"Having long ago outgrown the confines of the English country house murder mystery, the detective has travelled widely, adapting himself to other cultures and genres. Contemporary critics have become increasingly fascinated by this versatility and by the diversity of detection itself. The nine excellent essays in Detecting Detection astutely consider the reasons for the detection plot's persistence and proliferation, exploring in detail the ways in which it has been transformed across cultures and incorporated in a variety of other narrative forms. They illuminate its ability to raise difficult questions about moral and ethical choices, guilt, political repression, personal and national trauma, witnessing, judgment and belief - and about 'the elements of the global mystery of the functioning of the world and society'." -- Lee Horsley, Reader in Literature and Culture, Lancaster University, UK