Detecting Texts : Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism

Although readers of detective fiction ordinarily expect to learn the mystery's solution at the end, there is another kind of detective story -- whose history encompasses writers as diverse as Poe, Borges, Robbe-Grillet, Auster, and Stephen King -- that ends with a question rather than an answer.

The detective not only fails to solve the crime, but also confronts insoluble mysteries of interpretation and identity.

As the contributors to Detecting Texts contend, such stories belong to a distinct genre, the metaphysical detective story, in which the detective hero's inability to interpret the mystery inevitably casts doubt on the reader's similar attempt to make sense of the text and the world.