The Encluesiast

In my early twenties, one of the paths I idly contemplated was to become a scholar of mystery fiction. This idea was easily discarded, however, because I knew that the kind of scholarship I would want to do is completely alien to what academia favors (then and now). I would have combined three largely obsolete critical paradigms: structuralism, formalism, and reader response theory. I wanted to write a history of misdirection in Golden Age mystery novels and what they reveal about human psychology—general principles that are part of everyday human cognition, but also ones formed specifically through the expectations manufactured by literary conventions.

Many years later (for reasons I will explain in a future post) I decided to try my hand at writing mysteries. My first story “Murder Under Sedation” was published in the March/April 2024 issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine. (It went on to be nominated by the Mystery Writers of America for the 2025 Robert L. Fish Memorial Award.) Editor Janet Hutchings gave me an opportunity to write a post for the magazine’s blog Something Is Going to Happen.

I chose to write about what I consider to be the greatest mystery short story of all time: John Dickson Carr’s “The House in Goblin Wood” (published under the pseudonym Carter Dickson). (My opinion that this is the greatest mystery short story of all time is shared by mystery blogger Puzzle Doctor. His posts on this story may be found here.) 

The resulting post, “The Trail of Breadcrumbs out of Goblin Wood,” may be found here. It was my first time writing an actual analysis of a mystery.  Having written it, I realized that I was a fool to ever think that because I would not pursue creating structural analyses of mysteries as a profession, I could not continue to pursue it as a hobby.

Consider that analysis a taste of things to come. (Most subsequent analyses will be longer and more detailed…)