Murder most fair

"At the very beginning of mystery criticism, Thomas De Quincey asks the question critics are still trying to answer: why should mystery appeal? Given the fact that it does, what are its conventions, forms, and necessary formal features? How significant are such stories by comparison with what we think of as "literature"? These questions organize Murder Most Fair, which begins with the question of form.

Part of the argument is that the convention of mystery - the features that explain its appeal - are both more foundational than previously thought (the hard-boiled formula supposedly invented in twentieth-century America shows up in the earliest detective fiction, for example) and more labile, undergoing profound transformation from one generation of fiction to another. The treatment of formal features is historical."--BOOK JACKET.