The thesis that modern bureaucracies and detective fiction spring from the same source lends itself to a Foucauldian interpretation. It could be argued that statistics and the bureaucracies that are sustained by them are, like detective fiction, techniques of surveillance, mechanisms of a disciplinary form of power. Each of these techniques isolates minute, differentiating and therefore incriminating details which give access to the most intimate secrets of the individuals they investigate. It is, in fact, the very passion for counting, recording and tabulating that deposits many of the clues used by detectives to track their suspects. Laundry lists, insurance records, telephone bills, parking tickets, the criminal and the criminal act always turn up as figures in some bureaucracy's accounting. When Walter Neff attempts to avoid detection, he establishes his alibi by making a long-distance call that he knows will be recorded and thus help to place him at home at the hour of the crime. Keyes begins to unravel the case when he notes that Mr Dietrichson did not put in a claim for his broken leg, though he was insured against such an accident. In detective fiction, to be is not to be perceived, it is to be recorded. This is one of the fundamental differences between the realist novel (with its emphasis on the intersubjective network of perceptions) and detective fiction.