Read complete books and articles on: Mystery and Detective Fiction

Mystery - or mystery story, literary genre in which the cause (or causes) of a mysterious happening, often a crime, is gradually revealed by the hero or heroine; this is accomplished through a mixture of intelligence, ingenuity, the logical interpretation of evidence, and sometimes sheer luck.

History

Although some critics trace the origins of the genre to such disparate works as Aesop's fables

History

Although some critics trace the origins of the genre to such disparate works as Aesop's fables, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and the Apocrypha, most agree that the Western mystery, complete with all its conventions, emerged in 1841 with the publication of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." This and all of Poe's "tales of ratiocination" feature the chevalier C. Auguste Dupin, a brilliant amateur detective, who, by a keen analysis of motives and clues, solves crimes that are baffling to the police.

The first full-length mystery novels were probably Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White (1860) and The Moonstone (1868), which continued Poe's concept of the brilliant detective—although Collins's rose-growing Sergeant Cuff is a policeman—and added an emphasis on the sleuth's idiosyncrasies. Charles Dickens's The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870) is a detective novel that is both intriguing and frustrating because, since the novel is unfinished, its crime is never solved. In 1887 Arthur Conan Doyle published "A Study in Scarlet," which introduced Sherlock Holmes, destined to become the most famous of all literary detectives. This vain and aloof amateur sleuth, with a fondness for pipes, violins, and cocaine, solves crimes through extraordinarily perceptive recognition and interpretation of evidence.

Like Conan Doyle, subsequent mystery writers often featured the same detective in several works. Especially popular are G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown, E. D. Biggers's Charlie Chan, S. S. Van Dine's Philo Vance, Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe, Agatha Christie's Hercule Poirot and Miss Jane Marple, Georges Simenon's Inspector Maigret, Dorothy Sayers's Lord Peter Wimsey, Leslie Charteris's "The Saint," Robert van Gulick's Magistrate Dee, Harry Kemelman's Rabbi David Small, Emma Lathan's John Putnam Thatcher, Ellery Queen in the works of Frederic Dannay and M. B. Lee, and P. D. James's Adam Dalgleish.

Types of Mysteries

Many authors incorporate the conventions of the mystery into the novel, producing works that are warm, witty, often erudite, and filled with interesting characters and atmosphere. Such authors include Dorothy Sayers, Michael Innes, Josephine Tey, Nicholas Blake, Edgar Wallace, Ngaio Marsh, Philip McDonald, Anna K. Green, Carolyn Wells, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Elizabeth Daly, Peter Dickinson, and Hilda Lawrence. Some detective novels focus on the actions of the police in solving a crime; notable "police procedure" novelists are Freeman Wills Crofts, George Bagby, Ed McBain, and Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö.

Dashiell Hammett initiated the "hard-boiled" detective genre, featuring tough, brash, yet honorable "private eyes" living on the seedy criminal fringe and involved in violent and incredibly complex crimes. Other such writers are Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Chester Himes, Ross Macdonald, and Elmore Leonard and, adding lurid sex and brutality, James Hadley Chase and Mickey Spillane. There has been a resurgence of interest in hard-boiled stories, with such popular authors as Jim Thompson and Charles Willeford.

An extension of the detective novel is the espionage tale, which became very popular in the 1960s. Usually convoluted in plot, these novels emphasize action, sex, and innovative cruelty and sometimes stress the moral ambiguity of the spy's world. Noted authors of espionage novels are Graham Greene, Eric Ambler, Ian Fleming, Len Deighton, John le Carré, Alan Furst, and Tom Clancy.

In the subtle and perceptive works of writers such as Georges Simenon and Nicholas Freeling the psychological reasons behind a crime are often emphasized more than the crime's solution. Other writers, notably Julian Symons, have extended this emphasis, maintaining that early mysteries, with their country-house settings and aristocratic characters, are snobbish and escapist. Attempting to be contemporary and meaningful, these authors probe the psychological and sociological aspects of a crime, often producing grim and uncomfortable conclusions. The courtroom drama has also been popular, as seen in the success of Erle Stanley Gardner's many Perry Mason books, Scott Turow's Presumed Innocent (1987), The Pelican Brief (1992) and other thrillers by John Grisham, and other tales of legal suspense.

