Peter Biella is Director of the Program in Visual Anthropology at San Francisco State University.  He has spent more than 25 years developing a hypermedia ethnography of Ilparakuyo Maasai in Tanzania but last year in Peru he came up for air and shot a regular movie at 17,000 feet.

Coherent Labyrinths

Peter Biella

       Judge Cadwell ripped open the envelope, started looking through the papers.
       "Mr. Mason," he said, "this is a very grave matter."
       "Yes, Your Honor."
       "The papers in this envelope are matters of evidence.  They constitute most important bits of evidence in the case."
      "Evidence of what?"   Mason asked.

Erle Stanley Gardner (1957:126)

Part I.  Labyrinth and Maze

     Labyrinths properly speaking require that only one decision be made:  one who enters must decide whether or not to follow the path.  Because of this, labyrinths have played an important symbolic role in Christianity since at least 1201, when this floor of Chartres Cathedral was put in place.  The faithful were instructed to travel its path (often on their knees) in contemplation.  The passage was a microcosm of the journey to faith, a pilgrimage.  Chartres' labyrinth was called Chemin de Jerusalem. 1

2.  Chartres' 11-circuit design

Although the path looks quite confusing, it contains no false leads, no dead ends. 2

3.  The labyrinth as an animated movie.  Click the  Play button. 3

Since the labyrinth represents the Road to Salvation, the journey is a sort of mise-en-abysm, the universe of faith in miniature. 4

In the 16^th century, Church Fathers at Chartres decided that their labyrinth-pilgrims' journeys would be more spiritual if locations along the way were identified with the Fourteen Stations of the Cross.

     The faithful were instructed to meditate at each Station.  If the stops along the way in the labyrinth did hasten a pilgrims' salvation, they did not elicit the confusion of competing paths.  Even with its fourteen meditation points, the labyrinth is unicursal:  it offers only one route on which all nodes are touched.  The path, though meandering, is unambiguous. 5

     Strange, then, that the most famous example of what is called a labyrinth was that  riddle of warrens at the Palace of Knossos, in Crete. 6  The Minoan labyrinth should properly be called a maze, since it confounds solution with its many deceptive paths.

     Hardly distinguishable from a labyrinth, this maze contains a single entrance and single exit.

However, as the white path confirms, only one of several alternatives leads to the solution.  The others, the pink paths with red doorways, lead to the yellow dead ends. The doorways are distracters, offering false choices that are indistinguishable on the ground from those that lead to the solution.

     First, though, I want to consider some implications of labyrinths and mazes for detective stories and visual anthropology.  I will discuss how authors of both types of writings create the unicursal paths to a destination of meaning.  In the next section I'll analyze how three types of empirical evidence are used in detective fiction to approach the final, coherent theory of the crime.  In the third section of the paper, I'll suggest how interactive ethnographies can be designed to help researchers discover new evidence of cultural coherence.

 
10.  My well-worn copy (Gardner 1957)

     First, detective stories.  In 1956, Erle Stanley Gardner published his 55^th Perry Mason mystery, The Case of the Lucky Loser. 7  I read it first twenty years ago, and thought about it often.  In celebration of the 50^th anniversary of the publication, it is time for me to tell all.

I read the mystery several more times over the next four years.  Each time I made marginal notes (using different colored inks) and appreciated it more. 8

12.  Pleasures of the text -- p. 17

            The Lucky Loser is remarkable, first, because Gardner leads us through four mutually-exclusive theories of the crime.  Each new theory arises when the discovery of new evidence causes its predecessor to collapse. Moreover, each theory entails different Victims, different people Accused, and different Means by which the crime was committed. 

            There is also a great playfulness in the narrative.  The real killer says he once said he was guilty, but then says he was lying.  Two innocent people actually believe they might  be guilty, and one of the innocent people -- unfortunately this one happens to be an anthropologist -- turns out to be the corpse! 

            Despite their basis in deception, detective stories are expected to play fair.  Every piece of evidence must persist in the novel:  no evidence may be forgotten nor may any be left unexplained.  Detective stories are expected to be more than fair.  They are not only required to "drop clues" but must present all of the clues needed for an astute reader to solve the case as quickly as does the detective.  Small wonder that the fictional world of Perry Masons and similar Whodunits is particularly attractive to real-world anthropologists.  For us, the persistence of material reality is disconcertingly fused with the impermanence of interpretation.  A great attraction in detective stories is their demonstration of the modernist faith:  however misguided original interpretations of evidence may be, nothing more than a flexible, skeptical mind is needed to learn the whole story and the incredible story.

