Friday's "Forgotten" Books: Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction

Hofstra University hosted an Agatha Christie interdisciplinary conference in 1991 in honor of the centennial of Christie's birth. The result of that conference was the book Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction, published in 1997 and edited by Hofstra professors Jerome H. Delamater and Ruth Prigozy. The editors were attempting to offer "a variety of new and innovative approaches to classic detective fiction," by including essays of a theoretical approach to the genre, then tracing the genre back to Agatha Christie and traditional British detective fiction.

Part I looks at the nature of and the audience for detective fiction, as well as at the genre as a literary form. This first half of the book includes an inquiry into the role of the detective, applications of psychology to the genre, and a look at literary criticism positing that "traditional detective fiction contained the seeds of its own subversion." Part II focuses on the writing of Agatha Christie and her heirs in the British ratiocinative tradition.

The 16 essays include topics such as "Shamus-a-um: Having the Quality of a Classical Detective" by Timothy W. Boyd and Carolyn Higbie; "Parody and Detective Fiction" by Janice MacDonald; "Christie's Narrative Games" by Robert Merrill; "The Game's Afoot: Predecessors and Pursuits of a Postmodern Detective Novel by Kathleen Belin Owen; and "Class, Gender, and the Possibilities of Detection in Anne Perry's Victorian Reconstructions" by Iska S. Alter.

Some of the themes underlying the book are the way the genre reflects important social and cultural attitudes, contributes to a reader's ability to adapt to the challenges of daily life, and provides alternate takes on the role of the detective as an investigator and arbiter of truth. As one of the essays notes, thanks to the detective novels of Tony Hillerman, set among the Native American population around New Mexico, "many American readers have probably gotten more insight into traditional Navajo culture from his detective stories than from any other recent books."