Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
1
The semiotics of paranoia: the thriller, abduction and the self
PAUL COBLEY
The year 1980 saw two momentous publications that bear closely on the topics dealt
with in this essay. The first was by Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker-Sebeok and
entitled ‘You Know My Method’. On cursory glance it was a curious little volume,
being neither a straightforward piece of Holmesiana in spite of it appearing under the
imprint of Gaslight Publications; nor was it a typically academic essay based on the
narrow appeal of acutely focused analysis. The second was an essay entitled ‘Clues’
by the respected Italian historian, Carlo Ginzburg. This, too, might have been thought
a curiosity in that Ginzburg’s prominence in the Anglophone academic world was
based mainly on his translated work of 1976, The Cheese and the Worms, a quirky,
but nevertheless exemplarily documented, tale of a sixteenth century miller and his
autodidacticism. ‘Clues’, on the other hand, was an illuminating piece of metahistory,
focusing on an obscure art historian in conjunction with both the father of
psychoanalysis and the fictional figure of Sherlock Holmes.
As is well known now, in different form both publications were to appear as essays in
Sebeok and Eco’s legendary volume, The Sign of Three (1983). The editors of that
book had not only already knew that these two essays on related topics existed but
also found that there were a good many scholars writing about the topic which was so
central to their view of detection: that is, ‘abduction’. Unsurprisingly, a number of the
aforementioned scholars had been operating within Peirce scholarship where the issue
of abduction was so central. However, others had been treating abduction with
particular reference to the process of detection. Given the far-reaching nature of the
insights contained in Eco and Sebeok’s collection it might have been thought that the
fields of popular fiction, genre studies and literary history might have undergone a
sea-change on publication of the volume. But this, oddly, is not the case. Indeed, it
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
2
almost seems as though the scholarly work on abduction as it relates to these fields
was eclipsed by the publication, in the following year, of Eco’s bestselling novel, The
Name of the Rose (1984) which, of course, replayed abductive reasoning in a number
of its set-pieces.
The following essay considers some of the consequences of The Sign of Three for the
broad history of the thriller, for the theory of genre, and in terms of an investigation
of the relations between genre and subjectivity. It is not a fully worked-out history of
the thriller and fictional detection in light of the scholarship concerned with
abduction. Rather, it is a mere sketch of how such a history might look. It attempts to
cast some light on the process of generic canon-building. It also poses a relation
between the growth of ‘social paranoia’ in the history and cultural growth of the
thriller and the general phenomenon of ‘anxiety’ which is pivotal to the biosemiotic
foundations of what has been called by Sebeok (1979) and others (e.g. Wiley 1994)
the ‘semiotic self’.
The thriller and abduction
It should be explained at the outset why the broad designation ‘thriller’ is used rather
than ‘detective fiction’, here. Some words should also be offered on the definition of
‘genre’ of which the thriller, of course, is one. It is clear that there are some popular
fiction readers that will only consume spy stories, or some that will only consume
‘cozy’ detective narratives, or some other form of similar fiction. However, strictly
speaking, these are subgenres of a larger genre called ‘the thriller’ which comprises,
as well as the subgenres that have been mentioned, such phenomena as the police
procedural, hard-boiled fiction, adventure narratives, gangster films, crime fiction,
sensation novels and so forth. The waters are somewhat muddied by the fact that
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
3
generic classifications may lump such fictions under ‘crime’ (in bookshops, for
example) or ‘suspense’ (in film and TV publicity); yet, as has been argued elsewhere,
the texts and subgenres that make up the thriller, while nebulous and by no means
subject to a reductive formula, are characterised by a specific verisimilitude and
united by the vastly accommodating general theme of conspiracy (see Cobley 1997).
This conspiracy is both a threat to, at once, wider and local relations of equilibrium in
thriller, and, more specifically, to the veneer of capitalist success.
Insofar as the thriller is a genre, it should not be assumed that its features are
immanent to it. Customarily, from Aristotle to the ‘synchronic’ thinkers of the
twentieth century, genre has been pursued as a purely textual entity that can be
discerned through scrutiny of the ‘structure’, ‘syntax’, ‘archetypes’ or ‘re-playing of
myth’ and suchlike, in a given configuration of signs. An emergent perspective on
genre, instead, seeks to show that it is to be considered more as a set of expectations
harboured by readers about the quality of interaction that a generic text will facilitate
for them (Altman 1999; Cobley 2001; Makinen 2001). Where the thriller is
concerned, these expectations concern its verisimilitude and the enactment of a fear
of conspiracy, but these are figured in terms of mysteries, puzzles, codes, detection
and quests for knowledge.
The Sign of Three directly addresses detection and the knowledge question in the
thriller. There is no substitute for a reading and re-reading of the volume, but a brief
replay of the general argument of the contributors is required here for two reasons.
Firstly, for purposes of exposition; and, secondly, because of the failure of the
majority of commentators to recognize the way in which the volume’s conclusions
fundamentally transformed the field of research into the thriller.1 More will be said
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
4
about this latter in relation to the thriller canon. A bald summary of the arguments of
The Sign of Three, though, would be that ‘classical’ detection in thrillers, as carried
out by two detectives who expound upon their methods, Dupin and Holmes, consists
of ‘abduction’ or, put another way, ‘retroduction’, ‘hypothesis’ and ‘conjecture’. The
inferences of the classic detective are not, as commonly assumed, acts of ‘deduction’;
rather they are informed ‘guesses’ of the kind that Charles Sanders Peirce discussed
in his writings on science, logic and philosophical method.
Probably the most accessible exposition of Peirce’s own arguments regarding logical
method is the essay, ‘Deduction, induction and hypothesis’ which appeared in
Popular Science Monthly in 1878 (reprinted in 1923 in the collection entitled Chance,
Love and Logic). Here, Peirce summarises Aristotelian logic, using syllogisms to
demonstrate different types of reasoning. One example concerns a bag of beans in
which two thirds of the beans are known to be white; if one bean is taken from the bag
there is a two thirds probability that the bean will be white. This is a deductive
inference (1998: 133). But a deductive inference can be inverted to make a synthetic
inference (induction or hypothesis [also called ‘abduction’]):
Suppose I enter a room and there find a number of bags, containing different kinds of
beans. On the table there is a handful of white beans; and, after some searching, I find
one of the bags contains white beans only. I at once infer as a probability, or as a fair
guess, that this handful was taken out of that bag. This sort of inference is called
making an hypothesis. It is the inference of a case from a rule and result. We have,
then –
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
5
DEDUCTION
Rule.- All the beans from this bag are white.
