Plots and Devices

Abstract

Crime fiction is known as the plot-driven genre, par excellence, which has often excluded crime fiction from a place on the academic curriculum because the question “what happened?” is considered only a superficial reading of a text (Milhorn, 2006, Writing Genre Fiction: A Guide to the Craft). As a methodology invested in explicating ways of communicating “what happened,” narrative theory provides a productive avenue for attending to crime fiction plots and genre devices. Using core concepts applied to crime fiction by narrative theory, “Plots and Devices” offers strategies to enrich class discussions of crime fiction plots, demonstrating their complexity in the genre and their value to literary studies generally.