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death leaves a mystery to be unraveled by Landsman, the detective,
whose job it is to read in Mendel’s dead body any clue that may lead
to a singular answer
—
the identification of Mendel’s killer, the
disclosure of the murderer’s motive for killing the deceased, and the
completion of Mendel’s story of a life of failure. As Landsman
himself puts it, weary as he is, he has not lost his “appetite for
people’s stories,” his appetite for “puzzling back through [people’s
stories] from the final burst of violence to the first mistake” (168).
However, as Landsman goes on with his investigation, it is as if
Landsman, rather than being guided by his detective instinct, has
been singled out and called out by Mendel so that he has no other
option but to respond to this call and read on. Landsman continues
to investigate Mendel’s murder case, unmotivated by self-interest or
calculation. In other words, it can be said that it is Mendel who, in
his untimely death, brings out in Landsman what has lain dormant
“as a potential waiting to be addressed” (Santner, 2001: 132), that
which exceeds Landsman’s knowledge and understanding.
Mendel is the text that Landsman cannot resist reading, but
before Landsman can properly read Mendel’s stories he must begin
by piecing together the puzzles randomly scattered about the crime
scene. The detective’s reliance on random details is well attuned to
the emphasis of contemporary counterfactual narrative on
contingency and arbitrariness. Adam Rovner, in noting the
prevalence of detective form in contemporary counterfactual fiction,
argues that the marriage of the detective form and the counterfactual
thinking functions to excavate, through the remnants of an unsolved
mystery, counter-memories that are also alternative histories. So
doing, the counterfactual novel that makes use of the detective form
helps to “dispel the illusion of determinism that the historical
perspective creates: this liberation enhances the freedom for thought,
for reform, for change” (149). Indeed, the coupling of the detective
form and the counterfactual thinking can be taken as a response to,
or a critique of, “the historiography’s displacement of the contingent”
(149). However, the detective reader, in successfully solving the