Chapter 30 The little gray cells are more active than the history of detective novels in our memory is less than

"If you really used your brains to investigate crimes, there would be no such thing as a mystery!" CSI agents have a catchphrase: "The corpse can talk!" It can also be translated as "the corpse decides everything", which is an extreme statement of "evidence decides everything".Since the first season, every episode of "CSI" has corpses talking non-stop. They are bloated, rotting, knifed, quartered, lying on the dissecting table. After watching it, I will definitely not cherish life more.The only function is to let the audience know how many kinds of corpses look like after death.For comparison, Agatha Christie's, "Destination Unknown" and other novels of more than 200 pages have only one death, while "CSI" has at least one death in every 60 minutes of an episode.

Edgar Allan Poe, Sherlock Holmes From the pioneering detective novel "The Murder in the Rue Morgue", to the classical mystery novels of the golden age, to the TV series "CSI", which is currently being broadcast in the United States, reasoning is the main thread running through them, and the difference between the two ends is definitely not the difference in the number of dead , but the difference in reasoning methods, which ultimately reflects the difference between "I believe in me" and "I believe in it", which is the concession of human self-confidence.Anyway, those little gray cells in our own brains had their days of glory.

In 1841, Edgar Allan Poe wrote The Murder in the Rue Morgue, the pioneering work of modern detective novels. The protagonist Dupin and his friend "I" walked on a long and dirty road, and suddenly said "I" was in the heart. What to think about: From a fruit seller, to Santilly who should go to the circus, and Epicurus was thought of in the middle.This crude, far-fetched, and at first sight very startling "trick" is the first step in the intellectual display of detective fiction for more than 160 years.The school of detective novels that insist on "intellectual activities" is called the classical school. The detective novels of Britain, the United States and France have an absolute advantage in both quality and quantity. After the "World War II", Japanese mystery novelists put forward the "Benge School" statement.Many so-called authentic detective novel fans insist that this is the real detective novel.

Conan Doyle mentioned the advanced bloodstain detection technique at that time, and Poirot also used the most superficial fingerprint technique, but the scientific method is not the dominant of classical detective novels, but the perception ability, reasoning ability, including intuition ability, especially Believe in the power of logic.Like the "Old Man in the Corner" written by Baron Orcize, he is neither a public police detective nor a private eye, but a "sideline commentator" who sits there every day, only based on the newspapers available to the public. The social news, through logical reasoning, solves various difficult and miscellaneous cases. He said: "If you really use your brains to investigate crimes, there will never be such a mystery!" Incomparably confident in his own mind.

At the beginning, the "little gray cells (brain cells)" showed very immature abilities.The first time Conan Doyle showed his ability to observe was that he glanced at Watson and said, "I can see that you have been to Afghanistan." The place is tropical), the sickness has not gone (got a disease that is only in a certain area), and so on.This level is no different from Grandpa Wangfa in the movie "Haixia" who saw through Mrs. Liu's identity as a spy - "Everyone who fishes at sea for a living has separate toes", but Mrs. Liu's toes are not like this, So he is a fake fisherman.Holmes' deduction is also based on his mixed knowledge.This is unfair to the readers, who can only watch Holmes show off his knowledge with envy: "From the gaps between these teeth marks, I think that the dog's jaw is wider than that of a dog, and that it is wider than that of a dachshund." The mastiff has a narrow jaw. It must be a curly-haired long-eared dog." Try it out, how many people know the pronunciation.In addition to being beyond the scope of ordinary people's knowledge, it is also a problem not to tell the reader the clues in advance.Dupin, after observing Mogg's haunted house thoroughly, said at last: "There is a lightning rod about five and a half feet from that window."

Conan Doyle wrote a total of 24 short stories from 1891 to 1894. These short stories were evaluated by Maugham as "so poor in content", "When you have read 50 stories about Sherlock Holmes, you don't know more about Sherlock Holmes than You know a lot more when you’ve just read one.” But then, and now, readers can’t resist those “continuous recounts.”It is the rivalry between the reader's enthusiasm and the author that promotes the development of the detective novel's showmanship. Jacques Futre, GK Chesterton Going to the extreme in this regard is the American writer Jacques Futre and the British writer GK Chesterton.Van Dusen in Futrey's works emphasizes that "thinking can dominate everything", and all problems can be solved without leaving home.Father Brown of Chesterton never completely lost his sense of right and wrong. He raised the detective to an aesthetic level: "The criminal is a creative artist, and the detective is a critic." As long as the word is not spelled backwards," the priest, in "Garden Murder", matched the two headless corpses with the two heads, and fully described the process of the two being killed and then replaced. .As for "The Old Man in the Corner", I simply said: "The people I sympathize with are often criminals who are smart and cunning enough to lead the whole police by the nose."

