Charles Brownson: 3 books

An old professor of intellectual history inexplicably commits suicide. As a result, his doctoral student has to abandon his research, a young professor loses her job, a marriage falls apart and the wife has a breakdown, a community of friends disintegrates. And yet, there are small moments of understanding and compassion, and all is not lost.

On Sunday mornings in bed a long-married couple tell each other stories. One of them starts on a detective story, and when the other takes it up the story gets complicated by a competition. Each one leaves it after their turn with the plot in a condition apparently impossible to continue. In the course...

This book begins with a history of the detective genre, coextensive with the novel itself, identifying the attitudes and institutions needed for the genre to emerge in its mature form around 1880. The theory of the genre is laid out along with its central theme of the getting and deployment of knowledge....