Introduction: The Detective Novel and the Textual Crisis

The introduction argues that allusion is a central part of the Golden Age detective novel, and should be read as a reaction to a crisis in the shared textual foundation constituted by Shakespeare and the Bible. This chapter reviews previous scholarship on allusion in the detective novel, elaborates the idea that the texts of Shakespeare and the Bible had come to seem unstable and troubled by the mid-twentieth century, and connects this to the knotty and difficult allusions found in detective fiction. It goes on to outline a major argument of this study: that the midcentury allusive tendency was exemplified in the novels of Dorothy L. Sayers, and that later novelists exercised the same allusive habit on Sayers’ works.