‘I cannot predict what is going to happen’, Bergson says, ‘but I foresee that I am going to have known it.’ This empty foresight offers a grammatical form, the future perfect, which links together the structure of an existential moment, the engagement with a fictional plot, and contemporary epochal self-consciousness. In 1977, Robert Champigny published a philosophical study of mystery stories titled What Will Have Happened, a tense form that creates a conjunction between a prospective present and the retrospective future. Speaking of the investigative sequence of a mystery story or detective fiction, what makes aesthetic sense for Champigny ‘is that an investigative sequence can turn the opposition between narrative questions and answers into a tighter tension or complementarity between narrative progression and retrogression’:

This is an intriguing claim, partly because it seems to want to locate the interplay between narrative progression and retrogression not only in the temporality of a reading, but in the investigation itself: the structure of what will have happened is not only the structure of general future orientation, in reading or in life, but a particular kind of narrative – the investigative sequence – capable of binding prospect and retrospect together in an unusual complementarity.