The Plotting of Criminal Relevance in the Story of Crime: Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs

The way a cause-and-effect relation between events is organized in a plot-based crime story depends

upon a hinge point in the discourse, which unravels a competing story logic that shapes a “story of

intentionality” embedded first in the story of crime and second in the story of investigation. The aim of this paper is to evaluate the “intent.” If intent is considered as a hinge point against which the causality of events takes place, then it is necessary to work out the causation. Following a ‘‘discoursebased’’ frame analysis, an “intent frame” is evaluated using an “inference-making” process. The intent frame is then mapped along the horizontal and vertical axes of a narrative frame in the application of a logical fallacy. Such application of narratological concepts with stylistic strategy is effective for the revelation of participant relevance to an offense in the story of crime adapted from Agatha Christie’s Five Little Pigs.