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Aaron Jacklin's avatar

Great piece, as always!

This all reminds me of something from crime fiction, specifically the introduction to The Continental Op, a collection of short stories by Dashiell Hammett, which was published in 1974. The collection was selected and introduced by Steven Marcus, who wrote in the introduction first: "...an ideal-typical description runs as follows. The Op is called in or sent out on a case. Something has been stolen, someone is missing, some dire circumstance is impending, someone has been murdered--it doesn't matter. The Op interviews the person or persons most accessible. They may be innocent or guilty--it doesn't matter; it is an indifferent circumstance. Guilty or innocent, they provide the Op with an account of what they know, of what they assert really happened. The Op begins to investigate; he compares these accounts with others that he gathers; he snoops about; he does research; he shadows people, arranges confrontations between those who want to avoid one another, and so on. What he soon discovers is that the 'reality' that anyone involved will swear to is in fact itself a construction, a fabrication, a fiction, a faked and alternate reality--and that it has been gotten together before he ever arrived on the scene. And the Op's work therefore is to deconstruct, decompose, deplot and defictionalize that 'reality' and to construct or reconstruct out of it a true fiction, i.e., an account of what 'really' happened."

And then: "What Hammett has done--unlike most writers of detective or crime stories before him or since--is to include as part of the contingent and dramatic consciousness of his narrative the circumstance that the work of the detective is itself a fiction-making activity, a discovery or creation by fabrication of something new in the world, or hidden, latent, potential, or as yet undeveloped within it. The typical 'classical' detective story--unlike Hammett's--can be described as a formal game with certain specified rules of transformation. What ordinarily happens is that the detective is faced with a situation of inadequate, false, misleading, and ambiguous information. And the story as a whole is an excercise in disambiguation--with the final scenes being a ratiocinative demonstration that the butler did it (or not); these scenes achieve a conclusive, reassuring clarity of explanation, wherein everything is set straight, and the game we have been party to is brought to an appropriate end."

It's been too long since I read Hammett's work for me to comment on whether Marcus is "right" about the stories about the Op, but there seemed to be some thoughts relevant to the different types of true crime work you write about in this post. Or not. Curious about what you think.

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