Detective Fiction and the Problem of Knowledge ― Perspectives on the Metacognitive Mystery Tale

This book establishes the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that Antoine Dechêne calls the metacognitive mystery tale. It delineates a corpus of texts presenting 'unreadable' mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs – the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text – that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Analysing the works of a wide variety of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry James, this book is vital reading for scholars of detective fiction.

Antoine Dechene holds a PhD from the Universite de Liege, Belgium. His research deals with all aspects of the metaphysical detective story in the USA and in France. He is co-editor with Michel Delville of the first volume dedicated to the genre in French: Le Thriller metaphysique d'Edgar Allan Poe a nos jours (2016).