![]() Time shifts do even more to show that we cannot rely on the detective. The reader understands the terror of the moment and knows the identity of the killer Harry comes along afterwards to investigate an inert crime scene. ![]() In the most extreme examples of the reader knowing more than the investigator, we twice experience the death of a character, who is being murdered, from his or her point of view. Nesbø's novel is built from multiple viewpoints and frequent time shifts, with the reader made constantly aware of the partial nature of the detective's knowledge. Yet it puts him within a narrative structure that emphasises his incomplete or belated understanding. Jo Nesbø's The Redbreast still relies on a decent, clever, hard-bitten detective, Harry Hole, who will get to the bottom of the crimes he confronts. Many writers within the genre have wanted to undermine this reassurance without abandoning the closure that has always been part of the contract with the reader. Detective fiction presented us with unconnected events and gave us someone who could turn them into a coherent narrative. ![]() He or she explained everything in the book that had perplexed the reader. O nce upon a time, you could rely on a fictional detective to return the world to intelligibility. ![]()
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