contains not one but two stories: the story of the crime and the story of the investigation. In their purest form, these two stories have no point in common … The first story, that of the crime, ends before the second begins. But what happens to the second? Not much. The characters of the second story, the story of the investigation, do not act, they learn. Nothing can happen to them: a rule of the genre postulates the detective's immunity. This second story, the story of the investigation, […] is often told by a friend of the detective, who explicitly acknowledges that he is writing a book; the second story consists, in fact, in explaining how this very book came to be written […] The first [story]—the story of the crime—tells “what really happened,” whereas the second—the story of the investigation—explains “how the reader (or the narrator) has come to know about it.” The first, that of the crime, is in fact the story of an absence: its [salient] characteristic is that it cannot be immediately present in the book. In other words, the narrator cannot transmit directly the conversations of the characters who are implicated, nor describe their actions: to do so, he must necessarily employ the intermediary of another (or the same) character who will report, in the second story, the words heard or the actions observed. The status of the second story [consists of being] a story which has no importance in itself, which serves only as a mediator between the reader and the story of the crime […] We are concerned then in the whodunit with two stories of which one is absent but real, the other present but insignificant. (Todorov, xx)

subscribes to a rigidly uniform, virtually changeless combination of characters, setting, and events familiar reader in the English speaking world. The typical detective story presents people assembled at an isolated place—usually an English country house—who discover that one of their number has been murdered.