Detective Stories and Discovering the Truth

More than any other literary genre, the detective story deals with discovering the truth. Implicit in classic detective literature is a twin assumption: that the truth exists and that it can be discovered. The world is perceived to be rational; the riddle of the murder is only seemingly mysterious. Aided by logical reasoning, the detective is capable of uncovering the chain of causes and effects, discovering the truth, and thereby re-establishing a world of order and logic. In the American school of hard-boiled detective fiction, truth is a more liquid commodity, with the detective's intervention per se serving to veer the investigation from its original course. Alternatively, the postmodern detective story uses the basic format of the genre in its quest to reveal the irony underlying its basic assumption - that the truth does not exist, cannot be known or is, simply, irrelevant.