Detective Fiction
Much to my surprise, the department chair has encouraged me (with no prompting, other than my enthusiastic participation in a discussion of the genre) to offer a 'Special Topics' course on detective fiction. I have not given any thought to particular chronological, geographical, or thematic parameters that would limit the scope of such a class, so for now, I'll just start brainstorming anything I can think of, as follows. I'm sure that these categories will shift as time goes by. Simply as a result of my own previous reading, these are fairly Anglo-centric works - even some of the Sister Fidelma novels are set in England - but even among Angl0-centric works, this list is not exactly comprehensive. Suggestions are welcome!
Early Works
Wilkie Collins
Edgar Allen Poe
Arthur Conan Doyle
John Buchan
Classic Golden Age - It's worth discussing the ways that even these authors 'break' the rules set by the likes of S. S. Van Dine.
Margery Allingham
Agatha Christie
Ngaio Marsh
Dorothy L. Sayers
More Recent Proponents
Colin Dexter
P. D. James
Ellis Peters, Inspector Felse
Josephine Tey - I associate Tey with the 1950s, but maybe I should actually be including her in the Golden Age category? Funny how I simply think of her in a different category.
Historical Detective Fiction
Laurie R. King, Mary Russell
Ellis Peters, Brother Cadfael
Peter Tremayne - knows more about early Irish law than about good writing....
English-language Works Set in Other Parts of the World
Colin Cotterill, Dr. Siri Paiboun investigating in Laos
Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee novels, which are based on an 18th-century detective novel from China.
Eliot Pattison, featuring a Chinese investigator whom we meet as a prisoner in Tibet