Narratives of Enclosure in Detective Fiction

The locked room has long fascinated readers of detective fiction with its images of entrapment and entombment. Narratives of Enclosure is the first full length critical study of the Locked Room Mystery, tracing its origins in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', the first detective story, up to the modern era. Looking beyond the facade of the impossible crime to examine stories by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and Paul Auster,...
More Description

The locked room has long fascinated readers of detective fiction with its images of entrapment and entombment. Narratives of Enclosure is the first full length critical study of the Locked Room Mystery, tracing its origins in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', the first detective story, up to the modern era. Looking beyond the facade of the impossible crime to examine stories by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and Paul Auster, Michael Cook uses critical and thematic contexts to show how the idea of enclosure has informed detective fiction at every stage in its history. Whether in the narrative itself, as in John Dickson Carr's classic Golden Age novel The Hollow Man, or the psychological relationship with physical environments in Dickens's 'The Signalman', the metaphor of the locked room casts a long shadow on the wider genre.