Stern on Detective Fiction

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Detective Fiction in the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, ed. Robert Spoo and Simon Stern (London: Elgar, 2025), 149-51.

This is a preprint draft of a contribution to the Elgar Concise Encyclopedia of Law and Literature, ed. Robert Spoo and Simon Stern (London: Elgar, 2025), 149-51. To quote or cite, please consult the published version.] [DOI: https://www.elgaronline.com/display/book/9781803925912/ch39.xml] Abstract: Detective fiction has been one of the most fruitful genres for studying the relations between law and literature, because it offers so many opportunities for examining fictional treatments of legal actors, criminal procedure, and jurisprudential thought. Recent research has built on these well-established connections to explore questions about the case form, scientific and epistemological aspects of forensic evidence and technology, and the problems of analyzing and representing intention. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's stories about Sherlock Holmes provide an especially useful means of examining these issues, because the period in which Doyle was writing-the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries-witnessed a series of important changes in all these areas.

Download the essay from SSRN at the link.