Evidence Type 1 is Available to the characters in the novel and Recognized as such by them.  This evidence quickly becomes familiar to the reader.  It piles up dramatically in The Lucky Loser, as one passes through each theory.  In the following, I indicate Evidence Type 1 with blue bullet-point nodes.

16.  Evidence Type 2 (red): Available but Not recognized.

Type 2 evidence is available to the reader but not recognized, not appreciated as relevant to a theory of the crime or a solution to the mystery.  Available / Unrecognized Evidence is indicated with red nodes.

           The third type of evidence is, in one way or another, Not available, and characters may never think to look for it.  Despite its invisibility, the existence of Type 3 Evidence can be deduced, and it is always dramatically revealed by the detective at the dénouement.  Not available but Recognized evidence is bulleted in green.

           In the following, I'll model the appearance of evidence in The Lucky Loser as nodes in a graph.  These nodes are key plot elements to which the mystery's reader may be obliged to return more than once.  Returns are required when new evidence forces the abandonment of old theories.  As this occurs, evidence which was misinterpreted before is reevaluated and recast, to support an alternative (and sometimes also superior) theory of the crime.

            Many readers find the exercise of recasting meaning an enjoyable kind of brain work (particularly if the stakes are no higher than those of most paperback fiction).  Erle Stanley Gardner had perfected his art of making readers rethink what they thought they knew seventeen years before he wrote The Lucky Loser.  In the 1939 Case of the Perjured Parrot, Gardner has his hero describe the strategy of flexibility that a lawyer (and mystery writer) must adopt toward evidence:

I never take a case [Perry explains,] unless I'm convinced my client was incapable of committing the crime charged.  Once I've reached that conclusion, I figure there must be some discrepancy between the evidence and the conclusions the police have drawn from that evidence.  I set out to find them (1947:3).

Later in the same novel, Perry elaborates:

We've been talking quite a bit about becoming hypnotized by circumstantial evidence.  After a person once gets a fixed belief, he interprets everything which happens in light of that belief.  It's a dangerous habit to get into, and I'm afraid I haven't been entirely innocent, myself.  I've been so busy pointing out the trap to others that I've walked into one myself without noticing what I was doing (1947:178).

But, no worries, by the end of the novel Perry does properly uncork the mystery of the evidence.  He never fails to extract himself and the reader from the predicament of fixed beliefs.

            Now, to The Lucky Loser.  The novel begins, the case opens, with evidence being taken in court.  It is Type 1, blue, Available and Recognized as proof of Theory 1.

According to that theory, Ted has accidentally killed a pedestrian in a hit-and-run car crash.

Theory 1 is supported with four pieces of Type 1 Evidence (blue).  I define this as evidence that is Available and Recognized.  By these terms I mean that the material evidence is in the possession of the interested parties and it is argued by them to support a theory of the crime.  Blue nodes in Plate 19 represent evidence that the police put forward to prosecute Ted.  The shaded nodes (midway along the edge between evidence and theory) represent the argument by which each piece of evidence is justified in support of the theory.  Justifications that support Theories 1 through 3, in addition often to being obvious, are also often wrong.  For that reason, in these plates I do not dwell on the justifications but only represent them visually.  In Footnote 20, though, I list the ways that characters have misconstrued each piece of evidence and summarize Perry's correct explanation of the role of the evidence in solving the crime.

            I anticipate that a scant few readers will have less interest in the scholarly aspects of The Lucky Loser than I.  So that these troglodytes may easily recognize the sections they want to avoid, I've indented parts of the footnotes that give Lucky Loser plot details and page numbers.  Readers may speed through indented summaries and concentrate on sections of the footnotes in which I draw my conclusions. 9

Theory 1 takes on a variant when Ted's clever first attorney convinces the jury that Ted's accuser, Myrtle, committed the hit-and-run crime herself. 10

            I note here in passing the later emergence of a plot twist that ultimately affects Theory 1.  In it, one of the killers -- named Boles -- says he told the other killer -- named Dorla -- to confess to the hit-and-run crime.  Thus Dorla's name, like those of Ted and Myrtle before it, is added to the list of the Accused in a third variant of Theory 1. 11

     Meanwhile, Perry goes into gear, spotting anomalous Evidence Type 2 (red).  He notices something suspicious about Myrtle's handwriting.  Although her note was on the evidence bench and could have been interpreted by anyone, neither Howland nor the police pays it any attention, much less uses it to argue a new theory of the crime. 

