18th and 19th Century
This author wrote A Case of Identity featuring detective Sherlock Holmes
Who is Arthur Conan Doyle?
This famous Belgian detective investigates the murder aboard the Orient Express.
Who is Hercule Poirot?
This author created Easy Rawlins, one of the most famous Black detectives in modern American fiction.
Who is Walter Mosley?
After WWII, this subgenre emerged, focusing on teamwork, realism, and everyday policing.
What is the police procedural?
This British author, known as the “Queen of Crime,” wrote Murder on the Orient Express in 1934.
Who is Agatha Christie?
Sherlock Holmes is famous for solving cases using this kind of thinking.
What is logical or rational deduction?
In this era, what crime became essential to the plot?
What is murder?
In Mosley’s fiction, this serves a double purpose — authentic dialogue and a form of linguistic resistance.
What are Black vernaculars?
In postwar British crime fiction, this new type of criminal — often psychologically complex and motivated by obsession — became a central figure.
What is the serial killer?
Hercule Poirot’s investigations rely on logic, detail, and reasoning, rather than emotion or violence. What type of detection is this?
What is rational detection?
This was a harsh legal system punished even minor crimes with death
What is the Bloody Code?
Golden Age stories like Christie’s often end with the exposure of the killer and the return of stability. What is this called?
What is restoring social order?
This concept, defined by W.E.B. Du Bois, describes the feeling of looking at oneself through the eyes of others — a major theme in Mosley’s detective fiction.
What is double-consciousness?
Martin Priestman notes that postwar crime fiction began to take these kinds of detectives more seriously.
What is middle-ranking or blue collar police detectives?
Christie loosely based the Armstrong kidnapping subplot on this real-life American case that gripped the world in the 1930s.
What is the Lindbergh baby kidnapping case?
In novels like Moll Flanders, justice often depends on confession or fate, not investigation. What key figure is missing from these stories?
What is the detective figure?
This 'unlikely' tendency of solving a case disappeared during the Golden Age.
What is coincidence?
In Devil in a Blue Dress, Easy often listens to jazz or uses casual speech to express resilience. These are examples of what Soitos calls ____.
What are blues idioms or expressive arts?
Training Day and postwar British fiction, like Rebus, both blur the line between justice and crime. What shared theme do they explore?
What is the corruption or fallibility of the police?
In Murder on the Orient Express, the train’s confined space represents this classic Golden Age convention.
What is the closed-circle or locked-room mystery?
Stephen Knight describes the detective as this kind of “agent,” offering logic and reassurance to a confused society.
What is an agent of consolation?
The “Golden Age” of detective fiction is usually considered to fall between these two wars.
What are World War I and World War II?
In Mosley’s work, Black detectives often “carve out a small slice of the good life for themselves, and often fail.” This observation comes from this critic.
Who is Andrew Pepper?
This Scottish detective, created by Ian Rankin, represents the postwar move toward realistic officers who confront moral and institutional decay.
Who is Rebus?
The train route in Murder on the Orient Express connects two famous European cities. Name them.
What are Istanbul (then Constantinople) and Calais (or Paris)?