Fellow GAD blogger Noah Stewart has in the past talked about intertextuality in detective fiction, part of which is how each mystery’s solution feeds into a general awareness of all other mysteries and their solutions.  Essentially, reading detective fiction is then a game: has the author been able to mislead you about the solution?  And the more you read, the harder this game becomes for these authors, especially as many of them wrote their books close to a century ago and so don’t really get the right of response where later developments in the field are concerned.  The best GAD plots stand up to all subsequent attempts to innovate, and remain surprising.

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