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Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction

Part of the Crime Files Series Book Series

DOI: 10.1057/9780230313736

ISBN: 978-1-349-32531-3

Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK - Springer Journals

Nov 23, 2015

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Chapter 1Edgar Allan Poe and the Detective Story Narrative

Cook, Michael

Pages: 1 –20

[One of the more remarkable facts about detective fiction, a genre which has now assumed epic proportions, is its foundation of just three short stories, an experiment to be abandoned by its creator almost as quickly as it appeared. For Edgar Allan Poe, the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue...
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Chapter 2The Locked Compartment: Charles Dickens’s ‘The Signalman’ and Enclosure in the Railway Mystery Story

Cook, Michael

Pages: 21 –42

[On the evening of Saturday, 9 July 1864, Thomas Briggs, the chief clerk of Robarts Bank in the City, boarded the 9.50 train from Fenchurch Street to Hackney. Briggs was returning home from a weekly excursion to visit a family member in Peckham, a routine journey he had made countless times, but...
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Chapter 3The Body in the Library: Reading the Locked Room in Anna Katherine Green’s The Filigree Ball

Cook, Michael

Pages: 43 –61

[It is an iconic moment. Mary the housemaid enters the library and draws back the curtains to reveal the body of a blonde stretched out on the carpet. The Bantrys, hapless owners of Gossington Hall in Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library (1942), have no idea who she is or how she got there....
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Chapter 4G. K. Chesterton’s Enclosure of Orthodoxy in ‘The Wrong Shape’

Cook, Michael

Pages: 62 –84

[Ellery Queen, in his survey of early detective fiction, was moved to describe Chesterton’s The Innocence of Father Brown (1911), his first collection of such stories, as the ‘miracle book’.2 There is just the faintest tinge of irony in this statement; this first set of clerical mysteries do...
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Chapter 5The Hollow Text: Illusion as Theme in John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man

Cook, Michael

Pages: 85 –111

[Edward D. Hoch, a critic and prolific writer of locked room mysteries, claimed in 1981 that ‘the locked room story has a long and noble history, going back to Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”’.2 In the period after the First World War the genre began to see a return to the notion in Poe’s...
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Chapter 6Jorge Luis Borges and the Labyrinth of Detection

Cook, Michael

Pages: 112 –133

[When Jorge Luis Borges wrote the first of three detective stories in 1941, ‘The Garden of Forking Paths’, he did so as part of a wider initiative to mark the centenary of the publication of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’. This year also saw the inaugural edition of Ellery Queen’s Mystery...
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Chapter 7The Question is the Writer Himself: Paul Auster’s Locked Room in City of Glass

Cook, Michael

Pages: 134 –151

[Paul Auster’s The New York Trilogy — originally published as three separate novels, City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986) — are works where the ultimate nightmares for detective fiction come true. These are stories where unexplained absences and strange disappearances...
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Chapter 8The Narrative of Enclosure

Cook, Michael

Pages: 152 –172

[I have, during the course of this study, argued that the concept of enclosure should be recognized as having a profound effect on detective fiction. Much of the reason for this is directly attributable to the locked room mystery, and in particular to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’; its dual...

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