In order to make the intellectual game fairer, Willard Wright, a journalist and art critic with the pseudonym Van Daan, put forward the "Twenty Principles of Detective Fiction". The clues are all explained clearly.Others are such as: the deception of the reader should be limited to those tricks that the criminal uses on the detective himself; The person should not be the detective himself, or a member of the police force.This is a base means of defrauding the reader; the method of solving the case needs to be reasonable.Witchcraft such as mind-reading, shamanism, summoning spirits, and looking at crystal balls are taboos in detective novels.It should be a mortal who fights wits with readers.In the fourth-dimensional space of metaphysics, readers have no chance of winning when they fight with gods and ghosts.Therefore, writers of detective novels must come up with a better way, either to find or create readers’ psychological blind spots, and then use logical reasoning to make the impossible possible.During the creative process, some classic puzzle-setting formulas were formed, such as secret room reasoning, isolated island reasoning, alibi, no footprints, impossible disappearance and so on.

In "God's Lamp," amateur sleuth Ellery Queen experiences the seemingly impossible: A solid house disappears overnight.Before finding out the reason, the article repeatedly mentioned that Aunt Sarah mistook Miss Mayhew for her daughter Olivia.On the surface, it seems to be just a common illusion of a confused old man, but in fact it is an extremely important clue to solve the puzzle.Readers must be as careful as a gleaner in famine times while reading this type of detective novel. If they are so careful, the mystery will be solved before the end of the article.This is an intellectual contest between the author and the reader. The author has to give clues while trying to make them unnoticed.

The reasoning in the secret room is the most representative. A homicide occurred in a room that no one can enter or leave. Mystery novels are elevated to the point of artwork.If the purpose of detective novels at the beginning was to believe that they could catch the murderer with their own minds, but now it no longer discusses who did it, but focuses on how things happened, and has become a purer intellectual game. Agatha Christie, Japanese detective novels Agatha Christie is the most successful writer of detective novels who uses blindfolding.Although in "The Mysterious Case of Stiles Manor", Agatha revealed her knowledge of pharmacology, but soon, she entered an almost purely intellectual game.It is the most classic work of "Island Reasoning", and it is actually a variant of "Chamber Reasoning".Ten unrelated people are invited to a desert island, and the desert island becomes a closed space, no one can leave or come, ten people die one by one.There are certainly dubious elements to the story, but because Agatha is so good at creating tension, the reader has little time to notice the flaws in the narrative.Fortunately, Agatha is not a reasoning machine. She knows that it still has something to do with morality. Miss Marple never forgets to thoroughly analyze the relationship between men and women in the process of solving the case.

After World War II, Japan became an important town for detective novels.Detective and reasoning have the same meaning in Japanese, but because of the Japanese reform, the word "detection" was canceled, so mystery novels replaced detective novels.From a technical point of view, Japanese mystery novels are not particularly groundbreaking, but only develop to the extreme in terms of "impossibility". In 1912 Edmund Clarichu Bentley wrote The Last Case of Trent to demonstrate the futility and perniciousness of crime-solving reasoning.Trent thought he had solved the mystery of Manderson's death, so he proudly invited "his friend" Kapoor to dinner to celebrate.The old man told Trent that his seemingly rigorous deduction was useless, and that he was the real murderer. 40 years later, Maugham declared in "The Decline and Death of Detective Fiction" that Mr. Bentley's strategy is also "useless", and its "uselessness" lies in the application of fingerprinting. Throwing it on the ground, the fingerprints were not wiped off, and the smell of gunpowder and particles remained on his fingers. Fingerprinting, which has been used to capture murderers since 1892, was not yet popular when Bentley wrote the novel, but now readers read Bentley's novels, and his carefully designed puzzles are meaningless.But he is not the first person to retreat from science.

There is also Poirot, in the middle, this Belgian with a small head like an egg lashes out at Fang Chief, and seems to have mastered all the wisdom of human beings when he deciphered the last chapter.In fact, his tricks are no longer needed.Any audience who has been slightly trained by "CSI" can't help but worry about the killers when they watch the movie of the same name: they left too much evidence at the scene: the fingerprints on the doorknob are enough to make these people fall into the prison quickly. French Open. The first season of "CSI" aired in 2000, and one of the episodes seemed to be a tribute: a murder occurred in the commercial cabin of an airplane, but all the living passengers unanimously said that there was no murder.Grayson and his team didn't listen to that testimony or engage in easy chair thinking, they left everything to the evidence.Evidence, not reasoning, convicts all of them of participation in the murder.Poirot would wag his fat finger and say, "No, I found contradictory statements from all the witnesses." Grayson would say, "I found contradictory statements from all the witnesses." The mental work of human beings has been handed over to objective evidence. This subject called forensic science, just like the camera pushed the painting to the modern school, turned the human intelligence in the classical mystery novel into a painting on the wall.