            Moreover, the police have their own dilemma with another piece of Evidence Type 2.  They have a corpse on hand (Available) but they cannot identify it (it's Not Recognized).

            This same problem, missing identity-evidence, can also be modeled as a node of Evidence Type 3 (green), Recognized through deduction to be significant but Not available.  Perry realizes that the Victim's body has been made unrecognizable by the killers to confound detection. 12

          Now dramatic new evidence forces the abandonment of Theory 1 and brings about a reinterpretation of preexisting Evidence Type 1.  It leads to a new theory of the crime.

Exhumation of the corpse has proved that the Victim was killed by a bullet.  Ted owns the gun and he is rearrested for murder.  Ted fires the first lawyer and hires Perry in his place.

 

27.  Movement to Theory 3

            The police remain stuck at Theory 2, but Perry and the novel move on to a third theory of the crime. Two accounts of it are spun privately to Perry;  first it is told reluctantly by Florence, then aggressively by Boles, one of the killers.  Although Florence thinks her "incredible story" (Plate 13)  is true, Perry suspects it is not.  When Perry hears the same story from Boles, woven into bribes and blackmail, Perry begins to realize that he is the real killer.

 

28. Theory 3, Variant 1:  Guthrie as  Accused

        Before Florence admits her secret about Theory 3, she tries to hold the novel back at Theory 2, claiming that Ted is guilty.  Perry won't have it, though, and forces Florence's hand:  she then admits that she believes Guthrie committed the crime;  he confessed it to her.  Her admission that she lied about Ted's guilt is the novel's most poignant evidence that Guthrie may be the killer.  Boles tells Perry the same story, but he is lying whereas Florence is only mistaken. 15

Boles further claims he lied to Dorla, telling her that he himself was guilty of the shooting.  Since Dorla and Boles are the killers, Boles claim of lying is itself a lie meant to deceive Perry.  In telling it, Boles adds his name to the list of the Accused in a variant of Theory 3. 16

And Boles continues lying to Perry, now saying that he intended to blackmail Dorla, forcing her to confess to Theory 1, the hit-and-run. 17

     Theory 3 is a fascinating turning point in the novel because here the story twice twists back and reflects on itself, like the microcosm of Chartres' labyrinth.  Florence tells her lie for the humdrum detective-story reason of protecting the man she loves.  But the return it brings to Theory 2 foreshadows a much more dramatic move when Boles takes us back to Theory 1.  Boles' account of events at this point in the novel is a complete fabrication.  Yet in it, Boles' lie leads us back to the original theory of the crime, enjoining the killers to confess in fantasy what was their real crime, and all of Boles' fabrication unfolding in a Tale World that is itself a fabrication.  Here in this parsimonious double movement The Lucky Loser gives its readers a lovely mise-en-abysm of the entire novel (Ryan 2001:167). 18

     And at last Perry has the brainstorm that cracks the case, the final example of Evidence Type 2.  Guthrie has been out of touch, Perry realizes, not because he is in Mexico doing anthropological fieldwork, but because he is dead!  Thus Perry leads us inexorably to Theory 4, the Solution.

Knowing that Guthrie is the Victim, Perry proves that Boles and Dorla perjured themselves to hide their crimes.  He also deduces the existence of a missing second bullet, fired by Guthrie.  Perry's deduction gives the novel its final example of Evidence Type 3. 19

         All the facts are now marshaled to confirm the Solution. 20  With new arguments, the all too familiar, almost always misconstrued Evidence Type 1 suddenly points to the killers.  Type 2 clues, before never recognized as such, now betray them.  And Evidence Type 3, the physical absence of which requires astute deductions by the detective, has now duly been brought to the attention of the authorities. 21

Part III.  The Case of Maasai Interactive

35.  Maasai Interactive's Text Field
-- transcribed, translated, subtitled

            To conclude this essay, I want to discuss the relevance of the kinds of evidence and attributes of recognition discussed above in relationship to a computer-based visual ethnography.  Maasai Interactive contains many transcribed conversations, like Plate 35, that I recorded cinéma vérité style, in a Tanzania Maasai homestead.  As the audio plays, each line is highlighted.  Lines of transcription are clickable, interactive subtitles.  For the snippet of audio that belongs to this section, play the following:

36.   Main Text Field with footnote numbers marked

More than a thousand moments in the transcripts are footnoted.  These moments constitute nodes like Perry Mason's Evidence Type 1, Available and Recognized.

