A charter to commit the crime once more

On crimes and clues, continued

I begin with Northrop Frye, from Anatomy of Criticism, placing the “detective story” among his “Theory of Modes”:

The fact that we are now in an ironic phase of literature largely accounts for the popularity of the detective story, the formula of how a man-hunter locates a pharmakos and gets rid of him. The detective story begins in the Sherlock Holmes p…