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