Despite its conventions, good writers can make the mystery novel their own. For example, Agatha Christie is noted for her clever plots, John Dickson Carr for his ingenious "locked room" mysteries, Dick Francis for his depiction of the horse-racing world, and Ruth Rendell for her novels combining character and atmosphere with absorbing police procedure, perceptive sociological and psychological analysis, and a sense of life's tragedy. Other popular detective novelists include Sue Grafton, Sara Paretsky, and Amanda Cross (all of whom feature heroines), the humorous Elmore Leonard, Lawrence Block, Walter Mosley, and Tony Hillerman.

15 of the Best Books and Articles on: Mystery and Detective Fiction

as selected by Questia librarians

1.

An Introduction to the Detective Story » Read Now
by Leroy Lad Panek. 214 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...essentials of the detective story. When it does enter mystery literature...of their fiction to bring...amateur detective to fiction. Sure, Dupins...locked-room mystery...
2.

The Reader and the Detective Story » Read Now
by George N. Dove. 204 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The Reader and the Detective Story is unique in the criticism of detective fiction, in the sense that it treats the detective story as a special case of reading, governed by special rules and shaped by a highly specialized formula. The method of interpretation is the application of the principles of...
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The Reader and the Detective Story is unique in the criticism of detective fiction, in the sense that it treats the detective story as a special case of reading, governed by special rules and shaped by a highly specialized formula. The method of interpretation is the application of the principles of Response Theory (especially those developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans Robert Jauss) to the reading of a tale of detection. Dove shows how the "English" soft-boiled mystery and the "American" private eye story, although they have different settings and develop different plots, belong in the same subgenre and follow the same formula, inherited directly from Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". The Reader and the Detective Story is bound to arouse controversy and to stimulate a reexamination of the nature and purpose of detective fiction.
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3.

The Lock and Key Library: Classic Mystery and Detective Stories » Read Now
by Julian Hawthorne. 368 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...most outre results, it would make all fiction, with its conventionalities and foreseen...demeanor with which he treated the singular mystery which he had been called upon...
4.

Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction » Read Now
by Jerome H. Delamater, Ruth Prigozy. 206 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
5.

The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women » Read Now
by Catherine Ross Nickerson. 276 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

The Web of Iniquity is a study of detective fiction written by American women between the Civil War & World War II. Refuting the idea that no American detective fiction of substance was produced between the times of Edgar Allan Poe & Dashiell Hammett, Catherine Ross Nickerson shows how these women...
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The Web of Iniquity is a study of detective fiction written by American women between the Civil War & World War II. Refuting the idea that no American detective fiction of substance was produced between the times of Edgar Allan Poe & Dashiell Hammett, Catherine Ross Nickerson shows how these women writers blended Gothic elements into domestic fiction to create a unique & all-but-ignored subgenre that she labels "domestic detective fiction." This subgenre allowed women writers to participate in postbellum culture & to critique other aspects of a rapidly changing society. Domestic detective fiction combined elements of sensationalist papers, popular nonfiction crime stories, & the domestic novel. Nickerson shows how it also incorporated the gothic tropes found in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, & Charlotte Bronte & influenced the work of Pauline Hopkins. Mid-nineteenth-century writer Metta Fuller Victor, who represented such important areas of cultural conflict as the role of professions in the formation of class identity & the possibility of women's independence & self-determination, paved the way for the appearance of women detectives in the late-nineteenth-century fiction of Anna Katharine Green. Nickerson credits Mary Roberts Rinehart, in particular, for bringing sophistication to the subgenre by amplifying the humorous, terrifying, & feminist elements inherent in earlier detective novels by women. Throughout the volume, Nickerson focuses on the narrative qualities of the domestic novel tradition & the ways in which it reflected ideologies of domesticity & gender. Also included are a discussion of various rewritings of the Lizzie Borden scandal in this tradition & an afterword on the relation of domestic detective fiction to the hard-boiled style. The Web of Iniquity places the detective fiction written by women between 1850 & 1940 into ongoing discussions regarding women, culture, & literature & will appeal to scholars & students of women's studies, American studies, & literary history.
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6.