     My ethnographic analysis of the transcripts (the Annotation field) is usually on screen.  Linked to footnote numbers in the Main Text field, the Annotation field provides my interpretation of the empirical evidence of the audio recording.   My analysis unfolds in parallel with the transcript's sequential events.  Each annotation is linked to its available evidence node, offering a theory, argument or comment about what I recognize to be significant.

            The simplest way to work through Maasai Interactive is to treat it as a unicursal path. This route, from Transcript to Annotation, would trace a labyrinth:  one would follow each node of evidence to its analysis, then return back to the next. The Greek word boustrophedon, moving as the ox plows, left to right, right to left, captures the idea.

Annotations do not exclusively refer to the Transcript Main Text, however.  Maasai Interactive allows the reader many opportunities to escape the path of the ox.  Many annotations are cross referenced to other annotations, and thus provide links to distant moments which shed light on the topic at hand.  If the reader clicks on these cross reference nodes, the associated transcript and annotation appear on screen.

     Cross references offer side trips to the journey I have designed in Maasai Interactive, but keep the reader within my labyrinth.  The annotation at level A is rich with cross references to related annotations at Level B.  The latter contains cross-reference nodes to many more annotations, on different topics, at Level C. 

     Although my awareness as author is limited primarily to (blue) hard links, readers may yet transcend the paths I understand.  Following cross-reference chains they can easily jump from ideas at A to ideas at C.

     The readers' jump from A to B and from B to C incorporates whatever knowledge I have gained about these relationships.  But the red leap from A to C can give readers an order of insight beyond what I know.  Such a leap is to information of Type 2, evidence that is easily Available but that I did Not recognize. 22  The leap thus allows readers to exit the labyrinth of my knowledge and enter a maze of their own design.  There they may find golden nuggets, previously undiscovered, dormant in the rich documentary evidence of Maasai life.

            Readers may also develop independent theories in a second way.  To test for evidence in support of new hypotheses they invent, readers can use Maasai Interactive's search engine.

Since independent searches concern ideas which may never have occurred to me, searches explore Evidence Type 3, Recognized   but previously Not available. 23

     By using a search engine and making their own soft links, readers have a second means to depart my road to formulate their own paths.  Each link in the labyrinth invites the invention of a new maze, a new opportunity to form cultural hypotheses.  With them, readers reach unanticipated destinations, and become immersed in the infinite pathways of knowledge.

     I do not want to say that Maasai Interactive, rich as it is, is a microcosm of Ilparakuyo life.  Yet studying the Ilparakuyo with this interactive labyrinth has been for me a mise-en-abysm of fieldwork, and has given all the enjoyment of detective fiction.

Bibliography

Althusser, Louis

1971 Cremonini: Painter of the Abstract.  In Lenin and Philosophy.  Ben Brewster, trans.  Pp. 229-42.  London: New Left Books.

Aslaksen, Helmer

2002  Interview with the Minotaur.  Electronic document, http://www.math.nus.edu.sg/aslaksen/gem-projects/maa/Interview_with_the_Minotaur/rite.htm, accessed January 9, 2007.

Barthes, Roland

1977   S/Z.  Translated by Richard Miller.  New York: Hill and Wang.

Boyd, Michael, et al.

1998   The palace of Knossos and its surroundings - 3D virtual reality tour.  Electronic document, http://www.bsa.gla.ac.uk/knosos/index.htm?vrtour, accessed January 9, 2007.

Bradley, Jan

2007  The Labyrinth.  Electronic document, http://www.cabiz.net/wheelsoflight/labyrinth.htm, accessed January 9, 2007.

Descartes, René

1952 [1638] La Géométrie.  La Salle, IL: Open Court Publishers.

Eichfelder

nd        100 Labyrinthe. Electronic document, http://www.eichfelder.de/kulte/labyrint/labyrint.html, accessed January 11, 2007.

