Postmodern Anti-Detective Fictions: A brief analysis in view of Paul Auster’s “City of Glass”, Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”, and Borges’ “Death and the Compass”

This book aims at analyzing the 'metaphysical detective story', a genre that twists and turns the well-wrought conventions of the typical Holmesian detective stories and slyly leaves philosophical questionings of 'reality', 'truth', 'self' and 'identity' in the fabric of the text. The writer observes curious results when postmodernism with its characteristic indeterminacy and chaos is applied on to a genre that hinges on certainty and order. In the three selected texts the detectives Daniel Quinn (in "City of Glass"), Christopher Boone (in "The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time”) and Erik Lonnrot (in “Death and the Compass”) are caught in a perilous world and the case as well as the story is left unfinished. The role of the detective is parodied. This book reveals that these queer consequences raise deeper philosophical questions and raises, at the same time, the detective genre as a whole, from its 'popular' image to an 'avant garde' form of art.