The Idea of Education in Golden Age Detective Fiction by Dalrymple, Roger; Green, Andrew;

Short description:

This book presents an exploration of how Golden Age detective fiction encounters educational ideas, particularly those forged by the transformative educational policymaking of the interwar period.

Long description:

This book presents an exploration of how Golden Age detective fiction encounters educational ideas, particularly those forged by the transformative educational policymaking of the interwar period.

Charting the educational policy and provision of the era, and referring to works by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edmund Crispin and others, this book explores the educational capacity and agency of literary detectives, the learning spaces of the genre and the kinds of knowledge that are made available to inquirers both inside and outside the text. It is argued that the genre explores a range of contemporaneous propositions on the balance between academic curriculum and practicum, length of school life and the value of lifelong learning.  This book’s closing chapter considers the continuing pedagogic value for contemporary classrooms of engaging with the genre as a rich discursive and imaginative space for exploring educational ideas.

Framing Golden Age detective fiction as a genre profoundly concerned with learning, this book will be highly relevant reading for academics, postgraduate students and scholars involved in the fields of English language arts, twentieth-century literature and the theories of learning more broadly. Those interested in detective fiction and interdisciplinary literary studies will also find the volume of interest.

'A well-researched and thoughtfully presented study of a fascinating area of vintage mystery fiction.'

Martin Edwards, author of The Life of Crime and the Rachel Savernake mysteries.

'This book is an insightful exploration of how education and Golden Age detective fiction have co-constructed each other. Often dismissed as lacking the qualities of serious literature, detective fiction, the authors argue, is a critical site for examining serious educational issues—something scholars have largely ignored. … detective fiction engages readers in the very ideas of learning. The authors assert that the educational capacity and agency of the detective […] represents “a crucial point of mirroring and identification for the reader who is engaged in a parallel process of decoding the text and the mystery it depicts” (p. 4). The book offers a delightful range of examples, featuring well-known and lesser-known authors, to make a valid case for the role and pedagogic use of detective fiction in education.'

K. Wein, University of Wisconsin, Platteville

Table of Contents:

Introduction  1.  Learning in the Age of Sleuthing  2.  Detective as learner and teacher  3.  The learning spaces of Golden Age Detective Fiction  4.  The limits of detective learning  5. Detective fiction in education