Dey, Anindita1, [email protected]. "The Politics of Watching in the Narratives of Detection and Crime: A Study of the Murder of Roger Ackroyd and the Erasers." IUP Journal of English Studies 8.4 (2013): 7-20. Humanities Source. Web. 11 June 2015.
In this article, Dey coherently investigates the power and authority of watching solely to the investigator or a detector in detective fiction. The narratives contained in the article mediate moral, political, and epistemological queries through the rationalistic and surveillance interpretations of detectives. It exclusively addresses the issue of politics where it explains that a new pattern of power derives a very divergent ideological perspective. Therefore, watching in the detective fiction novels is not centralized on the ideological and aesthetic mediation of discipline and the social surveillance, but rather presented as a hermeneutics of power.
The article takes an unusual path in portraying the aspect of politics in this genre of narratives. In this paper, political affairs also represented as a subject that brings a distinction between the criminal and detective world, emerges through dissolving the knowledge of the person that pursues or watches over them. That helps the reader to derive the narrative pleasure dispersed through the reversal of the customary order. The article is interesting to read since it explicitly discusses the detective action of maintaining an omnipresent watch over those individuals that are guilty to preserve the harmony and the innocence of community life. Besides, it emphasizes on the influence of political authority on the lives of various people such as Robbe-Grillet, and Agatha Christie murdered through the use of political power. The unwinding political event that feature in the detective narrative makes the article more fascinating not only to a neutral leader but a researcher too. Therefore, the research article is a must-read for students interested in discovering how politics meddles in the issues of crime detection.