ABSTRACT
This chapter explores the crime fiction text's fine detail. This detail includes the choice of words and style of sentences in the language, and the insignificant items and fleeting gestures of the content. The chapter shows how the objects of the detective's gaze differ from what narrators are shown in other forms of fiction, and considers what fascination this idiosyncrasy in the genre holds for the writers of literary pastiche. In the views of objects discussed from Les Gommes, one can see links to both the exactitude of crime fiction's visual representation and the reluctance with which its physical evidence is subsumed into the narrative's systems of signification. Robbe-Grillet's 'evidence' differentiates itself from conventional literary representation by taking on some of the attributes of the crime novel's clues, as well as by exploiting the reader's usual response to perception in a crime fiction context.
