There's something in common between Nabokov's worlds and the "real" world and that is absent from detective fiction and in traditional novels: it is the world's "pathological structure," and a general lack of closure (not that we ever stop looking for it in both cases).*

 

For years I've been interested in the Sherlock Holmes kind of mysteries, in all sorts of detective and crime stories and present day movies about them. I was amused by Vladimir Nabokov's parodies of Agatha Christie, and other detective-story writers, in his first English novel, "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight." and how she was nominally brought back in "Lolita" (thru "A Murder his Announced," kept in the prison library), whereas in "Pale Fire" the parody of detective novels acquires still another twist. Planned robberies and murders can be found as early as in "Laughter in the Dark" and "Desire." (but in these two we are offered a reassuring explanation and conclusion)  In the later "Ada, or Ardor" we find that its main characters, Ada and Van, constitute a murderous pair, at least in the eyes of some Listlers such as C.Kunin (one of the few who dwells in this crime dimension in "Ada" or when considering the life of John Shade). One even finds evil crazy crimes in TOoL.  

 

Today, while watching another CSI episode,. I got an interesting interpretation for the rhymes, also mentioned by V.N in RLSK, about  "Who killed Cock Robin?."**. It invited me to plan to reconsider the stories that V outlines in RLSK while quoting his brother's lines ***. I felt that SK's novels must have been connected by various disparate clues, independently from their having been authored by one Sebastian Knight ( "the dead man of the tale").

As in Hitchcock's 1951 "Strangers on a Train"#, when we are offered various distinct culprits (=emotions, memories, lies, ideas, society, author, reader), all of them claiming their sole guilt (=pertinence), it becomes very difficult to isolate the one who'll be the true "killer" (=reaching closure) from the bunch.

Contrary to Highsmith/Hitchcock's finale, in my eyes, there's no final solution leading to a "real" author in RLSK, nor in Lolita, PF, aso. .

 

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On the side:  Could there be any deeper connection between the titles from VN's novels, Sebastian Knight's and V's that were mentioned in LATH? 

In LATH we get:
"Other books by the narrator 

 

 

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* - In his excellent 1996 article "The Mirror you Break Your Nose Against: Lolita and the Conquest of Crime," William Dow distinguishes detective from crime novels, following Tony Hilfer, Jean Symon and PD James. For them, the detective novel "guarantees the orderliness of the world and a rational self, whereas the crime novel dramatically departs from this."  For him, "Nabokov's 'Lolita' takes advantage of crime fiction conventions to essentially 'destroy' the text, establish a certain 'hide and seek' with the reader, and create an ontologically puzzling world." He sees Nabokov as an author who "takes advantage of the crime novel convention and then, partly to renew the form, subverts it...He assimilates these conventions into a more contemporary acceptance of the nonlogical and the nonsolution." (Cf. Americana, n.13, 1996, Presses de l'Université de Paris-Sorbonne.)

 

** - In the internet we find the lines at: http://en.academic.ru/dic.nsf/enwiki/1283735