Great Women Mystery Writers: Classic to Contemporary » Read Now
by Kathleen Gregory Klein. 432 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This comprehensive bio-critical dictionary evaluates 117 widely read historical and contemporary women mystery writers and over 1,000 novels. From the sensationalist women mystery writers of the 19th century to the mid-1990s practitioners such as Margaret Maron, Karen Kijewski, and Sue Grafton, this...
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This comprehensive bio-critical dictionary evaluates 117 widely read historical and contemporary women mystery writers and over 1,000 novels. From the sensationalist women mystery writers of the 19th century to the mid-1990s practitioners such as Margaret Maron, Karen Kijewski, and Sue Grafton, this work celebrates the contributions of women writers to mystery fiction, with an emphasis on contemporary writers. Signed interpretive and evaluative essays by 86 scholar-critics who are experts in the field are 4-5 pages in length and review the totality of the writer's work. A complete mystery bibliography and selected critical bibliography are also included in each entry, and helpful appendices conclude the volume. Great Women Mystery Writers is a full-fledged critical companion by noted scholars and critics, and can be used for its critical interpretations, as a reader's advisory, and as an essential reference tool for librarian and patron alike.
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7.

Mystery Fiction and Modern Life » Read Now
by R. Gordon Kelly. 232 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

An Analysis of How Codes of Modernity are Reflected in Detective Thrillers and Make Them Believable
The detective novel is both a product of the twentieth century and a response to the needs of readers forced to deal with social and political insecurities of the time. Thus codes of modernity are the...
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An Analysis of How Codes of Modernity are Reflected in Detective Thrillers and Make Them Believable
The detective novel is both a product of the twentieth century and a response to the needs of readers forced to deal with social and political insecurities of the time. Thus codes of modernity are the essence of the genre, and its plausibility relies upon the degree of the readers' expectations, demands, and vicarious experiences. Even one of mystery fiction's hallmarks, the seemingly improbable but consequential encounter with strangers, is assimilated in the modem sensibility, which has been shaped by concepts of trust and confidence, of rationalism and emotion, of expertise and amateurism, and of ideology and morality.
This intelligent and probing analysis of the detective novel shows how the fictional world portrayed by the mystery writer is perceived as parallel with the actual world. This apparent unity of the fictional thriller and veritable circumstance would make it possible for some high-ranking,diplomat to outwit his adversaries by emulating the exploits of Sherlock Holmes. Similarly, a professor of medicine might assign students the study of Arthur Conan Doyle's stories as exercises in detection or in drawing inferences, for like the work of Holmes the practice of medicine connects visible symptoms to their invisible causes.
In the light of this concept of modernity Mystery Fiction and Modern Life examines works by Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Tony Hillerman, Agatha Christie, Helen MacInnes, Patricia Cornwell, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Anthony Price, and others.
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8.

Detection & Its Designs: Narrative & Power in 19th-Century Detective Fiction » Read Now
by Peter Thoms. 182 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that...
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Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure. Detection and Its Designs reads early detective fiction as a self-conscious form that is suspicious of the detective it ostensibly celebrates, and critical of the authorial power he wields in attempting to reconstruct the past and script a narrative of the crime.
In readings of Godwin's Caleb Williams, Poe's Dupin stories, Dickens's Bleak House, Collins's The Moonstone, and Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Thorns argues that the detective's figurative writing emerges out of a desire to exert control over others and sometimes over himself.
Detection and Its Designs demonstrates that, far from being a naive form, early detective fiction grapples with the medium of storytelling itself. To pursue these inward-turning fictions is to uncover the detective's motives of controlling the representation of both himself and others, a discovery that in turn significantly undermines the authority of his solutions.
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9.