Case.- These beans are from this bag.
. . . Rule.- These beans are white.
INDUCTION
Rule.- These beans are from this bag.
Case.- These beans are white.
. . . Rule.- All the beans from this bag are white.
HYPOTHESIS
Rule.- All the beans from this bag are white.
Case.- These beans are white.
. . . Rule.- These beans are from this bag.
(1998: 134)
A basic knowledge of detective fiction, even if derived only from the works of Poe
and Conan Doyle, enables one to see that the form of reasoning which most concerns
the classic detective falls into the third category: ‘abductive inference’ or
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
6
‘hypothesis’. As Peirce frequently points out, deduction deals with what must be,
induction is a matter of what is, and abduction is about what may be (given the
necessary conditions). A fictional detective is usually presented with an event - a case
- without knowing what precipitated it; the detective’s task, then, is to find the
solution, the precipitating factor(s). As Peirce argues, induction is a conclusion that
facts similar to observed facts are true in cases not examined; abduction or
hypothesis, on the other hand, involve a conclusion of “the existence of a fact quite
different from anything observed, from which, according to known laws, something
observed would not necessarily result” (1998: 143). Induction reasons from
particulars to the general law in an act of classification; abduction reasons from effect
to cause in an attempt to explain.
Abduction is altogether more tentative and risky than either induction or deduction.
Peirce notes that “There is some justice in the contempt which clings to the word
hypothesis” (1998: 146). Yet, problems with abductions arise primarily when they are
not tested or when conditions are imperfect. In The Sign of Three, Truzzi is especially
sceptical:
The great weakness in Holmes’s applications of inference - at least as Watson related
them to us - was Holmes’s failure to test the hypotheses which he obtained through
abduction. In most instances, Holmes simply treated the abducted inference as though
it were logically valid. (Most of the parodies on Holmes are built upon this weakness
in the narratives). The simple fact is that the vast majority of Holmes’s inferences just
do not stand up to logical examination. He concludes correctly simply because the
author of the stories allows it so (1983: 70)
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
7
Truzzi’s comments are true of many detectives in thrillers, from ratiocinators such as
Poirot, to police operatives with a hunch, to profilers who try to enter serial killers’
imaginations. Hypothesis, according to Peirce, must be put as a question; the results
of its predictions should be anticipated; random cases of the hypothesis should be
used in testing; and a log of failures in testing should be kept (1998: 142) – measures
that fictional detectives usually fail to take.
The conditions prevailing in an abduction also make the act of constructing an
hypothesis risky. When Holmes infers a number of details about a man from
examining the dilapidated nature of his hat, as he does in ‘The adventure of the blue
carbuncle’, the modern reader, especially, is able to identify the tell-tale signs of
speculation. One of Holmes’s conclusions is that the man’s wife has ceased to love
him if she takes no care of this aspect of his appearance. It is questionable whether
Holmes has made an accurate abduction here, even within the milieu in which he
exists; certainly, given the change in women’s roles in the West since the nineteenth
century, his observations are far from universally applicable (cf. Pyrhönen 1999: 70-1
and Truzzi 1983: 70). The standard analysis of the thriller, especially detective
fiction, as being consonant with the rise of science and presenting in its resolutions a
form of logical closure (e.g. Van Dover 1994; Nordon 1967: 247; Booth 1997: 158-9;
Panek 1987: 85-6) is therefore brought into question by The Sign of Three.
Abduction, to be sure, is certainly part of scientific method; moreover, The Sign of
Three is concerned with the development of this method, the continuity and
divergences between common sense and scientific investigation and the role of
detailed scrutiny of ‘trifles’ in the pursuit of answers to larger questions. But in its
juxtaposition of Peirce with Dupin and Holmes The Sign of Three also fundamentally
re-orientates the established view of what might be called the thriller’s ‘dominant
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
8
procedure’. There is a problem of knowledge in the thriller; but it is not the one that it
is customarily thought to be.
‘Deduction’ and the dominant: re-thinking the thriller canon
The exploration of abduction offered by The Sign of Three and the attendant
qualifications of the knowledge process discussed therein, actually shed light on the
very ways in which a genre (of any kind) is constituted. The case of the thriller, it
might be argued, is pronounced, because logical reasoning is frequently so central to
thriller texts; but, most importantly, the character of logical reasoning is the basis on
which canon-building and reification of a corpus’s generic quality takes place.
As Harrowitz points out in her essay for The Sign of Three, one of the most
influential histories of the thriller, Julian Symons’ Bloody Murder (1974; originally
1972), opposes two approaches to the origins of the detective story: one which relies
on the key process of ‘deduction’ as an almost timeless phenomenon and another
which relies on detection used by the police and private detectives as a fact of social
life. For Symons, what matters is whether a purely historical connection between
social life and the text is applicable in the case of Poe’s rarely disputed paternity of
the detective story. He is willing to accept that his object of study is a ‘hybrid’ and
therefore subject to a number of influences from a number of sources and yet, he
wishes to avoid discussing the “enormous mass of more or less entertaining rubbish”
(1974: 10) which would make up the object of a more comprehensive consideration
of the thriller. Here, immediately, is the canon-building impetus. In some degree, it is
excusable, as the volume of popular fiction that has been, and continues to be,
produced is simply impossible to accommodate within academic analysis. However,
unself-conscious canon building has implications regarding that which is taken to
constitute a genre.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
9
If we were to allow Symons’ understanding of the thriller genre to stand, based, as it
is, on the absolute centrality of socially grounded detection as opposed to general
‘deduction’ (read: ‘abduction’) then the canonic impulse would be sharpened.
