Perplexing plots: popular storytelling and the poetics of murder

Introduction: mass art as experimental storytelling

Part I

The art novel meets 1910s formalism

Making confusion satisfactory: modernism and other mysteries

Churn and consolidation: the 1940s and after

Part II

The Golden Age puzzle plot: the taste of the construction

Before the fact: the psychological thriller

Dark and full of blood: hard-boiled detection

The 1940s: mysteries in crossover culture

The 1940s: the problem of other minds, or just one

Part III

The Great Detective rewritten: Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout

Viewpoints, narrow and expansive: Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain

Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark machine

Tarantino, twists, and the persistence of puzzles

Gone girls: the new domestic thriller

Conclusion: the power of limits.