Framing the Clue-Puzzle: The Paratextual Voice in Golden Age Detective Fiction

In Framing the Clue-Puzzle, Zi-Ling Yan examines a familiar but understudied aspect of detective fiction: the inclusion of paratexts typically associated with nonfiction into mystery narratives. Starting with the work of Gérard Genette and more contemporary critics of the paratext, Yan develops a theoretical position that draws upon Richard Walsh’s notion of fictionality, by which paratexts are viewed in Golden Age fiction as mimicking metaleptic functions. As such, they possess subtle framing capacities that escapes clear-cut agency; in many cases, what speaks is the paratextual voice, a site of enunciation obscured by the paratext’s formal associations. The core of the book develops this thesis, with individual chapters treating prefaces, footnotes, maps, floorplans, and a related set of problems—the intratext—as expressed in diagrammatic devices. Although paratexts of these types are clearly concentrated in the Golden Age clue-puzzle form, the conclusion examines moments in detective fiction’s trajectory (1862, 1934, and 1980) to demonstrate how three paratext-heavy novels point up draw attention to different regimes of knowledge underpinning the normative representation of abstractions like justice and meaning.