Eliade, Mircea

1970  Patterns in Comparative Religion.  Cleveland: World Publishing Company.

Fischer, Adrian, and George Gerster

1990  The Art of the Maze.  P. 12.  London: Seven Dials.

Gardner, Erle Stanley

1947 [1939]  The Case of the Perjured Parrot.  New York:  Pocket Books.

1956   The Case of the Lucky Loser.  Serialized in The Saturday Evening Post, September I to October 20.

1957   The Case of the Lucky Loser.  Indianapolis: Curtis Publishing Company.

1979   The Case of the Lucky Loser.  In Seven Complete Novels.  Pp. 257- 361.  New York: Avenel Books.

1990   The Case of the Lucky Loser. New York: Bantam Books/Random  House.

Hage, Per and Frank Harary

1983  Structural Models in Anthropology.  Cambridge and New York:  Cambridge University Press.

1991  Exchange in Oceania: A Graph Theoretic Analysis.  New York and Oxford:  Oxford University Press.

1996  Island Networks: Communication, Kinship, and Classification Structures in Oceania.  Cambridge and New York:  Cambridge University Press.

Hammett, Dashiell

1972 [1929]  The Maltese Falcon.  New York: Vintage Books/Random House.

Hébert, Jacques

Huston, John, dir.

1941  The Maltese Falcon.  Hollywood, CA: Warner Brothers.  Distributed by Culver City, CA: MGM/UA Home Video.

Labyrinth Society, The

2005  About Labyrinths.  Electronic document, http://www.labyrinthsociety.org/html/about_labyrinths.html, accessed January 11, 2007.

Newman Catholic Fellowship

nd       Labyrinth.  Electronic document, http://newman.union.rpi.edu/labyrinth.html, accessed January 9, 2007.

NPR, National Public Radio

2002 Present at the Creation: Perry Mason.  Electronic document, http://www.npr.org/programs/morning/features/patc/perrymason/index.html, accessed January 13, 2007.

Paxworks

nd       Labyrinth.  Electronic document, http://www.paxworks.com/resources/labyrinthbasicinfo.pdf, accessed January 9, 2007.

Ryan, Marie-Laure

2001  Narrative as Virtual Reality:  Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media.  Baltimore and London:  John Hopkins University Press.

Saward, Jeff and Kimberly Saward

2005  The Tomba del Labirinto Luzzanas, Sardinia.  Electronic document, http://www.labyrinthos.net/luzzanas35.htm, accessed January 9, 2007.

Silber, Bettina

nd      Archie Software?  Error Localization Tool for Software Testing Named after Archie.  Electronic document, http://www.nerowolfe.org/htm/archie/Archie_software.htm, accessed January 11, 2007.

Wikipedia contributors

2007a  Maze generation algorithm.  Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.  Electronic document, http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Maze_generation_algorithm&oldid=98664941, accessed January 11, 2007.

2007b Seven Bridges of Könnigsberg. Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia.  Electronic document, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seven_Bridges_of_K%C3%B6nigsberg, accessed January 11, 2007.

Footnotes

1 Labyrinths predate the Christian era.  A lovely repertoire of early examples may be viewed at Aslaksen (2002). Other beautiful collections may be explored in Eichfelder (nd), Hébert (2006a), and Labyrinth Society (2005).  One of the earliest datable examples, below, is the "Classic 7" found in a cave in Luzzanas, Sardinia, from perhaps 850 BCE.  Authors have speculated about the lines, which I've emphasized in black, that block the labyrinth's entrance and pathways (Fischer and Gerster 1990, Hébert 2006a, Saward 2005).  For a wonderful animation of how this labyrinth can be drawn, see Hébert (2006b).

2  Interest in labyrinths is experiencing a renaissance.  A society and many websites are dedicated to their appreciation.  (For a labyrinth near your home or place of business, visit The Labyrinth Locator.)

            Labyrinths and mazes have also come to prominence in the last twenty years because they form the foundation of many computer games, including my nemesis, Nanosaur.  In it, you have to search the island wastelands to recover stolen dinoeggs, and the image below is a cheat overview of the Nanosaurian archipelago.  I've marked the best route through the maze to get the eggs.

You may think this maze looks easy, but you wouldn't say that if you were on the ground without a map being chased by a dozen jet-launched pterodactyls.

