"The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious."
Einstein and Mystery
Category: Why Do We Love Murder Mysteries?
Ah, the French
Roland Barthes proposes an erotics of reading. And crime fiction does not come off well.
The Cleverest Christie: The Reversal
Writing about The Dry and its clever plotting reminded me of something I have been noticing about contemporary crime fiction, and brought me again to an appreciation of the skills of the masterful Agatha. An Engrossing Procession The clue-puzzle structure in The Dry is linear: a procession of clues or revisions point to first one … Continue reading The Cleverest Christie: The Reversal
Greek Tragedy and Freud: Auden on the Detective Story
For W. H. Auden detective fiction embodied a timeless idea, which appears in Classical, Christian and Freudian thought.
Forgotten Facts and Hidden Meanings
You can’t really discuss Australian crime fiction without mentioning Jane Harper’s first book. It has been spectacularly successful. Here's one reason.
The Unputdownable and the Unpickupable
“If a narrative is going to be as clumsy as that, can’t it have some guns?”
THE MR JONES MOMENT
Something is happening here but you don’t know what it is.
