Bestsellers: Detective Fiction
MIT's Literature Department offers this seminar as one installment of its recurring Bestsellers course, which each semester examines popular books grouped by genre, theme, or style. The Fall 2006 topic is detective fiction, tracing how the genre developed and what made certain mysteries catch the popular imagination across different eras. Materials on OCW include the syllabus, a full reading list of primary detective novels and short stories, and assignment prompts used in the actual MIT classroom. The course asks students to read closely for narrative structure, character types like the detective and the criminal, and the genre's recurring devices such as clues and red herrings. There are no video lectures, but the syllabus and readings give a workable framework for running the course independently.