

For the sequence of events:Ī standard detective story usually begins at step three.


The detective story is usually one inversion: the story of the detective works backwards from the result of the crime to its committing. If your response is “not ALL detective stories”, as if that invalidates the arguments, well…. I’m going to make some generalizations here about how detective stories work, a mashup of ideas I encountered in a college class and my own observations. In my town library’s children’s section, they were side-by-side on a low shelf without any indication that the board between them was a gendered divide I was not supposed to cross. As a child I read stacks of both Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew books.
