The Double, the Labyrinth and the Locked Room

Traditional detective fiction celebrates the victory of order and reason that is associated with the sleuth over the chaos and irrationality associated with the crime mystery. Yet in spite of its apparent valorization of rationality, the detective genre has been associated, from its inception, with three paradoxical concepts-the double, the locked room, and the labyrinth. Rational thought relies on binary oppositions, such as truth and falsehood, appearance and reality, chaos and order. Paradoxes subvert customary distictions between truth and falsehood, suggesting that something can be true and false at the same time. This book explores detective fiction and film from the perspective of their entrenched metaphors of paradox. This new and intriguing angle yields fresh insights into a genre that has become one of the hallmarks of postmodernism.