“One Must Actually Take Facts as They Are”: Information Value and Information Behavior in the Miss Marple Novels

One perspective not often brought to the study of detective fiction is that from the field of information science. Among other topics, information science is concerned with information behavior, or how people behave with respect to information: needing, seeking, accidentally encountering, avoiding, evaluating, storing and so forth. Examining the solving of a mystery as an information behavior has potential for insights into the genre and into our twenty-first century readings of detective fiction. Current audiences are accustomed to modern information technology and the information behaviors afforded by it: amateur sleuths hack computer systems or professional detectives analyze trace evidence for DNA. Highly technologized contemporary information environments leave us to ask: in what ways do the manipulation of information value, and the sophistication of the information behaviors, in novels written by Agatha Christie in the early- to mid-twentieth century, continue to enthrall readers in the twenty-first?