            In any case, the increased commercial value of maze-based computer games has stimulated the invention of many algorithms that create mazes (Wikipedia 2007a).  More commercially significant is the fact that mathematicians and computer programmers have found Graph Theory invaluable.  It is the mathematical foundation of much artificial intelligence and is based on analyzing the maze-like properties of decision trees.  I might add that Graph Theory was invented on a lark in 1736 (Wikipedia 2007b).  One never knows the final reach of  playfulness.

            Few anthropologists have the acumen to apply the mathematics of Graph Theory to ethnographic problems, but the trail has been blazed by Hage and Harary (1983, 1991, 1996).

3 To produce my animated labyrinth, I was obliged to study my model in Chartres.  The length of the straightened-out spaghetti is 20 times the labyrinth's diameter.  To discover this factoid, I attached a copy to a cork board, unwound a string along it as Ariadne's thread, kept the string in place with tacks, and then, after the string completed the journey, I measured the string.  Since the plan was to fill the spaghetti with a growing rainbow, I needed the total length of the unwound spaghetti to know how many pixels would be required for each increment of color. Because I assumed that watching the rainbow grow would be tiresome after 10 seconds, I gave each increment a one frame, one-thirtieth of a second, so that the filling would take 9 seconds, 270 frames.  Friends have said that the labyrinth fills too quickly for their liking.

            To create the individual frames for this animation, I started with the empty labyrinth in PhotoShop, gave it a 410 pixel diameter, and anticipated an 8200 pixel length of spaghetti.  I found a rainbow on the web and divided it into 270 increments (later discovering to my disappointment that quite a few increments were identical in shade).  Since the total length of the spaghetti divided by the number of increments was 30, I assigned to each of the 270 increments about 30 pixels of spaghetti.  (My would-be rigor loosened at each of the labyrinths twenty-eight 180-degree turns and six semi-right angles.  As a result, I ended up needing 290 increments, which explains why the rainbow returns to the color red.)  I then created an individual layer in PhotoShop for each increment, filled each with the accumulation of all preceding layers, and added to each layer one new increment.  Once I had filled the labyrinth, I generated an individual, numbered PICT file for each of the 290 layers and imported the lot into Final Cut Pro.  In that application I made each image one frame long and created the movie.  The process took five or six hours.

            Were I to make another, I would design it so that the filling at the beginning and end moved more slowly than the rest of the journey.  I would also part company with the new age rainbow and try something a bit more subtle, more old age, perhaps like this:
 

4  Considering the labyrinth as microcosm, Mircea Eliade writes: "The supreme rite of initiation is to enter a labyrinth and return from it, and yet every life, even the least eventful, can be taken as the journey through a labyrinth. The sufferings and trials undergone by Ulysses were fabulous, and yet any man's return home has the value of Ulysses' return to Ithaca" (1970:382).

5  I have taken descriptions of Chartres and definitions of labyrinth and maze from Newman Catholic Fellowship (nd) and Paxworks (nd).

6 The Minotaur and his Maze have disappeared from Crete, but one may still become lost in the ruins through eleven elegant virtual-reality videos Boyd et al. (1998).

7  Gardner's complete Perry Mason bibliography is available at Barrister (nd). For a different evocation of great lawyer detective, listen to this:

borrowed from NPR (2002).      

8  I purchased my copy of The Lucky Loser at a Maine garage sale for 25 cents.  For my first reading in 1986, I made comments in pencil and black ink (lower-case).  I added the red-ink notes in November, 1989, and they are the most beautiful.  Sparse green comments come from December, 1989, and capital-letter black ink was added August, 1991.  I read The Lucky Loser once or twice more in the 1990s, but did not have enough new ideas to justify another color of ink.  I had worked out the basic premises but had not fully cracked the code -- summarized in Plate 34 -- until 2006-7 when I wrote the present essay. 

9  The Case of the Lucky Loser has been reprinted often, with different pagination in at least four editions.  It is currently out of print, although the Ballentine Books/Random House edition is easy to find used, online.  In the following, my citations to the text give page numbers for two editions.  The first are from my copy of the Curtis Publishers' edition (Gardner 1957).  These are followed by a slash and the page numbers from the Ballentine paperback edition (1990).   Other versions include the original serialization in The Saturday Evening Post (1956) and an Avenon Books collection of seven complete novels (1979).

