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A U.S. reaction to the cozy conventionality of British murder mysteries was the American hard-boiled school of crime writing of Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, and Mickey Spillane, among others.
Some representative examples of whodunits in chronological order
Finally, recent additions to the subgenre of the whodunit include the novels of Simon Brett, the Thackery Phin novels of John Sladek, Lawrence Block's The Burglar in the Library (1997), which is a spoof set in the present in an English-style country house, Kinky Friedman's Road Kill (1997), Ben Elton's Dead Famous (2001), and Gilbert Adair's The Act of Roger Murgatroyd (2006).
An important variation on the whodunit is the inverted detective story (also referred to as "howshecatchem") where the guilty party and the crime are openly revealed to the reader/audience and the story follows the investigator's efforts to find out the truth while the criminal attempts to prevent it. The Columbo TV movie series is the classic example of this kind of detective story (Law & Order: Criminal Intent also fits into this genre). This tradition dates back to the inverted detective stories of R Austin Freeman, and reached an apotheosis of sorts in Malice Aforethought written by Francis Iles (a pseudonym of Anthony Berkeley). In the same vein is Iles's Before the Fact (1932), which became the Hitchcock movie Suspicion. Today, these novels are seen as the predecessors of the psychological suspense novel (Patricia Highsmith's This Sweet Sickness, 1960; Simon Brett's A Shock to the System, 1984; Stephen Dobyns's The Church of Dead Girls, 1997; and many more).
Parody and spoofIn addition to standard humor, parody, spoof, and pastiche have had a long tradition within the field of crime fiction. (A pastiche is a piece of writing in which the style is patterned completely upon the original work and no parody or ridicule is involved. Examples are the Sherlock Holmes stories written by John Dickson Carr and Adrian Conan Doyle, and hundreds of similar works by such authors as E. B. Greenwood.) As for parody, the first Sherlock Holmes spoofs appeared shortly after Conan Doyle published his first stories. Similarly, there have been innumerable Agatha Christie send-ups. The idea is to exaggerate and mock the most noticeable features of the original and, by doing so, amuse especially those readers who are also familiar with that original. One of the earliest parodies of the whodunit genre in general is Englishman E.C. Bentley's (1875 - 1956) novel Trent's Last Case (1913), which introduced Philip Trent, a detective who gets everything wrong right from the start: Assigned to investigate the murder of English millionaire Sigsbee Manderson, who is found shot in the library of his country house, Trent makes his first major mistake when he falls head over heels in love with the main suspect. In the course of his investigation he jumps at the wrong clues, in his reasoning he carefully eliminates the wrong suspects, and finally he arrives at a conclusion concerning the identity of Manderson's murderer which turns out to be completely wrong (though Trent is not presented as a bumbler at all). At the end of the novel, the real perpetrator casually informs him during dinner that he/she has shot Manderson. These are Trent's final words to the murderer:
A more recent example of a spoof, which at the same time shows that the borderline between "serious" mystery (if there is any such thing) and its parody is necessarily blurred, is U.S. mystery writer Lawrence Block's (born 1938) novel The Burglar in the Library (1997). The burglar of the title is Bernie Rhodenbarr, who has booked a weekend at an English-style country house just to steal a signed, and therefore very valuable, first edition of Chandler's The Big Sleep, which he knows has been sitting there on one of the shelves for more than half a century. Alas, immediately after his arrival a dead body turns up in the library, the room is sealed off, and Rhodenbarr has to track down the murderer before he can enter the library again and start hunting for the precious book. Murder by Death is Neil Simon's spoof of many of the best-known whodunit sleuths. In the 1976 film, Sam Spade (from The Maltese Falcon) becomes Sam Diamond, Hercule Poirot becomes Milo Perrier, etc. The film makes particular fun of the relationship between each detective and his or her sidekick. The characters are all gathered in a large country house, given meaningless clues, and all of them fail to solve the mystery. Another example is the Lord Darcy stories by Randall Garrett. Despite their fantasy fiction setting, they are "straight" whodunits. However, the names of many of the supporting characters are puns, suggesting Garrett's friends, or the lead characters in other detective stories. Often, the personality of the character also reflects this. See also
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