The Adventure of the Speckled Band and Other Stories of Sherl... by Arthur Conan Doyle

This observation also applies to much criticism of crime fiction, which has tended to treat the genre. In his foreword to Kristin Ross’ The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune, Terry Eagleton comments that space “has proved of far less glamorous appeal to radical theorists than the apparently more dynamic, exhilarating notions of narrative and history” (Eagleton 2008: xii). It demonstrates that various permutations of murder fiction make for very different narrative texture and reading experiences. Covering the forms that murder fiction takes, this study includes analyses of texts by Doyle Christie Sayers Hammett Chandler Highsmith Jim Thompson Thomas Harris and others. Mystery assures us that motives exist for both words and deeds. Built in a faith of foundations, it insists upon the solidity of social life, the validity of social conventions and the sanctity of signs. takes place in a centered world, one whose most distinctive characteristic is motivation (of behaviour and signs). Parts One and Two distinguish between mystery and detective in terms of their narrative worlds and their treatment of the sign.

It attempts to express their interrelations, to define their differences, and to explain why these subgenres take the forms they do. This text identifies three basic fictional forms dealing with murder and detection - mystery, detective and crime fiction. Hans Robert Jauss's ideas about genre and other perspectives on reimagining Holmes help contextualize the strategies used by participants, while Gadamer's conception of the festive enables insights into the communal processes of creation and understanding. This process is explored in the context of two playful writing workshops in which participants passed the opening of a piece of Holmesian fiction they had written to another participant to continue, before sharing the results with the group. Peter Hühn's work on the detective as reader and writer is extended in relation to the work of understanding and creation carried out by authors who add new works to the genre of Holmesian fiction. Through the agency of Dr Watson, the reader is invited to join the game and attempt to work out the solution to the mystery as the narrative unfolds before them.

Holmes is therefore a creative and scientific detective, one who loses himself in the game of detection in order to find himself in the search for truth in the wider world. Chesterton refers to as the poetry of the modern world. The work of Hans-Georg Gadamer enables Holmes's methods to be seen as both playful and creative as he seeks to understand what G. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories involve a hermeneutic game in which Holmes attempts to uncover the mystery of unsolved crime.

The Adventure of the Speckled Band and Other Stories of Sherl... by Arthur Conan Doyle