Formal Investigations: Aesthetic Style in Late-Victorian and Edwardian Detective Fiction

These essays explore the taxonomies and relationships between the aesthetic forms, styles, and methodologies of detective and crime fiction in the late-Victorian and Edwardian period. The influences on the genre’s artists are as varied as the era’s interests in scientific method, forensics, archaeology, medicine, and the paranormal. Yet the formalizing tendencies of the investigative process remain, and this volume examines the understanding of crime’s resolution as a stylistic imposition of structure on disorder.