This book establishes new perspectives on mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining how it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Discussing modern works of mystery and classic pieces, essays examine the effect of mystery on literary forms and on readers, addressing a variety of forms including novels, plays, graphic novels, television series, films, and ipad games. Scholars of mystery and detective fiction, crime fiction, genre studies, and cultural studies will find this book invaluable.

Introduction: Embarking on a New Investigation Casey A. Cothran and Mercy Cannon Part 1: Disturbing Expectations 1. Troubling Bodies of Evidence: Gender, Detection, and the Problems of Self-Reinvention in Raymond Chandler's The Lady in the Lake and Tim O'Brien's In the Lake of the Woods Andrew M. Hakim 2. The Revelations of the Corpse: Interpreting the Body in the Golden Age Detective Novel Brittain Bright and Rebecca Mills 3. Mapping the Mark: Tattoos, Crime Fiction, and Gendered Cartographies Kate Watson Part 2: Implicating Readers 4. The Transtextuality of James M. Cain's Snyder-Gray Novels: The Postman Always Rings Twice, Double Indemnity, and The Cocktail Waitress Jennie MacDonald 5. P.D. James's Discontinuous Narrative: A Suitable Job for a Reader Janice Marion Shaw 6. Franz Kafka: Before the Fictional Process David Ben-Merre Part 3: Indicting Cultures 7. J.D. Robb's Police Procedurals and the Critique of Modernity Srividhya Swaminathan 8. Cooking the Books: Metafictional Myth and Ecocritical Magic in "Cozy" Mysteries from Agatha Christie to Contemporary Cooking Sleuths Susan Rowland 9. Romance Narratives, Blackmail, and the Price of Knowledge in the Novels of Raymond Chandler John Scaggs Part 4: Adapting Forms 10. Agatha Christie's Mousetrap and Tom Stoppard's Real Inspector Hound: Playing Cat and Mouse with Farce, Parody, and Meta-Theatricality Caroline Marie 11. Beyond the Fog: Inherent Vice and Thomas Pynchon's Noir Adjustment Eleanor Gold 12. The Mystery of the Missing Formula: Adapting the World's Most Popular Girl Detective to Multimedia Platforms Beth Walker