SOURCE: Tani, Stefano. “The Metafictional Anti-Detective Novel.” In The Doomed Detective: The Contribution of the Detective Novel to Postmodern American and Italian Fiction, pp. 113-47. Carbondale, Ill.: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984.

In the following essay, Tani provides an overview of the metafictional anti-detective novel and reviews the major works of the sub-genre.

Metafictional anti-detective novels belong only in a general way to anti-detective fiction. In innovative anti-detective fiction the stress was on social criticism and on a solution without justice; in the deconstructive category I emphasized the nonsolution, the ambiguous perception of reality from the point of view of the detective, the sense of conspiracy and satanism. The characteristics of the second kind are, in comparison with the first, more subjective, bordering on the irrational. The anti-detective game gets more sophisticated and less preoccupied with reality (justice, social criticism) and objectivity (solution) as we proceed from one category...