disturbing the boundaries between depth and surface. His method, as we have seen,

involves turning the clues in the investigation inside out.22

 In the following section, I would like to draw on the detective's method to

investigate the strange case of Orson Welles's The Stranger. The name "Orson Welles" is

usually regarded either as a mark of genius or as a sign of failure. Both camps employ

tactics similar to those used by "the investigative reporter Thompson's staff editor in

Citizen Kane," who is, as Jonathan Rosenbaum suggests, "bent on finding a single

formula for explaining a man's life" (376). But no such single formula exists. That is

where the detective comes in. As a historian, the Benjaminian detective would be highly

appropriate for investigating the varied ways in which Welles, especially in a film such as

The Stranger, navigates the tensions between the auteur and the apparatus as well as

explores the relationship between autography and authority. But this would be a different

kind of investigation than the wildly romantic discourse of the Cahiers critics, one that,

as Naremore has noted, "formed canons and fixed the names of people we should study"

("Authorship" 21; emphasis added). But what if we un-fix these names? What if, instead

of considering the directorial signature as a source of interior meaning and auteurism as a

way to uncover his submerged personality, we turn his name inside out?

 Like the purloined letter, the name of the author is actually "hidden" on the surface

of the text. As Dudley Andrew puts it, "Always a problematic and very special sign, the

signature of the author is a mark on the surface of the text signaling its source" (83). It is

this problematic sign that the detective can explore by inspecting the significance of the

name, its meanings, associations, and variations. If the detective-historian were to explore

the signature as a clue, the investigation would be similar to the way Jacques Derrida