taking it in one direction, but we might end up quite different from what we
imagined initially.
References:

Oster, Pol. (2003). Njujorska Trilogija. Beograd: Geopoetika.

Online sources:

http://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Franz_Kafka

http://fictionwriting.about.com/od/glossaryofmysteryterms/g/detectivestory.htm

http://fictionwriting.about.com/od/glossaryofmysteryterms/g/hardboiled.htm

http://reconstruction.eserver.org/023/swope.htm

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&client=firefox-a&channel=s&rls=org.mozilla:en-
US:official&hs=NDo&defl=en&q=define:Detective+fiction&sa=X&oi=glossary_definiti
on&ct=title

http://www.univie.ac.at/Anglistik/easyrider/data/pages/auster/menu.htm