‘Whodunnit?’ asked my husband mildly as I threw The Da Vinci Code into the cardboard box intended for kindling, next to the hearth.
‘Whyreadit? That’s the question.’
The Da Vinci Code, which follows so many of the clichés of pulp thrillers, also employs the airport school’s convention for titling, which applies to films too. It entails the adjectival use of a proper noun attributively with some common noun that sounds possibly interesting. You know, The Shawshank Redemption, The Thomas Crown Affair, The China Syndrome.
I should like to know who started it. Chaucer, to be sure, wrote The Canterbury Tales but he didn’t call ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ ‘Chicken Run’, let alone ‘The Chaunticlere Abduction’.
I was wondering if some founder of the modern school, such as Poe, began it. Poe does use proper names to give a flavour of reality or mystery to his stories: ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget’.
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