The Detective and the Artist

<p> This book focuses on the distinctive role that artists have played in detective fiction--as detectives as villains and victims and as bystanders. With a few significant exceptions literary detectives have always identified themselves as essentially the deconstructors of the artful crimes of others. They may use various methods--ratiocinative scientific or hard-boiled--but they always unravel the threads that the villains have woven into deceptive covers for their crimes.</p><p> The detective does in the end produce a work of art: a narrative that explains everything that needs explanation. But the detective's moral work is often juxtaposed to the aesthetic work of the painters poets and writers that the detective encounters during an investigation. The author surveys this juxtaposition in works by important authors from the early development of the genre (Poe Conan Doyle) the golden age (Bentley Christie Sayers James et al.) and the hard-boiled era (Hammett Chandler Macdonald Spicer et al.).</p>