Reading and writing the primal crime scene: Fred Vargas's Dans les bois eternels

One of the enduring myths ofdetective fiction surrounds the concept of the clue puzzle. The pleasure of reading a detective story is generally held to lie in the web of clues that allow us to pit our wits against a sleuth, whose great powers of deduction spring from his or her position in the text as ambassador for authorial power. To use Roland Barthes's terms,' we engage in a text that presents itself as eminently writerly. That is to say that the text offers itself to us as a puzzle to be put together, which elevates the reader to the status of writer, or producer of the text. The whodunit generally shatters its own myth, however, by celebrating the detective's revelation of the truth at the end of novel. This truth, regardless ofwhether or not the reader happens to have arrived at the same conclusions, brings down an iron curtain across the divide between reader and writer: authorial power lies in this revelation that things can only be as the author (represented here by the detective) decrees.