Tearing the heart out of secrets: inside and outside a murder mystery

This paper is concerned with the narrative operations of the murder mystery and their effect on the reader's process of identification. I examine femi nist appropriations of the terms 'identification', 'incorporation' and 'the grotesque', and consider the effect of these processes on the subjectivity of the reader of murder mysteries. My case study is of Minette Walter's po pular novel The Ice House, and I demonstrate how the failure of the detecti ves to solve the mystery is due to their inability to identify with a femal e killer. I conclude that the reader of this popular murder mystery is forc ed into an unhappy identification with the textually incorporated writer, a nd is therefore unable to come to terms with the secret at the heart of the novel. This in turn results in the cyclical consumption of the popular thr iller.