Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder (Paperback)

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mass Art as Experimental Storytelling
Part I
1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism
2. Making Confusion Satisfactory: Modernism and Other Mysteries
3. Churn and Consolidation: The 1940s and After
Part II
4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot: The Taste of the Construction
5. Before the Fact: The Psychological Thriller
6. Dark and Full of Blood: Hard-Boiled Detection
7. The 1940s: Mysteries in Crossover Culture
8. The 1940s: The Problem of Other Minds, or Just One
Part III
9. The Great Detective Rewritten: Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout
10. Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive: Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain
11. Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine
12. Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles
13. Gone Girls: The New Domestic Thriller
Conclusion: The Power of Limits
Notes
Index