ABSTRACT
For the purposes of the argument in this chapter, crime fi ction is synonymous with the detective novel. This is not because I necessarily ally myself with those that claim that the genre is the only authentic form of crime fi ction but because of the genre’s preoccupation with what John Scaggs (2005, p. 19) refers to as ‘the analytical and rational deductive ability of a single, isolated individual’. The uses to which crime fi ction can be deployed in relation to law are many and varied. Not surprisingly, it is often deployed to demonstrate the intimate relationship between law and violence – in particular the fundamental principle in ‘European legislation’ that refuses to sanction individual violence (Benjamin 2004, p. 280). Beyond the phenomenon of legal violence, crime fi ction is used to explore questions of criminal evidence and process, and questions of moral culpability. As I hope to show, the uses of crime fi ction extend well beyond the terrain of what may fall within the notion of sanctioned and unsanctioned violence/state and individual force, but can create the platform for an analysis and critique of the intellectual effort demanded of the legal mind – whether that mind is of the student, academic, lawyer or judge. Nowhere is that effort most clearly expressed than in what has come to be known as the ‘no right answer thesis’. Through Agatha Christie’s thinking detective, Hercule Poirot, I hope to demonstrate why and how the intellectual fabric within which judgement occurs – as espoused in the no right answer thesis – must alter.
