1 Read the passage and decide where the following phrases/clauses/sentences go.

Indicate
your choice by giving the number of the line where you think the phrase/clause/sentence
should be inserted. GIVE ONLY ONE ANSWER.

a) in a ‘vile alley’ somewhere in Paris _________

b) In order to emphasise his hero’s scientific credentials, _________

c) But one should always be cautious of authors’ attempts to acknowledge

or deny the ‘real’ originals of fictitious characters. _________

d) to demonstrate that X would have had time to do the bloody deed _________

e) – more and more, these days, a policeman or woman – _________

2 Provide the referent for the following words and phrases. GIVE ONLY ONE ANSWER.

his line 16

them line 23

them line 29

the genre line 32

her line 42

3 Write one or two well-formed sentences expressing the main idea of the text.
Abbreviations, fragments, and arrows are not accepted. Do not quote from the text. GIVE
ONLY ONE ANSWER.
4 Decide whether the following statements are TRUE, FALSE or there is NO EVIDENCE
for them in the passage. Indicate your decision with capital letters T, F or NE. Justify your
opinion in one or two well-formed sentences. Do not quote from the text. Abbreviations,
fragments, and arrows are not accepted. GIVE ONLY ONE ANSWER.

a) Edgar Allan Poe was the first author to write a classic detective story.

b) Chevalier Dupin wrote crime stories.

c) The essence of classic detective stories is to provide a predictable solution to crimes.

d) Conan Doyle invented his crime-story characters taking his professor Joseph Bell as their
example.

e) Dupin and Holmes use similar methods to solve crimes.

f) Agatha Christie makes it easy for her readers to guess who the murderer is.

5 Find words or expressions in the text that correspond with the following meanings and
explanations. GIVE ONLY ONE ANSWER.

1. handle (lines 1-25)

2. show (lines 1-25)
3. main (lines 1-25)
4. amaze (lines 1-25)
5. strategy (lines 26-48)
6. slightly crazy (lines 26-48)
7. cleverness (lines 26-48)
8. together (lines 26-48)
 1 At first sight the classic detective story might seem to be a form that is continuing the
2 Enlightenment’s attempts to grapple with the dark secrets of the human heart and, somehow,
3 reassure us that sweetness and light can win the day. But the history of the crime story is
4 powered by something as mysterious as the tales themselves.
5 The form really begins in the 1840s with the publication of a short story called The
6 Murders in the Rue Morgue by Edgar Allan Poe, the horrific tale of the murders of two
7 women. The crime is solved by a character called Chevalier Dupin who, at first sight, might
8 appear to be the first of those nineteenth century thinking machines of whom Sherlock
9 Holmes is the most famous example. Close inspection of the mechanics of the tale, however,
10 reveals that Dupin is closer to being a wizard of the old-fashioned type. Poe tells us at the
11 beginning of the story that draughts is superior to chess (more intuitive) and most of Dupin’s
12 ‘deductions’ – including a bizarre sequence where he professes to be able to read his
13 companion’s mind – are about as far from logical thought as you can get.
14 The detective story comes out of the nineteenth century’s loss of faith in religious truth
15 and its heart lies in improbable explanations. Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Holmes is one of
16 the most famous fictional characters in the world, acknowledges his debt to Poe in his first
17 published Holmes tale A Study in Scarlet. But though Doyle begins by emphasising the
18 rational nature of his principal character, Holmes gradually gets taken over by the gothic,
19 referring to cases such as that of ‘the giant rat of Sumatra for which the world is not yet
20 prepared’.
21 Conan Doyle said that he was based on his old professor of surgery, Joseph Bell. One
22 of Bell’s party tricks was to astonish patients in front of his students by deducing their
23 professions from the state of their clothes or telling them he knew they had walked across a
24 certain golf course in order to get to the hospital: ‘Only on these links, my dear man, is found
25 the reddish gravel that still adheres to your shoes’.
26 If we look closely at Holmes’s methods, we discover that the great detective is closer
27 to the mystical and the intuitive than anything else. One of his favourite ploys is to withhold
28 facts from the reader as well as the other characters and, when providing explanations, to
29 make them as pleasingly barmy as anything in Poe. The Speckled Band – one of Holmes’s
30 most famous cases – is based on a series of absurdities, not least of which is the idea that
31 snakes can slide down bell ropes.
32 This anti-rational strand of the genre might seem at odds with its next great
33 development – The English Golden Age Murder, whose greatest exponent is Agatha Christie.
34 Christie is a writer whose charm, for most people, is that her plots are fuelled by ingenuity,
35 not violence. Her great detective, Hercule Poirot, reckons to solve all his cases by use of ‘the
36 little grey cells’. And one of the things that Christie fans will tell you is that she ‘plays fair’
37 with the reader. Even in a story where the narrator turns out to be the murderer, she does
38 carefully adjust the timescale and, in order to seem absolutely above board, leaves an obliging
39 trail of asterisks to put us on our guard.
40 But when you come to look closely at Christie’s work it becomes clear that we are not
41 really supposed to read these texts while attempting to understand them. As Raymond
42 Chandler remarked of the solution to her famous story in which all of the suspects did the
43 murder in collaboration: ‘The plot is so ingenious only a half-wit would guess it’.
44 We read detective stories because we wish to imagine a world in which a strong,
45 independent figure can reassure us that justice has not altogether been extinguished from the
46 planet. And, as we move farther and farther from the notion of society, and mutual support
47 and concern for others come a long way behind our personal survival, our need for the world
48 of the great detective – however fantastic it may be – is greater and greater.