Name: Shannon Chamberlain

Title: "The Documents in the Case: Framing Devices and Early English Detective Novels"

Abstract: By the time that Wilkie Collins and Charles Felix are writing the first detective novels in English, fictionality should be taken, by reader and writer alike, as a given. But the elaborate framing devices invented in the eighteenth-century to obscure the non-referential qualities of the invented prose narrative, long obsolete in the nineteenth, seem to recur at the foundation of the detective story: The Notting Hill Mystery, The Woman in White, and The Moonstone construct themselves as a collection of narratives, provided by different characters with a unique and non-overlapping knowledge of the core mystery in each. What does the sudden re-invigoration—and a corresponding absence of sly meta-fictional commentary—mean for the foundational claims of this genre? Focusing on The Woman in White and The Notting Hill Mystery, I propose that the document forgeries common to both are not mere self-referential gestures but instead thematize the crime novel as a middle ground where public and private finally meet. The forgery in The Woman in White is a private act of writing with public implications, a hybrid in a world populated with them: individual readers who become jurors, private houses which become the scenes of public crimes, and, as D.A. Miller points out, the occasional privatization of public policing functions. Using forgery (the non-referential that claims to be referential for the public ill), the detective novel declaims fictionality to posit itself as the non-referential public good, and seek to define the public-private nexus that is crime.