Whether the ‘essence’ of the thriller is to be found in detection in social life or in a
general process of ‘deduction’ (read: ‘abduction’), the genre is posited in terms of a
textual ‘dominant’. It has been argued elsewhere (Cobley 2001) that such analysis is
limiting and can work against a dialogical genre theory, despite the fact that it will
inevitably be asserted that genres still have definable features such as heroes, heroines
and outcomes which in some way ‘dominate’ proceedings and have precisely been
the object of investigation for textual analysts in the past. Nevertheless, the idea of a
generic dominant (which grew out of Russian Formalism and was taken up by the
Prague Linguistic Circle) is, one could suggest, incarnated in its ‘strong’ form in
Symons’ view of the thriller. Symons’ dominant is not couched in Jakobsonian terms,
of course, but according to pre-requisites that are somewhat more mundane: a
consensus on a central corpus of texts and their relevance to the history of the genre
based on what is thought to be ‘good’ writing. ‘Tastemaking’ is one part of the
process;2 sketching a theory of ‘generic evolution’ is another part of it.3
Indeed, a false sense of evolution exists in a crucial symbiotic relation to the
maintenance of the dominant syntax of a genre. Towards the end of Bloody Murder,
Symons summarises the evolution of the crime story as a series of points, of which
the following is number 5: “The attempts to break the ‘rules’, partly on the ground
that their literary products were so boring (Francis Iles), partly because they were so
silly (Hammett and Chandler)”. This, of course, is probably the most prominent and
often discussed juncture of the detective story: when the ‘Golden Age’ or ‘Mayhem
Parva’ phase of the thriller was superseded. Yet Symons has propounded a fallacy in
order to construct a tidy model of evolution. The inaugural moment of the ‘Golden
Age’ is consensually placed at 1920, when Christie introduced M. Hercule Poirot in
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
10
her first novel, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. In spite of the consensus on the
dating, this in no way sets up a temporal evolution from subgenre 1 (the Golden Age
‘cozy’) to subgenres 2 and 3 (self-conscious detective fiction and the hard-boiled
school) as Symons’ schema seeks to do. Haycraft (1979: 112-180), writing in 1941,
dates the period of both the hard-boiled and Golden Age subgenres from 1918-1930;
there is no need to stress some kind of relation of reaction and transcendence on the
part of the hard-boiled story.4 Clearly, it is a device to shift discussion from
ratiocinative ‘deduction’ (artificial puzzles) to ‘realist’ enquiry (investigation
trammelled by social problems). Both, it might be argued, are better served by an
understanding of the patterns of inference they have in common.
Generic canons and models of genre evolution should be treated with extreme
suspicion within genre theory. At best, they run the risk of being questionable in
detail; at worst, they are thoroughly ahistorical. Furthermore, they are part of a
general paraphernalia of reification which facilitates a mechanical ‘reading off’ of the
‘meaning’ of a given text. As such, they go hand in hand with Symons’
aforementioned idea of the ‘rules’ of a genre, although, in the thriller especially, the
articulation of the rules has at least envisaged a tacit audience. Famously, in the 1920s
and 1940s, authors such as John Dickson Carr (1970), S. S. Van Dine (1974) and
Father Ronald Knox (1974), as well as Howard Haycraft with his spoof ‘Detection
Club Oath’ (1974), attempted to establish generic verisimilitude through an explicit
‘contract’ with ‘the reader’. This was a means to ‘ensure’ fair play between the
participants in the act of reading so that the narratives’ puzzle(s) could be solved
rationally. The way Carr and other writers of detective fiction ‘rules’ characterized
the generic contract was direct and traditional: sender, message, receiver. ‘Implied
authors’ ‘narrators’, ‘narratees’, ‘implied readers’ and ‘real readers’ do not figure in
such contracts, let alone the vagaries of ‘noise’ which have dogged communication
models since Shannon and Weaver.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
11
Perhaps more famous still as an example of the attempt to ground thrillers in rational
rules is Conan Doyle’s revelation in the December l900 edition of the Westminster
Gazette, that the idea of writing about a detective came to him around 1886 when he
had read some detective stones and thought they were nonsensical because the plots,
often thin, unimaginative and imitative - either revolved about coincidence or relied
for their denouement on the authors revealing vital clues that had previously been
hidden from the readers (Booth 1997: 104). Yet what the comments of the rulemakers
and Conan Doyle suggest is nothing to do with the intrinsic, dominant character of
the thriller but, rather, an attempt to impose a particular complexion on a corpus. In a
sense, Knox, Van Dine et al wished to institute a more rigorous contract for reading, a
contract which, in fact, is based on deduction. Carr’s insistence, for example, that the
detective story contract constitutes ‘a duel between author and reader’ (1970: 230) is
actually a reduction of the genre to a narrative puzzle. (As will be suggested below,
Carr also has a fairly one-sided outlook on puzzles here). Concomitantly, Van Dine’s,
Knox’s and Haycraft’s demand for strictly naturalistic means and a prohibition of
withholding evidence in thriller narratives, implies that the genre should be (all too
easily elided to is) dominated by a logical resolution of a textual enigma.
The obvious point is that the prescriptive ‘should be’ aspect of the rules reveals in its
very iteration that the genre is not made up entirely of the dominant procedure in
question. More pointedly, though, for the present discussion, is the fact that the
thriller, if it does contain some central syntactical features, is not unproblematically a
genre of deduction. From the supposed outset, as Rosenheim (1997: 68) notes, the
revelation of the ape as the culprit in Edgar Allan Poe’s 1840 story, ‘The Murders in
the Rue Morgue’, is a profound act of bad faith which contravenes detective fiction
‘rules’. Indeed, Rosenheim quotes Poe on this very issue, specifically on his own
‘puzzle’ narratives:
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
12
Where is the ingenuity of unravelling a web which you yourself have woven for the
express purpose of unravelling? These tales of ratiocination owe most of their
popularity to being something in a new key. I do not mean to say that they are not
ingenious – but people think they are more ingenious than they are – on account of
the method and the air of method (68).
Dupin’s ingenuity in ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, of course, is borne of
abduction, in his arguing from the surface manifestations of a case to the root of a
possibility.5
Puzzles, codes, logica utens and logica docens
Ronald R. Thomas (1999) has persuasively argued that American detective fiction in
the nineteenth century, contra its British variant, evinced a definite scepticism,
particularly around the node of forensic science. Technologies of sound and vision in
the period facilitated criminal surveillance and provided new semiotic means such as
ballistics and fingerprinting for evaluations of criminal activity after the fact.
According to Thomas, while the British mindset was quick to accommodate such
technologies in a spirit of scientific infallibilism, the American detective remained
uneasy about criminal anthropology’s guarantees of truth. It is perhaps possible in
this frame to say that the American detective partook not only of ‘scepticism’ but also
of ‘pragmatism’. Rather than detectives accepting guarantees of the finite nature of
forensic evidence, the scientific paraphernalia of truth in Puddn’head Wilson or
Hammett’s detective stories is shown to be overvalued and too mechanical in the
activity of detection (see Thomas 1999: 91-110, 240-275). The division between
British ‘empiricism’ and American ‘scepticism’ identified by Thomas, then, is clearly
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
13
an important one when viewed in relation to a theory of meaning such as pragmatism.