            Giving page citations, I'll here elaborate on the information I presented in  the main text of this essay and its plates.  In the first variant of Theory 1 we see:

Accused:  Ted (pp. 6 / 5)
Victim:  Unknown pedestrian (pp. 6 / 5)
Means:  Hit-and-run (pp. 6 / 5)

            Theory 1 is supported with four pieces of Type 1 Evidence (blue), Available and Recognized.  As the novel makes clear, evidence that is recognized in this sense is often misunderstood and used to support a false or partly-incorrect theory.
             Theory 1 introduces four evidence nodes of Type 1:

• A dead body is found in the road (pp. 9 / 9)

• The police receive an anonymous tip that the hit-and-run car belongs to Ted (police acknowledgment -- pp. 11 / 11;  Boles' version -- pp. 105 / 127)

• Blood is found on the bumper of Ted's car (pp. 7 / 6)

• Myrtle testifies that she saw the car swerve and hit something (pp. 16 / 17)

10  Myrtle joins the list of the accused in a second variant of Theory 1.  She says that she wrote down the license number while she was driving, and Ted's first attorney, the half shyster Mortimer Dean Howland, construes the evidence of her handwritten note in the following way:

•  Ted is innocent of the crime.  Myrtle herself hit the pedestrian because she was not looking at the road while she was writing her note (pp. 17 / 18-9).

            Howland has the evidence of Myrtle's handwritten note available, and he recognizes it to support his hare-brained theory.  Perry ultimately recognizes the real significance of the note and overturns Howland's theory (Plate 22 and Footnote 12.)

11  In an effort first to bribe and then to blackmail Perry, the killer Boles tells him a number of lies, including the following:

•  Boles says he once attempted to force Dorla into confessing the hit-and-run crime (pp. 105 / 126). 

This variant of Theory 1 is discussed at Plate 30 and Footnote 17.

12  I want to clarify how I use the concept of recognition in this essay.  At Plate 19 and Footnote 9, where I describe Evidence Type 1 (materially Available and Recognized), I define recognition as the interpretation of evidence and its use in support of a theory of the crime, whether or not that theory is true.  When events mandate, evidence incorrectly recognized to support one theory will be re-recognized to support another.

            Evidence in the Type 2 category (red), Available and Not recognized, entails additional defining attributes of recognition, as seen in two examples from Theory 1. 

• In the first, Perry notices that the handwriting of Myrtle's note is so steady that the writer could not have been driving (pp. 25 / 35). Ted's first lawyer, Howland, had failed to notice the significance of this available evidence (Footnote 9). 

No one except Perry looks for a better explanation.  The fact that the evidence has been characterized at all dissuades better efforts.
            A second example of Type 2 in support of Theory 1 reveals a different twist on the problem.  

• The police do not know the identity of the corpse (pp. 42 / 50)

Unlike the first example, the police in this case do understood that identification of the corpse is needed.  Here, however, they do not recognize that such identification is necessary for the solution of the crime, and they therefore drop the ball.

            The problem of identifying the corpse also gives rise to an example of Evidence Type 3, Not available although Recognized to be significant. 

• Whereas the police construe the inability to identify the corpse as an insignificant detail, Perry recognizes that it is essential to the solution of the crime (Perry hypothesizes this -- pp. 56 / 67;  he is proved correct -- pp. 139 / 168). 

            Two aspects of recognition errors have thus been identified.  A person may have an explanation, but have it wrong.  Or, a person may know that an explanation is lacking, but not realize how important having the explanation would be.

13   With Theory 2, the police version shifts dramatically.  The police do keep the same Accused (Ted), but they impose a name and a new status on the Victim and recognize a new Means of the crime.

              Evidence that is Available and Recognized abounds in Theory 2.  The recognitions, however, are again all focused on a false explanation of the crime.  New evidence in Theory 2 includes:

14 Anomalous evidence of Type 2 also abounds at this turn in the novel:

            If Type 1 Evidence is on everyone's mind, Type 2 is the 600 pound gorilla that nobody quite sees.  Evidence Type 3 is the missing link, the structuring absence (Althusser 1971), a material fact whose existence must first be deduced in order that it be discovered. 

15  In Theory 3, Variant 1:

Evidence, Type 1 in Theory 3 begins with:

Guthrie did shoot at someone in the dark, and that person, Boles, did pretend to die.  Guthrie then fled the scene and confessed to Florence what he thought he had done.  Boles, who was Dorla's lover, knew Guthrie believed he had killed someone.

