# The modernity of detective fiction > Hide a leaf in the forest; > hide a body in war; > hide a legend in everyday life. > > —— *Tuili Da Wuxian* I've always loved fantasy, science fiction, and detective fiction[^1]. Popular writing can teach you a lot about how to write papers, too. Great science fiction is always asking what happens when unusual material conditions or institutions meet ordinary human beings, and that isn't so different from what economics papers do. Will the future world be one of extreme monopoly or extreme equality? How would a safe, controllable one-centimeter wormhole reshape industrial geography? What kind of monetary and trading system would space commerce need? Put fictional institutions next to real human nature, and real insight starts to appear. **Reasoning** matters even more in papers and in the way we speak. How do you plant suspense? When do you put forward evidence? A good paper always has a process: first it raises a question and makes clear why it matters, then it answers that question with rigor and a bit of narrative pull. To enjoy detective fiction doesn't mean memorizing encyclopedias or hundreds of bizarre physical and chemical reactions. What matters is recognizing a narrative technique and an analytic technique. How does the human mind actually think? The recent excitement over AI chain-of-thought, for example, is one attempt to simulate reasoning. When people analyze, are we closer to Bayesians or to frequentists? {{< admonition type=example title="A model of interstellar trade" open=false >}} The Nobel laureate [Paul Krugman](https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/authored-by/KRUGMAN/PAUL) really did write an international trade paper about commerce in outer space. When a spaceship approaches the speed of light, time passes differently for the people on board and the people on the planet, which means capital turns over on different cycles. Each person has to decide whether to trade with people on the local planet or with people elsewhere, and equilibrium emerges from returns under different time conditions. ![A diagram](/img/侦探小说的现代性.zh-cn-20250222234514178.webp) {{< /admonition >}} {{< admonition type=example title="Detective narrative" open=false >}} I recommend *[The Great Economics Detective](https://book.douban.com/subject/35520486/)*. It does a very good job of showing how top economics papers build suspense through causal identification and empirical analysis, then work their way toward an answer. The social-science bestseller *[The Calling of Spirits](https://blog.huaxiangshan.com/en/posts/soul/)*, by contrast, unfolds like a mystery from the Qianlong emperor's point of view. It reconstructs the queue-cutting panic and then uses it to dissect the Qing communication system and its consequences. {{< /admonition >}} What I want to do here is summarize part of *[Tuili Da Wuxian](https://book.douban.com/subject/36692828/)*. The author's main goal is to let readers feel the pleasure of reading detective fiction, and the book also works as a kind of literary criticism of the genre. What caught my attention, though, was its discussion of the modernity of detective fiction. >To be clear, **this is not the book's main argument. It's simply the part that interested me most, so I'm recording it here.** ## The scope of detective fiction Detective fiction has two key elements: the detective as **subject**, and the process of **reasoning**. If we look only at the reasoning process, detective fiction is really a writing technique for creating suspense. The way we describe memory is itself blurry and full of gaps, like the waxing and waning of the moon, and good academic writing works the same way: it knows how to raise a question gracefully and then answer it. ## A brief history of detective fiction Detective fiction begins with Edgar Allan Poe's *[The Murders in the Rue Morgue](https://book.douban.com/subject/1141496/)*, but its great flowering happened in Britain. Britain was in the middle of the Industrial Revolution, and detective fiction fit that historical background in several ways. - First, it expressed a scientific spirit. Deduction celebrates science and positivism. - Second, its stories take place in everyday life, and above all in **urban everyday life**. Some literary critics and urban theorists treat detective fiction as a defense of modern life. Detective work makes ordinary life feel more poetic. The culprits in detective stories are often bourgeois figures: wealthy urbanites, manor owners, local notables. The stage for crime is often the suburban edge of the city. Money disputes, romantic entanglements, and parental control over their children's lives become the background to murder. The friction between private detectives and urban governance also becomes a recurring point of tension. All of this can be read as a way of interpreting city life. Solving the mystery gives everyday life its spell and then breaks it again; that is one of detective fiction's sharpest tools for turning the ordinary into something uncanny. ## Schools of detective fiction There are many ways to narrate deduction and revelation. Different writers sell different pleasures, and those different core attractions produce different schools: **Honkaku**: the main attraction is the pleasure of the puzzle itself. The rigor and ingenuity of the reasoning matter far more than the background of the crime or broader ethical and social concerns. Outside honkaku, the other branches go in different directions. The realist school can be divided into three kinds: - Courtroom fiction: contests between right and wrong, crime and punishment, law and feeling. - Hard-boiled fiction: character writing and a distinctive way of solving the case are what matter most. - Social detective fiction: the main attraction is the social background. **Henkaku**: deduction is only a pretext; what matters is the thought it provokes. For honkaku fiction, the detective and the reader should have exactly the same clues. That is what gives the reader the pleasure of an **intellectual contest** with the protagonist. Henkaku fiction does not treat deduction as its main selling point, so it is more willing to rely on narrative tricks, last-minute premise changes, forced reversals, or a deus ex machina to bring the story home. ## Detective fiction in different countries American detective fiction tends to favor the hard-boiled mode: the detective's experience in the course of the investigation matters more. Japanese detective fiction often favors the everyday mystery[^2]: deduction is used on ordinary life, or else malice rises out of the ordinary, usually with a strong light-novel and anime flavor. Chinese detective fiction generally draws on anecdotal lore[^4] and mythic storytelling. One point is worth noting: whether in Britain, the United States, or Japan, detective fiction hit its stride only after capitalist reform. Faster urbanization and greater population mobility produced the kind of social background in which detectives could plausibly appear. > In this age, the household replaced the clan, and the morning paper replaced morning prayer[^5]. Chinese detective stories are different. Although officials in imperial China also moved through appointments and postings, they represented **public authority**. Their protagonists are more often court officials, secret state agents, or public-security personnel. This difference can be explained, tentatively, from several angles: The individual detective is itself one of the defining features of detective fiction as leisure reading. Cafés are a recurring image in detective stories from this period, and people also consumed detective fiction as a form of leisure. Only when people have enough leisure do they begin to reason for pleasure and enjoy reasoning on the page. At the same time, China was still in the middle of a struggle for national survival, so the social soil for that kind of idle pleasure was thin. In mainstream Chinese suspense, once you set aside historical figures, myths, and anecdotal lore, what often remains is espionage in the service of nation and family[^3]. Even in the modern period, mainstream detective fiction is still dominated by police stories. Why does China not have as large an audience for detective fiction as Japan or the United States? The author offers one possible explanation: in China, Confucian *li* directly provides the norm, so people do not need to reason their way through process and justification. In this view, Eastern philosophy puts more emphasis on enlightenment and inward cultivation, whereas Western philosophy is more comfortable with layer-by-layer inference. {{< admonition type=note title="A question about consumption" open=false >}} By the same logic, we can also ask: where does China's appetite for science fiction stand in global terms? What kind of social soil produces the desire to consume science fiction? {{< /admonition >}} [^1]: The National Library in Beijing once hosted a Sherlock Holmes IP exhibition. I finished the Holmes stories before going, and my final verdict is: don't spend money on that exhibition. [^2]: It's hard to talk about this branch without mentioning the Japanese classic *Hyouka*. [^3]: I still miss my high-school days watching *The Message*. [^4]: A fun fact: the original author behind *Judge Dee* was the Dutch writer [Robert van Gulik](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_van_Gulik) [^5]: I found this line in a [Zhihu post](https://zhuanlan.zhihu.com/p/284278220), but I can't confirm whether that is the original source.