Indeed, in his later work, especially the 1898 and 1903 ‘Harvard lectures’, Peirce
manifestly associated pragmatism with the logic of inquiry. However - and especially
in light of what The Sign of Three demonstrated with regard to the congruence of
Peirce’s view of scientific method and the work of the detective figure - such a
dichotomy may be so fundamental in relation to detective fiction that it signifies more
than broadly national patterns of thought.
As has been seen, one of the canonic impulses in commentaries on the thriller has had
at its core a specific view of enigmas. In short, the thriller has been seen to revolve
around the dominant procedure of solving a riddle, puzzle or code. For canon-builders
especially, the history of the thriller has been one of an elaborated syntax of
ratiocination starting with Poe’s tales. Indeed, Shawn Rosenheim (1997) has
suggested that codebreaking is not just at the heart and origins of the thriller but that
Poe is the instigator of a proliferating cryptographic imagination in many spheres.
Poe’s 1843 story, ‘The Gold Bug’, is notable here, but so too is the cryptographic
expertise of the other putative archetype, Holmes, evidence of which is spread across
Doyle’s canon. Puzzles and codes, however, are not as logically straightforward as
they may seem. It is frequently assumed that codebreaking and puzzle-solving
necessarily invoke a linearly conceived logic in which the solution is dependent on
deductive steps.
Recent general works on codes and puzzles have implied that the activities
engendered by both are deeply ingrained in human nature or subjectivity. In this way,
the occasional American marketing designation of the general thriller genre as
‘mystery’ is a good one, since it gives a broad sense of the problem solving and
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
14
knowledge seeking which is featured in various ways in thriller narratives. What
puzzles and codes share with their refigurations in thrillers, though, is a dual logic
that is often required for the process of solving them. Before the twentieth century,
the Enigma machine and computer encryption, the most prevalent forms of ciphers
required ‘frequency analysis’ to begin the process of decoding. The simplest form of
frequency analysis with written ciphers involves identifying the most frequent
occurrences of letters in a cipher – for example, ‘e’ in the English language - and
matching them with the average frequencies of letters occurring in discourse that is
not encrypted. On the surface this seems straightforwardly logical and even
arithmetical. Yet, even with the simplest of ciphers, preceding the multiple
encryptions instituted by Alberti and Vigenère (Singh 1999: 45-100), accurate
reckoning is not efficacious on its own. It can never be certain that the cryptographer,
by chance or by purpose, has eschewed the letter ‘e’, for instance. Frequency analysis
thus proceeds not solely by way of precise correlations but according to an
accumulated store of knowledge of words which enables a decoder to hypothesize
what the message might be. In short, the solution is achieved by abductive inference,
or what Danesi dubs “insight thinking” (2002: 27-35).
Danesi sees insight thinking as “an admixture of imagination and memory that leads
us to literally see the pattern or twist that a puzzle conceals” (2002: 27). Given the
lineage of cryptanalysis and the elevated status of puzzle-solvers in early modern
society, Danesi does not shrink from stressing the apparently mystical aspect of the
process involved in reaching a solution, likening it to clairvoyance. At the same time,
however, he cites Rutherford’s propitious “guessing” of the inside of the atom as
equally characteristic of abductive inference (2002: 28). More generally, Danesi
argues that puzzle-solving calls not simply on ‘intelligence’; instead, it evokes logica
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
15
utens and logica docens, scholastic categories revitalised by Peirce. Along with
Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1980: 66), Danesi describes the former as a rudimentary
logic-in-use which can be practised by all, as opposed to logica docens practised by
scholars, logicians and medical doctors. Logica docens, Sebeok and Umiker Sebeok
argue, is
a logic which may be self-consciously taught and is therefore a theoretically
developed method of discovering truth. The scientist or logician does not, however,
invent his logica docens, but rather studies and develops the natural logic he and
everyone else already use in daily life (1980: 66).
They note, also, that Watson in the Holmes stories enacts logica docens in respect of
his medical practice but is inept in transferring this method to the detection of crime.
Holmes, however, who practices the methods of medicine in general, ensures that “an
element of art and magic is blended into the logic of scientific discovery” (Sebeok
and Umiker-Sebeok 1980: 66). An example of such “art and magic”, of course, is
clairvoyance.
Undoubtedly, the ‘magical’ aspect of puzzle-solving, codebreaking or inference in the
thriller is enhanced by the drama woven into the representation of the achievement.
Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok cite the Holmes story, ‘The crooked man’, in which
Holmes tells Watson of “‘those instances [of detection] where the reasoner can
produce an effect which seems remarkable to his neighbour, because the latter has
missed the one little point which is the basis of the deduction’” (1980: 71). This, they
suggest, is akin to the “con game” (where “con” is, for them, the diminutive of
“confidence” but in the present terms might equally be so of “contract”), between
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
16
author and audience. They quote Conan Doyle: “‘The first thing is to get your idea.
Having got that key, one’s next task is to conceal it and lay emphasis upon everything
which can make for a different explanation’” (72). The reading or spectatorship of
puzzle solving or abduction is, indisputably, different from the act of puzzle solving
itself, in spite of the element of puzzling and solution finding that the reader might be
compelled to carry out. This is why suggestions that the thriller ‘just’ relies on the
puzzle formula have a very limited mileage.
Nevertheless, this is not to say that the idea of the genre as a specific kind of
enactment of what Danesi calls the “puzzle instinct” should be dismissed. The thriller
is constantly identified as belonging to a distinct historical formation which
corresponds also to the period in which it was to become marketed as a commodity.
Its entwinement with logica utens, however, strongly suggests that the genre
facilitates and dramatizes a potent aspect of human identity that precedes those
formations. Furthermore, the genre does so in a fashion which indicates that an
invitation to readers to participate makes up its very fabric. One can speculate that the
aspect of identity dramatized by thrillers is the ‘desire to know’, also exemplified by
the puzzle instinct; and, without wishing to promote a totalising tendency or run the
risk of saying nothing of worth, one can observe that this desire is universal. In
relation to the genre’s narrative character, though, it seems likely that the gap
between the thriller protagonist’s movement towards knowing and the equivalent
movement on the part of the expectant reader only exacerbates the anxiety and unease
which prompts both movements in the first place. It is, perhaps, also the gap between
two other factors: the logica docens of the professional detective that the contributors
to The Sign of Three see as akin to scientific or academic knowledge, and the logica
utens of the lay practitioner.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
17
The thriller, paranoia and the semiotic self
There can be little doubt that the thriller has been one of the most pervasive of
popular genres to crystallize over the last two hundred years. It is almost as
ubiquitous and unquestioned as narrative itself. Moreover, the ‘evolution’ of the
thriller has, in fact, been a crystallization rather than a birth (with Poe) and an
exponential growth. The contemporary genre which, it has been asserted above,
comprises a number of subgenres in addition to detective fiction, also betrays the
residues of such established genres as tragedy (for example, the story of Oedipus), the
epic odyssey, the romance, the gothic, chapbook tales of criminality and the
bildungsroman. More directly, the thriller is a residual formation from Newgate
confessionals (collected stories of criminal lives; Knight 1980: 8-20); adventure
stories (tales of travels and exploits, often in remote areas or strange lands; Cawelti
1976: 39-41); ratiocinative tales (narratives of detection where intellectual
questioning is paramount; Cawelti 1976: 80-105, Knight 1980: 39-134, Moretti 1988:
130-56); memoirs of police operatives (as in those of Vidocq; Knight 1980: 26-37);
sensation novels (narratives which revolve around a mysterious hidden secret, for
example, Wilkie Collins’ The Woman in White [1860]; Stewart 1980, Rance 1991,
Pykett 1994) and, later, among other subgenres, hard-boiled narratives (tales which
are characterised by a particular ‘trimmed-down’ style and complementary
worldview; Marcus 1975, Ogdon 1992, Willett 1992; see also Cobley 2000: 55-77).
So heteroglossic is the thriller as a genre that it is difficult to argue against Knight’s
contention that it embodies the realisation and validation of a “whole view of the
world” (1980: 2).
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
18
The thriller’s heteroglossia, in fact, ensures that the view of the world that the genre
embraces is a fairly varied one. However, if one were looking for the structure that
facilitates this view, it is likely that the word ‘paranoia’ would reside at the forefront
of the search. In contrast to the formulation of Symons’ and others, then, this might
be considered the ‘weak’ theory of the generic dominant, even though it takes the
‘strong’ view of generic structure as the start point for its understanding of the
facilitation of narratives. Jerry Palmer’s Thrillers (1978), probably the most
persuasive of ideological/structural analyses of genre (cf. Wright 1975, Roth 1995),
puts paranoia and conspiracy at the very centre of the genesis and structure of the
thriller. Whilst it can be argued that the paranoid fear of conspiracy has worn
different political countenances in different social formations or ideological
configurations (Cobley 2000; cf. Hofstadter 1964), the isomorphism of conspiracy
fears – particularly the fear of property theft in the period of burgeoning capitalism -
and the crystallization of the thriller genre seems inescapable. It should be clear, too,
without entering here into an in-depth excursus on the psychological nature of
paranoia, that the kind of fear of conspiracy which plays such a major role in the
thriller is driven by hypothesis, that is to say ‘abduction’. It is no coincidence,
therefore, that Peirce’s famous exposition of abduction as ‘guessing’ (1929) discussed
by Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok concerns an incident, and its subsequent investigation,
in which Peirce’s watch was stolen during a trip from Boston to New York on the Fall
River Line steamship Bristol.
One argument implicit in all of the above is that the ‘minor’ tradition of evaluating
the thriller as a genre pre-dating Poe and encompassing all kinds of detective work
needs to be taken more seriously. In addition to canonisation and reification of the
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
19
genre, the suggestion that the thriller is bound up with the scientific bearing of
‘deduction’ has occluded an interrogation of the genre’s exemplification of, and
contribution to, forms of subjectivity broadly conceived. It is true that there have been
provocative and stimulating analyses of the genre and its subgenres in relation to
psychological and politico-historical factors (for example, Porter 1981 and Ogdon
1992); but given that abduction was taking place – even in fictional narratives –
before Poe, in the same way that humans were engaged in reasoning before Aristotle,
there is a need to consider the relation of the thriller genre to subjectivity in the
broadest possible sense. One is therefore led to question the general phenomenon of
paranoid anxiety that is entwined with readers’ expectations of the abductive impulse
in thriller narratives, a phenomenon which is dispersed elsewhere, especially across
those genres whose residues can be discerned in the thriller.
In spite of the example of psychoanalysis, the conception of a broad subjectivity
which incorporates paranoid anxiety is not common. It seems that the most discussed
modern theories of the human subject have had a distinct trajectory which, while
identifying anxiety in the human subject, has situated the feeling firmly within a
relatively recent formation. Subjectivity as it has been conceived in so-called
‘continental thought’ revolves around the dilemmas of the post-Enlightenment
human. Modernity has brought increasing ‘risk’ to humans, along with the necessities
of hypothesizing ‘risk assessments’. It has also intensified social relations and
increased the extent to which symbolic systems and power in all its guises suffuse the
private lives of individuals. Modernist faith in rationality has been a servant of an
illusory unity of the subject, denying differences derived from that which is beyond
rationality, such as human desire. Above all, though, the human subject has been seen
to be at the mercy of ‘language’ variously conceived as national linguistic formations,
habits and traits and, occasionally, as an innate psychological or biological
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
20
mechanism. All of these arguments are now fairly well rehearsed (see Benhabib
1992; Cascardi 1992; Elliott 2001; Giddens 1991; Taylor 1992). Yet, in light of the
putative resurgence of interest in biology in the late twentieth century which, at one
pole, comprises the excesses of evolutionary psychology and its popular reception,
and, at the other, the advances that have taken place in biosemiotics, subjectivity must
be recast.
Thomas A. Sebeok’s notion of the ‘semiotic self’ provides a programmatic re-
visioning of the concept of subjectivity. It is also particularly apposite, I would argue,
for the purposes of understanding the pervasive nature of the thriller genre. Sebeok’s
exploration of subjectivity takes place mainly in four published essays beginning with
‘The semiotic self’ (1979) and ‘The semiotic self revisited’ (1989), both reprinted as a
brace in his 1991 book, A Sign is Just a Sign, and ‘”Tell me where is fancy bred?”:
The biosemiotic self’ (1992) and ‘The cognitive self and the virtual self (1998),
reprinted as a second brace in the 2001 volume, Global Semiotics. As in numerous
places elsewhere in his work Sebeok demonstrates the centrality of medicine and
medical practices to the history of understanding signs. Like Ginzburg in his essay,
‘Clues’, Sebeok puts medicine at the centre of a shift in human understanding. For
both, not only does medicine involve the reading and interpretation of signs which
constitutes semiotics, it also deals with kinds of signs which, implicitly at least, are
fundamental to human biological and cultural functions. Firstly, medical symptoms
are ‘nonverbal cues’ – they can be read without necessarily being discernible to the
subject who harbours them. As such, these signs share much in common with the
nonverbal cues which might pass between a human and ‘intelligent’ animals in such
cases as that of ‘Clever Hans’ (Sebeok and Rosenthal 1981); they also share
characteristics with the signs that Peirce seems to have encountered when ‘guessing’
or ‘abducting’ the thief of his watch (1929; 271-3, 280). Secondly, in an apparently
synechistic fashion, there can be a continuity between physical symptoms and
supposedly larger, complex and systematic mental experiences such as subjectivity.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
21
It is appropriate, then, that Sebeok begins his stimulating but laconic essay on ‘The
semiotic self’ by pointing out the economy of Freud’s definition of anxiety. For Freud
and Sebeok, anxiety is a sign and, more specifically, an indexical one. It is integral to
the workings of the immune system of an organism which maintains a distinction
between ‘self’ and ‘non-self’. According to Sebeok, the immune system harbours a
kind of ‘memory’ based on biological discrimination, but also operates another kind
of memory, anxiety, whose domain is patterns of behaviour. Anxiety is activated
when the self is menaced and this can be triggered by signs that might “take a quasi-
biological shape, such as the olfactory trace of a leopard predator for a baboon prey,
or be of semantic character, such as some verbal assault whereby a stranger presses in
upon the territories of the Self” (1991: 39). Indeed, one precipitator of anxiety
mentioned by Sebeok is the constraining factor by which physical symptoms are
resistant to verbalisation and narrativisation in doctor-patient interactions (2001: 123).
The brute physicality or indexicality of symptoms requires an abductive
interpretation, an activity which Sebeok also sees as central to the maintenance of
self, inevitably in relation to an other:
Any self can and must interpret the observed behavior of another organism solely as a
response to its interpretations of its universe, ‘behavior’ meaning the propensity that
enables it to link up its Umwelt with those of living systems within its niche (2001:
126)
The act of interpretation, he adds, is an act of “assignment”, that is, the elevation of
an interpreted phenomenon to ‘signhood’. It is also self-maintaining or ‘autopoietic’
(2001: 126).
Anxiety, it would seem, is the key sign mechanism of selfhood. In his essays, Sebeok
focuses on this, love and the self-apprehension of body size in the maintenance of the
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
22
self. Yet anxiety’s role in the immunological system appears to be pivotal. It is worth
replaying Sebeok’s summarized propositions, here:
(1) There are at least two apprehensions of the Self:
(a) immunologic, or biochemical, with semiotic overtones;
(b) semiotic, or social, with biological anchoring.
(2) The arena of the immune reaction is contained within the skin; the arena for signal
anxiety is normally between the perimeter of the Hediger ‘bubble’ and the skin of
the organism, the former containing the latter.
(3) Invasion of (a) is initially signalled by the immune response, of (b) by anxiety,
with the latter serving as an early warning system for the former.
(4) In evolution, (a) is very old, whereas (b) is relatively recent. There is a
corresponding advance from a purely metonymic nexus to one perceived as causal
efficacy.
(5) Communicational errors occur in both processes, and may have devastating
effects on the Self (1991: 40).
Anxiety, one could say, is an indexical sign whose cause is another sign and which, in
turn, generates further signs. One could also suggest that, as an ‘early warning
system’, it is a peculiar form of preliminary abductive inference, a form which, like
all abduction, is far from foolproof but which is nevertheless crucial because there is
so much at stake in the maintenance of the self.
It is not difficult to see how conspiracy and the paranoid fear of conspiracy have
suffused modern life. As a feature of post-Enlightenment subjectivity, it seems self-
evident that the growth in property holding, along with the laissez-faire spirit and
competitive individualism imbricated with the establishment of a liberal bourgeois
hegemony in the nineteenth century West, catalysed those fears. In an epoch of
rationalism, anxiety about irrationalism has come to undermine the symbolic systems
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
23
which have so pervaded the life of humans. Yet anxiety runs deeper than the social
systems in which it is embedded. As a sign, its very primordial nature renders it
fraught with potential. For this reason, Sebeok’s identification of two apprehensions
of the self is far from reductive. Instead, it provides a facilitative way of thinking
subjectivity which does not need to eschew biology when proceeding from a semiotic
premiss.
Historically specific fears do not appear to be sufficient to account for the almost
immeasurable potency and ubiquity of the thriller, even if they do provide a basis for
the genre’s crystallization as a set of expectations in readers’ imaginations. The
contributors to The Sign of Three implicitly see their observations on a modest scale,
as a comment on the homologies of evolving methods of detection and the logic of
scientific inquiry. However, these analyses deserve amplification: at the very least,
they indicate that the power of an almost omnipresent genre is to be found in its broad
searching nature, an anxious quest for knowledge which not only underpins the
notion of science but which might be the basis of human subjectivity itself.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
24
Notes
1 It is worth noting how some commentators on the history of the thriller persist in a
conventional history in ignorance of the re-formulation of the genre offered by The
Sign of Three. Umberto Eco’s novel, The Name of the Rose, seems to be well loved,
but few thriller commentators see fit to engage with its theoretical underpinnings.
David Lehman’s The Perfect Murder (2000), for example, discusses the novel but
fails to mention The Sign of Three or any of its premisses; Dove’s The Reader and
the Detective Story (1997) does the same; Thoms’ Detection and its Designs (1998)
also discusses The Name of the Rose and lists The Sign of Three in the notes as a
helpful volume (although, unhappily, the subtitle is given as “Dupin, Holmes, Pierce
[sic]” in both the notes and the references); Van Dover’s You Know My Method
(1994), a discussion of detection and science, unavoidably mentions The Sign of
Three (on page 85), but seems very confused about Holmes’ method, defining it
mainly as ‘deduction’, but sometimes ‘induction’; Panek’s An Introduction to the
Detective Story (1987) fails to mention The Sign of Three and sticks to the idea of
Dupin and Poe as engaged in ‘deduction’; Julian Symons’ second and third editions
of Bloody Murder (1985 and 1992), though influential, are too lightweight to carry
comments influenced by The Sign of Three; while more specialized academic
histories of specific areas of thriller history – for example, Soitos’ The Blues
Detective (1996), Nickerson’s The Web of Iniquity (1998) and, most regrettably,
Cobley’s The American Thriller (2000) – do not see fit to broach the issues raised by
Eco, Sebeok et al; one major academic history of the thriller, Thomas’ Detective
Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (1999) also omits mention of the arguments
in The Sign of Three although the volume is noted as a good guide to the semiotics of
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
25
detective fiction. The creditable exception to all the above is the discussion of
abduction and narrativity in Pyrhönen’s Mayhem and Murder (1999).
2 Alastair Fowler gives a general overview of the process when he says that
Two particular cross-sections of a genre’s time-worm [sic] mainly interest critics.
These are: (1) the original generic state when the work in question was written; and
(2) the state in the critic’s own time. Intentionalists may be concerned to reconstruct
1; but every critic inevitably relates the work to 2, the genre he knows (1982: 51).
3 Frequently, critics, literary historians and, especially, historians of generic texts,
identify a line of development culminating in the period in which they write. An
influential take on thriller and gangster films will, for example, identify the final
ascent to grace of the subgenre in the present moment (for example, see the
discussion of Bonnie and Clyde and The Godfather in Shadoian 1978: 12); works on
the ‘structure’ of the thriller identify its contemporary apotheosis (Palmer 1978;
Mandel 1984); likewise, a work on African-American detectives will close with a
chapter on the ‘black anti-detective novel’ (Soitos 1996). Writers on the topic of
generic ‘evolution’ are very reluctant to countenance the idea that genre fiction can in
any way be ‘ahead of the times’ or even contemporary with them, in a manner which
seems to be reserved for valorized fiction. The precious few commentators who do
envisage this possibility – Thomas (1999) is a good example of how productive
suspension of high cultural prejudices can be in this respect – usually implement a
thematic rather than an evolutionary perspective on genre.
4 If one looks to the magazine Black Mask as an anchor for the hard-boiled school one
finds that it was founded in 1920 by Nathan and Mencken and the first hard-boiled
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
26
detective, Carroll John Daly’s Race Williams appeared in 1923 (Ruhm 1979 viii-ix).
Nevertheless, Haycraft, writing only eighteen years later, is so keen to credit
Hammett that he overlooks Daly’s paternity (1979: 169), introducing an evolutionary
model of his own. But apart from any of all this, the crucial ingredient to which
Symons is probably referring in his summary point is Chandler’s much-vaunted
vilification of the Golden Age story, which did not actually appear in print until ‘The
Simple Art of Murder’ was published in the Atlantic Monthly in 1944 (Gardiner and
Sorley Walker 1984: 14; see Chandler 1950; convincing reasons for Chandler’s
indisputable centrality to most thriller histories are offered by Knight 1980: 138).
Indeed, subgenre 2, ‘self-conscious detective fiction’ - associated with Francis Iles
according to Symons - can be dated especially at 1926 with the publication of
Christie’s own Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? if not earlier (see Bayard 2000).
5 Although, cf. Sebeok and Umiker-Sebeok (1980: 32, 54), on the differences between
Dupin and Holmes.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
27
References
Altman, Rick (1999) Film/Genre. London: BFI
Bayard, Pierre (2000) Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? The Murderer who Eluded
Hercule Poirot and Deceived Agatha Christie, trans. Carol Cosman, London: 4th
Estate
Benhabib, Seyla (1992) Situating the Self: Gender, Community and Postmodernism
in Contemporary Ethics. Cambridge: Polity.
Booth, Martin (1997) The Doctor and the Detective: A Biography of Sir Arthur
Conan Doyle. New York: Thomas Dunne Books
Carr, John Dickson (1970) The grandest game in the world. In: The Mystery Writer’s
Art. Francis M. Nevins (ed.) Bowling Green: Bowling Green University Popular
Press.
Cascardi, Anthony J. (1992) The Subject of Modernity. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Cawelti, John G. (1976) Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art
and Popular Culture. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press
Chandler, Raymond (1950) The Simple Art of Murder. Harmondsworth: Penguin
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
28
Cobley, Paul (1997) .The specific regime of verisimilitude in the thriller. In:
Irmengard Rauch (ed.) Synthesis in Diversity: Proceedings of the 5th Congress of the
IASS. Berlin: Mouton
Cobley, Paul (2000) The American Thriller: Generic Innovation and Social Change in
the 1970s, (= Crime Files), London: Palgrave.
Cobley, Paul (2001) Analysing narrative genres. Sign System Studies. 29 (1): 479-
502
Danesi, Marcel (2002) The Puzzle Instinct: The Meaning of Puzzles in Human Life.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Dove, George (1997) The Reader and the Detective Story. Bowling Green: Bowling
Green State University Popular Press.
Eco, Umberto (1984) The Name of the Rose. trans. William Weaver, London:
Picador.
Eco, Umberto and Sebeok, Thomas A. (1983) The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes,
Peirce. (= Advances in Semiotics), Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Elliott, Anthony (2001) Concepts of the Self. Cambridge: Polity.
Fowler, Alastair (1982) Kinds of Literature: An Introduction to the Theory of Genres
and Modes. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
29
Gardiner, Dorothy and Sorley Walker, Kathrine (eds.) (1984) Raymond Chandler
Speaking. London: Allison and Busby
Giddens, Anthony (1991) Modernity and Self_Identity: Self and Society in the Late
Modern Age. Cambridge: Polity.
Ginzburg, Carlo (1980a) Clues: Morelli, Freud and Holmes. History Workshop. 9: 5-
36.
Ginzburg, Carlo (1980b) The Cheese and the Worms: The Cosmos of a Sixteenth-
Century Miller. trans. John and Anne Tedeschi, Baltimore and London: Johns
Hopkins University Press.
Harrowitz, Nancy (1983) The body of the detective model: Charles S. Peirce and
Edgar Allan Poe. In: The Sign of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, (= Advances in
Semiotics), Umberto Eco and Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.), 179-197. Bloomington:
Indiana University Press.
Haycraft, Howard (1974) Detection club oath. In: The Art of the Mystery Story, (ed.)
Howard Haycraft, 197-199. New York: Carroll and Graf.
Haycraft, Howard (1979) Murder for Pleasure: The Life and Times of the Detective
Story. New York: Carroll and Graf.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
30
Hofstadter, Richard (1964) 'The Paranoid Style in American Politics' and Other
Essays. London: Jonathan Cape.
Knight, Stephen (1980) Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction. London: Macmillan
Knox, Ronald (1974) Detective story decalogue. In: The Art of the Mystery Story,
(ed.) Howard Haycraft, 194-196. New York: Carroll and Graf.
Lehman, David (2000) The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection. Second edn. Ann
Arbor: University of Michigan Press.
Makinen, Merja (2001) Feminist Popular Fiction. London: Palgrave.
Mandel, Ernest (1984) Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story.
London: Pluto.
Marcus, Steven (1975) Introduction. In: The Continental Op and Other Stories,
Dashiell Hammett, London: Pan
Moretti, Franco (1988) Signs Taken for Wonders: Essays in the Sociology of Literary
Forms. Rev. edn. London: Verso
Nickerson, Catherine Ross (1998) The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by
American Women. Durham and London: Duke University Press.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
31
Nordon, Pierre (1967) Conan Doyle: A Biography. trans. Frances Partridge, New
York: Holt, Rhinehart and Winston.
Ogdon, B. (1992) Hard-boiled ideology. Critical Quarterly. 34 (1): 71-87
Palmer, Jerry (1978) Thrillers: Genesis and Structure of a Popular Genre. London:
Edward Arnold
Panek, Leroy Lad (1987) An Introduction to the Detective Story. Bowling Green:
Bowling Green State University Popular Press
Peirce, Charles S. (1929) ‘Guessing’ Hound and Horn. 2 (3): 267-282.
Peirce, Charles S. (1998) Deduction, induction and hypothesis. In: Chance, Love and
Logic: Philosophical Essays. (ed.) Morris Cohen, Lincoln and London: Bison Books.
Porter, Dennis (1981) The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press.
Pykett, Lynn (1994) The Sensation Novel: from The Woman in White to The
Moonstone. Plymouth: Northcote House.
Pyrhönen, Heta (1999) Mayhem and Murder: narrative and Moral Problems in the
Detective Story, (= Toronto Studies in Semiotics), Toronto: University of Toronto
Press
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
32
Rance, N. (1991) Wilkie Collins and Other Sensational Novelists. London:
Macmillan
Rosenheim, Shawn (1997) The Cryptographic Imagination: Secret Writing from
Edgar Poe to the Internet. Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press
Roth, Marty (1995) Foul and Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction.
Athens and London: University of Georgia Press
Ruhm, Herbert (ed.) (1979) The Hard-boiled Detective: Stories from Black Mask
Magazine 1920-1951. London: Coronet
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1979b). The semiotic self. In The Sign and Its Masters, 263-267.
Austin: University of Texas Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1989) Foreword. In: Sign, Self and Society (= Approaches to
Semiotics), (eds.) Benjamin Lee and Greg Urban, Berlin: Mouton.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1991) A Sign is Just a Sign, (= Advances in Semiotics),
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1992) ‘Tell me where is fancy bred?’ The biosemiotic self. In:
Biosemiotics: The Semiotic Web 1991, Thomas A. Sebeok and Jean Umiker Sebeok
(eds.), 333-343. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
33
Sebeok, Thomas A. (1998). The cognitive self and the virtual self. In New
Approaches to Semiotics and the Human Sciences: Essays in Honor of Roberta
Kevelson, (= Semiotics and the Human Sciences 13), William Pencak and J. Ralph
Lindgren (eds.) 307-321. New York and Washington: Peter Lang.
Sebeok, Thomas A. (2001) Global Semiotics, (= Advances in Semiotics),
Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Sebeok, Thomas A. and Rosenthal, Robert (eds.) (1981) The Clever Hans
Phenomenon: Communication with Whales, Dolphins, Apes and Humans. Annals of
the New York Academy of Sciences 364. New York: New York Academy of
Sciences.
Sebeok, Thomas A. and Umiker-Sebeok, Jean (1980) ‘You Know My Method’: A
Juxtaposition of Charles S. Peirce and Sherlock Holmes. Bloomington: Gaslight
Publications.
Shadoian, Jack (1977) Dreams and Dead Ends: The American Gangster/Crime Film.
Cambridge and London: M. I. T. Press
Singh, Simon (1999) The Code Book: The Secret History of Codes and Code-
breaking. London: 4th Estate
Soitos, Stephen F. (1996) The Blues Detective: A Study of African American
Detective Fiction. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
34
Stewart, R. F. (1980) . . . And Always a Detective: Chapters on the History of
Detective Fiction. Newton Abbot: David and Charles.
Symons, Julian (1974) Bloody Murder From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel:
A History. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Symons, Julian (1985) Bloody Murder From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel:
A History. Second edn. Harmondsworth: Penguin.
Symons, Julian (1992) Bloody Murder From the Detective Story to the Crime Novel:
A History. Third edn. London: Macmillan.
Taylor, Charles (1992) Sources of the Self: The Making of Modernity. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Thomas, Ronald R. (1999) Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science, (=
Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth Century Literature and Culture), Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press,
Thoms, Peter (1998) Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in 19th-Century
Detective Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press.
Truzzi, Marcello (1983) Sherlock Holmes: applied social psychologist. In: The Sign
of Three: Dupin, Holmes, Peirce, (= Advances in Semiotics), Umberto Eco and
Thomas A. Sebeok (eds.), 55-80. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Cobley, ‘The semiotics of paranoia’ pre-print of article in Semiotica 148 (1/4): 317-336
35
Van Dine, S. S. (1974) Twenty rules for writing detective stories. In: The Art of the
Mystery Story, (ed.) Howard Haycraft, 189-193. New York: Carroll and Graf.
Van Dover, J. K. (1994) You Know My Method: The Science of the Detective.
Bowling Green: Bowling Green State University Popular Press.
Wiley, Norbert (1994) The Semiotic Self. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Willett, Ralph (1992) Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction. Keele: BAAS
Wright, Will (1975) Sixguns and Society: A Structural Study of the Western.
Berkeley and London: University of California Press
Top Related