16  In Variant 2 of Theory 3, Boles adds his name to the list of the Accused:

Boles prefaces this story of his own guilt to Perry by saying that it is false and that Guthrie is the real killer.  Thus, nothing about Boles' confession-of-a-confession was meant to be believed.  This proclaimed deception, though, is particularly clever in the narrative:  because Boles and Dorla are the killers, Boles' nominally-deceptive confession is actually the truth.  It has the additional benefit of increasing the elegance of The Lucky Loser's structure of misguided theories and free-floating signifiers:  even deceit can be deceitful.   The elegance of this structure is increased in the next plot move as well (Plate 29 and Footnote 17).

17 The narrative's playful reflexivity, first expressed in Florence's' deception, then more strongly echoed in Boles' phony / true confession, is increased with a yet third plot twist:

This leap back to the first theory of the novel gives readers a music-like reprise of the narrative pleasure they experienced before (Plate 20, Footnote 10).

18  Theory 3 offers a mise-en-abysm which proposes that Crimes, Criminals and Evidence are all interchangeable, all falsifiable, all grist for the narrative mill.   By posing the real killer as the false killer, Gardner playfully continues to exhaust as many formal possibilities as he can, making use of a multi-dimensional matrix of the Sincere and False, the Cast of Characters, and the Roles of Accused and Victim.  Almost everyone is almost everything.

 

In the upper matrix, Ted is accused of the murder in Theories 1 and 2, Myrtle in Theory 1, Guthrie in Theory 3 and Boles and Dorla in Theory 4.  Because the accusations are sincere, if usually false, I've indicated them with bright colors.  However, I've marked Boles (in the Theory 3 column) and Dorla (in Theory 1) with pale colors.  This is to signify that Boles confesses and accuses Dorla of the crime insincerely.  

In the lower matrix, the Victim's identity shifts as well.  In Theory 2, the police have not heard the Mafia theory, but Ted sincerely proposes it, and Florence insincerely does so.  It is thus half pale. Dorla's Lover (who turns out to be Boles) is deceptively proposed for the part in Theory 3 so his box in the matrix has to be pale.  But Guthrie finally wins the semiological audition and he does wind up dead in Theory 4.   With all this playfulness, Gardner must have been disappointed that only one character was able to serve both as the killer and the killed.  But there was, after all, only one corpse!  At least he could have two bad guys.  Compare this model of the novel with that in Plate 14.

19  Perry now puts together all the evidence that the reader has seen him gather in the preceding pages.  Everything of an evidential nature is sorted out:  Perry has cracked another case:

As Perry makes his final argument before the judge, all is Recognized, and almost all is Available.  Perry explains the following:

20  Evidence must be linked to theory through argument and justification.  By the end of the novel, Perry has justified and explained each piece of accumulated evidence in support of his theory of the crime.  (For a high-resolution graphic of all Perry's justifications, click here.)

21  In S/Z, Roland Barthes (1977) speaks of the weave of the bourgeois novel through which a textured impression of the real is sustained by reiterations, constancies and the persistence of signifieds.  The Case of the Lucky Loser is so closely crafted that it creates a remarkably believable tapestry.  In the present analysis, I have concentrated on the perfections of the weave.  In saying good-bye to it, though, I cannot help wondering about a few almost imperceptible flaws that I have noticed along the way.  I fear that these little details may constitute some radically new evidence and require a radically new theory of the crime.  I'll mention them here because, well, I'm troubled by them.

        Those are the problems I've found -- and they are disturbing.  All those are on one side.  Maybe some of them are unimportant.  I won't argue about that.  But look at the number of them.  What have we got on the other side?  All we've got is that maybe Boles killed Guthrie and maybe Guthrie killed Boles. 
        All right, I'm quoting The Maltese Falcon here (Hammett 1972:227) -- or, well -- the film version (Houston 1941) since the dialog there is better.  But, I am starting to get a bad feeling about this Lucky Loser  thing.  I'm wondering maybe the whole business is just some story that somebody made up!  I guess I'm just suspicious, but can I help it if everything I ever learned came from detective stories?  And I haven't even said one word about my total hero Nero Wolfe whose integrity is the stuff that dreams are made of.

22  It is more accurate to say that I do recognize some links between levels A and C, since every time I look at the darn transcripts I see something new.  It's an all right thing, though, "to leave others the pleasure of discovery" (Descartes 1952).  Where would Della and Paul be if Perry did all the work?