Winks, Robin, ed.
Detective Fiction: A Collection of Critical Essays
. New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1980.
Dorothy Sayers, W.H. Auden, and Edmund Wilson among others comment upon detective fiction. The conventions of the genre are considered; the history of its development is reviewed, and key works are given a formulaic analysis.
———, ed.
The Historian as a Detective
, Essays on Evidence. New York: Harper and Row, 1969.
The historian is shown to be like a detective. Sometimes he looks for the facts to support a solution; other times he uses evidence to form a conclusion.