The "whodunit" Versus The "inverted Detective Story"
A majority of detective stories follow the "whodunit" format. The events of the crime and the subsequent events of the investigation are presented so that the reader is only provided clues from which the identity of the perpetrator of the crime may be deduced. The solution is not revealed until the final pages of the book.
In an inverted detective story, the commission of the crime, and usually also the identity of the perpetrator, is shown or described at the beginning. The remainder of the story then describes the subsequent investigation. Instead, the "puzzle" presented to the reader is discovering the clues and evidence that the perpetrator left behind.
Read more about this topic: Detective Fiction
Famous quotes containing the words detective story, inverted, detective and/or story:
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“Can they never tell
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The whole hideous inverted childhood? Well,
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—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“In the towns I am tracked by phantoms having weird detective ways—”
—Thomas Hardy (1840–1928)
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—W. Somerset Maugham (1874–1966)