# Mystery & Detective Fiction

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Category: Literature
Slides: 30
Updated: 2026-05-15T22:18:35.969Z
Tags: literature, mystery, and, detective

## Summary

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..

## Slide Outline

1. Mystery & Detective.
2. A FIRST WORD What the genre is for.
3. CHAPTER I Fair play.
4. CHAPTER II Poe invents the detective.
5. CHAPTER III Collins · the first English detective novel.
6. CHAPTER IV Holmes.
7. CHAPTER V The Golden Age.
8. CHAPTER VI Christie.
9. CHAPTER VII The locked-room puzzle.
10. CHAPTER VIII Father Brown.
11. CHAPTER IX The hard-boiled school.
12. CHAPTER X Chandler on what the form is for.
13. CHAPTER XI The pulp tradition.
14. CHAPTER XII Highsmith.
15. CHAPTER XIII Postwar British.
16. CHAPTER XIV The police procedural.
17. CHAPTER XV Simenon · French restraint.
18. CHAPTER XVI Scandinavian noir.
19. CHAPTER XVII Japanese crime.
20. CHAPTER XVIII The literary thriller.
21. CHAPTER XIX The inverted mystery.
22. CHAPTER XX Tana French.
23. CHAPTER XXI Mosley · Black Los Angeles.
24. CHAPTER XXII Domestic suspense.
25. CHAPTER XXIII The crime novel as social novel.
26. CHAPTER XXIV The working parts.
27. CHAPTER XXV Cosy vs dark.
28. CHAPTER XXVI Thirty essential mysteries.
29. CHAPTER XXVII Where to go next.
30. Case closed.

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