The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American & Italian Fiction

"Tani's dissertation is the most stun­ningly original and intelligent I have encountered in 25years of teaching," wrote the late novelist John Gardner. Tani's argument says that the "mys­tery story as written by Hammett and others and touted by the French existen­tialists led to a new kind of novel and the old-style mystery, as written by, for ex­ample, Agatha Christie, seemed a liter­ary dead end--a conservative if not reac­tionary game. In recent years, Tani shows, the seeming dead end has led to the most important literary movement now visible: the ironic intellectual fic­tion of people ranging from Borges and Barth to Calvino, and he proves that the spearhead of this movement is Italian fiction as influenced by American mys­tery fiction. At first glance, the argu­ment seems outrageous. The brilliance of Tani's thesis--besides the original outrageous idea--is that he solidly and systematically makes his case."