When you have excluded the impossible, Sherlock Holmes pronounced, “whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”.
A fine notion. Elementary. But quite wrong. If you rule out the impossible, you are left only with what is possible; indeed, an infinite number of possibilities, only one of which is the truth.
This has not prevented an entire army of homemade Holmeses from setting out to tackle an unsolved case that has gripped the world’s imagination. We are drawn to the McCann story out of empathy and prurience, anxiety over the fate of a little girl and fear that there but for the grace of God go we. But at its root, our fascination with these events rests on something more benign, if artificial: our faith in the familiar structure of the whodunnit.
We need to discover how this detective story will end, and many imagine they know. As a nation, we are all first cousins to Lord Peter Wimsey and Miss Marple. The amateur detective is central to our popular culture: he or she spots the clues that others miss, takes the unexpected path and finds with humility and diligence the answer that eludes the flat-footed, wrong-footed professionals.
Witness the vast numbers of armchair and desk-chair gumshoes, swapping theories on the internet about what has happened to Madeleine McCann. From their computer screens, thousands of sleuths fan out across Google Earth to scour the countryside around Praia da Luz. Everyone has a theory.
The McCann story fits, with almost eerie precision, into the template of our cultural expectations: a sweet child, an attractive couple, a glamorous setting, a supposedly bungling foreign policeman or two. There is even the obligatory red herring (or perhaps not) in the shape of the neighbour who falls under suspicion. We are treated to a welter of technical expertise, which the readers and viewers are not expected to understand in detail, merely admire. Halfway through, the case has taken a huge, unexpected twist.
In the classic detective thriller, the tale will now end in one of two ways: the McCanns will be exonerated by the discovery of a key piece of evidence or, still better, the child herself; the unthinkable alternative will send the media into a cynical paroxysm over the seductiveness of beauty, another staple theme of the genre.
The modern mystery story was invented by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe on March 20, 1841, with the publication of The Murders in the Rue Morgue, immediately hailed as “a horrifying yet fascinating work of fiction that critics are citing as the first example of a new style – the detective story”. But the detective thriller is probably more deeply embedded in Britain than anywhere else, achieving a golden age in the 1920s, when Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham invented a world in which the amateur detective would simply take charge of the investigation. The genre has evolved and adapted over the years, but the essential ingredients have barely altered.
Every age has the crime story to reflect its fears and desires. It is no accident that Sherlock Holmes, working independently, should have emerged at a time when the professional police force had failed, under the full glare of public interest, to solve another horrible mystery: the Jack the Ripper case. The butler slipping poison into the port at the country house in the 1920s reflected middle-class unease that the social structure was changing and evil was everywhere.
It is unsurprising, then, that a nation raised on Cluedo and Conan Doyle should leap to join the hunt for Madeleine McCann. This instinct is essentially generous: we want to help, and we want to solve the mystery, to find a logical explanation for the inexplicable, and the psychological satisfaction that comes at the end of a satisfying whodunnit.
But modern detection does not always work that way. Most fictional detectives would not last long in a modern crime scene. Holmes is a towering figure in literature, but a pretty hopeless detective, unscientific and illogical. Agatha Christie inspired millions of homespun private eyes by writing books based on the foundation that “it is always interesting when one doesn't see. If you don’t see what a thing means, you must be looking at it wrong way around.” It is truer to say that if you don't know what a thing means, you probably lack the training to understand it and should leave the looking to someone who does.
Modern detective work is a matter of computers, the internet and minute science. It is boring, time-consuming and often incomplete. There are seldom neat and satisfying conclusions. The truth is elusive. Cases go unsolved.
Carl Jung once observed that the modern detective story “makes it possible to experience without danger all the excitement, passion and desirousness which must be suppressed in a humanitarian ordering of society”. Undoubtedly, many people feel a certain escapist thrill from witnessing and pondering the real-life detective story unfolding in Portugal. That is not wicked, but nor is it realistic: life seldom echoes art in the ways that we expect, and there is the danger that by framing these events as a detective story, we relegate it to a realm of the imagination, rather than cruel, unsparing reality. By treating the McCann saga as a mystery case, its sheer horror is blunted.
We crave a satisfying conclusion to the McCanns’ nightmare, preferably one in which the girl returns and her parents are above suspicion. More likely it will end in confusion, uncertainty and perhaps tragedy. We desire (and expect) a happy ending, or at least a solution. But as often happens in modern policing, and so seldom in the fictional world, this is a story that may have no ending at all.
Ben Macintyre