Whodunnit ? Why ? How ? And of course, where ? Here is the oath, composed by G. K. Chesterton, of membership in the famous British Detection Club: "Do you promise that your detectives shall well and truly detect the crimes presented to them using those wits which it may please you to bestow upon them and not placing reliance on nor making use of Divine Revelation, Feminine Intuition, Mumbo Jumbo, Jiggery-Pokery, Coincidence, or Act of God?" There are many variations in crime fiction, but the following are essential to most: a crime to be solved, the sleuth-hero, a dénouement, dangerous situations, and a detailed, plausible setting.

We will look at how successfully recent crime fiction has stuck to the rules and been faithful to the oath, along with how our sleuth-heroes and the locations have evolved in recent years.
We will compare and contrast crimes, sleuths, settings and situations; and do some detecting ourselves.
We will work on authors such as Cara Black, Michael Connolly, Lee Child, Donna Leon, Mary Higgins Clark, Alexander McCall Smith and Kathy Reichs, look at movies such as Blood Work, Fargo, The Actor, L.A. Confidential, Chinatown, and The Pink Panther, and TV series such as Starsky and Hutch, Murder She Wrote, Jonathan Creek, P.D.James, Inspector Morse and The Singing Detective. You will be required to immerse yourself in a world of mystery in order to bring extracts from these texts off the page.

Course requirements include: some reading, a touch of writing, a soupçon of acting, role-plays, presentations, and, of course, a taste for the mysterious, the macabre, and the mind-boggling.

Dernière mise à jour : lundi 2 avril 2012