The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction » Read Now
by Ray B. Browne, Lawrence A. Kreiser Jr., Robin W. Winks. 309 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...historical crime fiction / edited...paper 1. Detective and mystery stories...criticism. 2. Detective and mystery stories...Historical fiction, American...W. Winks Mystery...
10.

Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction » Read Now
by Richard B. Schwartz. 173 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

Owners of mystery bookshops will tell you that there are several sorts of buyers: those who purchase on impulse or whim; genre addicts who buy paperbacks by the week and by the armful; and those who have caught up on canonical texts and regularly buy new novels by select authors in hardcover...
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Owners of mystery bookshops will tell you that there are several sorts of buyers: those who purchase on impulse or whim; genre addicts who buy paperbacks by the week and by the armful; and those who have caught up on canonical texts and regularly buy new novels by select authors in hardcover. Richard B. Schwartz belongs in the last group, with his own list of approximately seventy favorite writers.
Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction explores the work of these writers, building upon a reading of almost seven hundred novels from the 1980s and 1990s. By looking at recurring themes in these mysteries, Schwartz offers readers new ways to approach the works in relation to contemporary cultural concerns.
With sensitivity to a culture consisting of frontiers and borders, Schwartz examines the position of the vigilante in art and society, racial bridges and divides, the absence of divine presence and compensating narrative strategies, the unresolved nature of the crime plot and its roots in chivalric romance. The special importance of setting, and the growing importance of grotesque humor in the fiction studied here are addressed by the author, as is the journalistic/ instructional dimension of the field and the importance of crossover narratives.
This book is not only a study and appreciation of an important subgenre and its contemporary practitioners, it also utilizes both literary history and theoretical material. Information has been drawn from fanzines, from discussions with writers, booksellers, agents, and editors, and from the author's own extensive knowledge of literature and American culture.
Nice and Noir is wide-ranging but neither ponderous nor lugubrious.Its language is accessible but not simplistic. The book will have a broad appeal -- both to academics and to general readers with some interest in American studies and popular culture.
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11.

American Mystery and Detective Novels: A Reference Guide » Read Now
by Larry Landrum. 276 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
12.

New Hard-Boiled Writers, 1970s-1990s » Read Now
by Leroy Lad Panek. 223 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

...0-87972-820-5 paper 1. Detective and mystery stories, American...criticism. 2. American fiction--20th century--History...every subgenre of detective fiction use their works...
13.

Shaman or Sherlock? The Native American Detective » Read Now
by Gina Macdonald, Andrew Macdonald. 288 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library
14.

Out of the Woodpile: Black Characters in Crime and Detective Fiction » Read Now
by Frankie Y. Bailey. 196 pgs.

Collections: Literature, Entire Library

This first sociohistorical study of the evolution of black detectives and other African American characters in crime and detective fiction identifies stereotypical images of blacks and probes the implied values and collective fantasies found in this genre. Bailey argues that a "mythology of race"...
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This first sociohistorical study of the evolution of black detectives and other African American characters in crime and detective fiction identifies stereotypical images of blacks and probes the implied values and collective fantasies found in this genre. Bailey argues that a "mythology of race" consisting of themes of sex and savagery exists in the U.S. and is perpetuated in popular culture. Additionally, fourteen crime and detective fiction writers present their views on creating black characters and a directory includes a sampling of cases featuring black characters, a list of black detectives, relevant works of fiction, film, television, and more.
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15.

Mystery in Children's Literature: From the Rational to the Supernatural » Read Now
by Adrienne E. Gavin, Christopher Routledge. 239 pgs.

Collections: Education, Literature, Entire Library

Mystery in Children's Literature charts a development from religious mystery through rationally solved detective fictions to insoluble supernatural and horror mysteries. Written by internationally recognized scholars in the field, these 13 original essays offer challenging and innovative readings of...
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Mystery in Children's Literature charts a development from religious mystery through rationally solved detective fictions to insoluble supernatural and horror mysteries. Written by internationally recognized scholars in the field, these 13 original essays offer challenging and innovative readings of both classic and popular mysteries for children. This volume will be essential and stimulating for anyone with an interest in children's literature or in mystery fiction.
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