Document Type

Other

Publication Date

7-2026

Department 1

English

Abstract

The bloody knife. The telltale footprint. The courtroom confession. We all know the cliches of the detective and mystery genres, so why do they remain novel even when you know “whodunit”? This class will investigate the literary and cultural factors that make detective fiction perennially popular, from Sherlock Holmes to your favorite true crime podcast. In order to explore central questions raised by mystery novels, short stories, poems, and plays about the craft of storytelling itself, we will read bestselling authors like Edgar Allan Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Charles Dickens, as well as lesser-known writers like Ella Hepworth-Dixon, Cornelia Sorabji, Susan Glaspell, and Rudolph Fisher. Through plot twists, cold cases, and red herrings, we’ll work to unravel the mystery of how this genre continually captivates new generations of readers.

Comments

This reading list was created for ENG 230: On the Case: An Introduction to Mystery and Detective Literature.

Creative Commons License

Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 License.

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