The American Gothic in Detective Fiction

In this study, Keli Masten advocates for a new approach to the study of popular fiction in the United States, positioning the detective story as an offshoot of the American Gothic and grounding its conflict in the social anxieties surrounding race, class, and gender in the US.

With deep roots in regional American Gothic literary traditions, detective fiction serves as a source of both macabre entertainment and a cultural critique of corruption and the abuse of power in the United States. Weaving together familiar elements like hostile environments, extreme jeopardy, and intuitive investigators, Masten contests that the way authors draw from multiple genres in American Gothic detective mysteries allows them to examine how the struggles between civility and savagery, authenticity and pretense, and order and chaos have evolved in response to regional American social values and concerns.

Across five chapters, Dark Logic features an influential representative author--Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Allan Poe, Anna Katharine Green, Mark Twain, and Dashiell Hammett--and offers unique regional perspectives on transgressive crimes and their disentanglement. Readers will not only gain a deeper understanding of gothic detective fiction, but of how these stories serve as a dialogue between the society which created them and the society which consumes them, targeting the values and anxieties of American culture and preventing its people from achieving the tranquillity they struggle to impose.