Who dunnit? Doesn't matter. Crime novels are not about plot.

I kinda banged around Teju Cole's otherwise noteworthy debut novel, Open City, for its altogether absence of plot, and that may explain why after Cole I gravitated toward Dashiell Hammett because, after all, isn't that what makes a crime novel or detective novel - the plot? And the answer is, no. It occurs to me, reading Hammett's "The Thin Man" that the plot is really ancillary to the pleasure, maybe even a hindrance to the pleasure, of reading crime fiction. The plot is, in Hitchcock terms, just the mega-Maguffin, something to keep the novel moving along. As I'm reading The Thin Man I don't particularly care who dunnit, and I find the long expositions rather tedious, unnecessary, even quaint - style has evolved a lot since 1934 and few crime novelists today would indulge in long chapters in which one character basically explains everything to a less knowledgeable counterpart everything he knows about the story. Today, writers, more schooled in film, develop the plot through scenes and through action, not through chat - though Stieg Larsson is an exception to this rule (can't figure out how he got away with that). But with Hammett, it doesn't matter - the point of the plot is to illuminate the character, cool, suave, debonair yet brave Nick Charles (and equally cool Nora). The dangers of the story give him the opportunity to show he's sanguine. British crime novels, at least the classics (Conan Doyle) are much more about plot - we try to outsmart or out-think Holmes, but we never can, because Conan Doyle holds all the strings. In Hammett, I'm not trying to out-think Nick - more trying to outwit him, waiting for his next barb or quip.