city of the dead a claire dewitt mystery

Poe’s master logician became the blueprint for every other classic or “cozy” detective written since, from Sherlock Holmes to Hercule Poirot to Lord Peter Wimsey. The method by which Dupin solves the crimes in his stories, which Poe called “ratiocination,” suggests that a sufficiently brilliant mind can get to the truth of any problem through a series of purely logical reasonings (whether that logic be deductive or inductive or abductive or superconductive or whatever). Auguste Dupin, widely acknowledged to be fiction’s first detective, is the ultimate product of two centuries of Enlightenment-era love of reason.

English-language detective fiction was born and raised in an increasingly scientific and rational age. The epistemology we glimpse in mystery stories is one of the many reasons they are so culturally important. These character-centered mysteries feature some of the most engrossing, evocative prose I’ve read in contemporary mystery fiction, but my purpose here isn’t simply to recommend them (though I do), but rather to observe how the Claire DeWitt novels illuminate an important aspect of detective fiction: every detective story contains within it a theory of what truth is and how we can grasp it-or an “epistemology,” I’ll say, just to feel like I’m getting my money’s worth out of that liberal-arts degree. The most recent Claire DeWitt novel, The Infinite Blacktop, came out last year, preceded by Claire DeWitt and the Bohemian Highway (2013) and Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead (2011). The book serves as something between a field manual and a spiritual text for Claire DeWitt, the PI created by author Sara Gran. This admonition comes from Détection by Jacques Silette, a book that joins a grand tradition of fascinating texts-within-texts, volumes that you long to pluck from some dusty shelf and peruse but cannot. If we do not put it first and foremost, always, there is no point in carrying on, in detection or in life. Janet HutchingsĪbove all, the inner knowing of the detective trumps every piece of evidence, every clue, every rational assumption. It’s evident from this post that he has extensive knowledge of the crime-fiction genre, past and present. Currently a Chicago-area resident, Chad is using his free time to pursue an M.A. He’s also written several plays that have been performed at theater companies around the country and had a creative nonfiction piece published in the literary journal Lunch Ticket. He makes his EQMM debut in our current issue, May/June 2019, with the story “The Smoking Bandit of Lakeside Terrace.” Previously, he had a paid fiction publication in the literary journal From the Depths. In the days when EQMM had a Department of Second Stories, legal-aid attorney Chad Baker would have qualified.

City of the dead a claire dewitt mystery