About this deck
The detective story is the only literary form in which the reader is officially permitted to enjoy a corpse. Its central labour is to make the disordered legible: to take a death, a deception, or an absence, and reorganise the world around it until the reader sees what was always there. Key sections include: Mystery & Detective.; A FIRST WORD What the genre is for.; CHAPTER I Fair play.; CHAPTER II Poe invents the detective.; CHAPTER III Collins · the first English detective novel.; CHAPTER IV Holmes.; CHAPTER V The Golden Age.; CHAPTER VI Christie.; CHAPTER VII The locked-room puzzle.; CHAPTER VIII Father Brown..