Sans attendre le dévoilement du coupable. La lecture policière comme impatience générique

This article considers the repetition of the fake culprit scenario as an element of transition between two reading models: from the waiting for the unmasking of the culprit in nineteenth century detective fiction to the reader’s hermeneutic engagement in whodunit novels. Although expecting a surprising outcome, the repetition of the fake culprit script programs the reader’s impatience toward its fictional discourse. We thus read in the effort of identifying clues suggesting different scripts of guilt. The model of a fictional clue-seeking reader represented in A Study in Scarlet by Conan Doyle becomes effective as reading pragmatics in The Mystery of the Yellow Room by Gaston Leroux. With no more need of forms programming it, the interpretative effort of the reader to solve the case becomes a horizon of expectation in The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie