“I treat storytellers as narrative engineers, subject to the constraints and compromises facing every artificer” (23), writes David Bordwell towards the end of his introduction to his wide-ranging and erudite new study of the “poetics of murder” throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As we might expect from such a clear-cut statement and the author's well-established (neo)formalist reputation since his editing of Post-theory: Reconstructing Film Studies (1996), Perplexing Plots focusses on the “how,” rather than the “what,” of Anglo-American crime storytelling in literary fictions, films and radio dramas, although Bordwell concedes that he is also interested in how technique interacts with “subject matter, themes, and story worlds to seize audiences” (11). The analysis of crime novels and films carried out by Bordwell does not seek interpretive frameworks to force on the texts – what the author identified in Post-theory as “vicissitudes of Grand Theory,” to which he opposes a “middle-level research,” highlighting how the formal and technical features of narratives work and produce reactions in the public. Building on his previous interests in innovation and experimentation within popular Hollywood genres as well as on the intermedia exchanges between literature and film in both The Way Hollywood Tells It (2006) and Reinventing Hollywood (2017), Bordwell takes crime fiction to be a privileged ground to study the mutual influences between high modernism and popular, mainstream storytelling, between the avant-garde and mass culture. Because a mystery story centres on revealing something that the reader does not know, it focusses on the act of storytelling itself. Crime narratives display the “awareness that the author is hovering over the text waiting for us to fail” (20), a tension that is peculiar to them and that does not feature that prominently in other generic contracts between authors and their public.
In the dialectics of continuity and change, schema and revision, that characterizes how genres work, Bordwell refuses to associate repetition exclusively with mass culture and innovation with high modernism. Mass-audience storytellers need to combine the novelty required by the evolving tastes of the public with familiar devices to make their work recognizable. This attempt to bridge “exoteric” and “esoteric” storytelling is the most intriguing of the book's arguments, although it is not always carried to its most logical, if radical, conclusions, as when Bordwell refers to the “art films” of the 1950s and 1960s such as Antonioni's L'Avventura and Godard's A bout de souffle as somewhat above generic formulas. Both “exoteric” and “esoteric” narratives produce their own perplexing plots, as the former's apparent accessibility still displays intricacy and brings pleasure to the reader though metafictional self-consciousness, while the latter's self-avowed complexity could also depend on mainstream appeal. Exoteric detective narratives trained audiences to recognize and understand the modernist techniques that were perceived to make literature and the arts new in the first half of the twentieth century.
The first part of Perplexing Plots is particularly concerned with these mutual formal influences, which Bordwell singles out as “the temporal structuring of the plot, the use of point of view, and the segmentation of the narrative into more or less explicit parts” (10). Nonchronological narratives, unreliable narrators, shifting points of view, flashbacks and flash-forwards can be found in Joyce and Faulkner as well as in the popular whodunits of the Golden Age tradition, and the psychological thrillers and the hard-boiled novels that revised that tradition. To these three mystery structures Bordwell devotes the second part of his study, where he highlights more explicitly the “two-way traffic between film and adjacent media” (18), showing the intersections between formal innovations in mystery and crime literature with cinema, particularly with the rise in the 1940s of what French critics would call film noir.
Although Perplexing Plots does not claim to be a history of the genre, both this second part and its third and last section, devoted to specific case studies ranging from Earle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout to Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain, as well as Quentin Tarantino and the “gynocentric” domestic thrillers of the new century, are concerned with how formal crime conventions have evolved over time. Bordwell introduces early on the concept of the variorum, “a menu of favored and less-common options” (10), to which he constantly returns throughout his study to show how a “storyteller takes from tradition a schema, a pattern of action or presentation, and revises it in certain ways” (13) to generate variety and novelty demanded by a mass market in narrative. Somewhat surprisingly, given the book's determination to strike a balance between innovation and repetition, as the study progresses we find continuity stressed over rupture and even Tarantino's apparently unpredictable juggling with time segments in Pulp Fiction is traced back to a revision of classic storytelling strategies: “the formal adroitness prized by the Golden Age authors became a hallmark of ambitious mysteries in adjacent genres for decades afterward” (407).
Right from the beginning of the acknowledgements, Bordwell openly confesses to his enthusiasm for modernist fiction, film and Golden Age mystery authors, both those who are still widely read today and those who are lesser known. His enthusiasm is contagious and we are drawn into Perplexing Plots as if it were a suspenseful whodunit, almost putting ourselves in competition with the author to recognize the latest addition to the variorum. At the end of this stimulating and pleasurable study, we are left wondering, however, what types of “constraints and compromises” confront the artificers of the poetics of murder in their daily duties and whether these are implicit in their raw materials or imposed from the social and political norms that tend to influence notions of artistic standards and acceptability. “Genres, conditions of production and reception, and other traditions provide the constraints” (412), Bordwell concludes, reprising his statement early on in the introduction. While the constraints within genre are widely and effectively explored, those having to do with the conditions of productions and receptions, as well as with other traditions, remain tantalizingly in the background of Perplexing Plots.
The very notion of an Anglo-American tradition could have been more fruitfully problematized as it runs the risk of reinstating older critical stances on crime narratives that have been questioned by more recent scholarship, such as the study of film noir as a uniquely American phenomenon and the neglect of other national, but also transnational, traditions, like Mediterranean and Nordic noir. To be fair, Bordwell's corpus of crime literature and film is already imposing and the author shows awareness of his concentrating on a specific tradition. Yet his conceding that “other national and cultural traditions would yield many differences” is immediately counterbalanced by the observation that some of the principles persist in other traditions, as “narrative audacity and finesse have no boundaries” (409). In addition, given the Anglo-American focus and the inclusion of contemporary additions to the variorum brought by Tarantino and the gynocentric thrillers, the study devotes scarce attention to the New Hollywood detective stories and paranoid thrillers by Arthur Penn, Alan J. Pakula, Francis F. Coppola and Roman Polanski, as well as to the more liberal investigations of police corruption by Sidney Lumet. The inclusion of these narratives, which, as scholars of the New Hollywood have argued, are more character-driven than plot-driven, would have provided a challenging test to Bordwell's argument.
