Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder
Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as "difficult" become familiar to audiences?
In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another's work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.Earn by promoting books
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My favorite of David Bordwell's many important books, this is an engrossing tour of crime and mystery storytelling in literature high and low, with asides on film, theater, and other media. I'm in awe of its encyclopedic reach, erudition, analytic brilliance, clarity, and wit. It's wonderfully instructive and fun.
--James Naremore, author of More than Night: Film Noir in Its ContextsPerplexing Plots is the most illuminating study of narrative technique that I've read. David Bordwell's investigation of popular storytelling benefits from his exceptional breadth of knowledge and analytic skills. But what is especially impressive is his ability to present information and insights so persuasively--and so readably. An admirable achievement.
--Martin Edwards, author of The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their CreatorsBordwell's is the first-ever-historical poetics of cross-media storytelling in which inventions and conventions, the new and the old, the brainy and the brainless are considered not as successive stages of, as Mandelstam called it, a "boring bearded development," but as complementary components of a creative symbiosis.
--Yuri Tsivian, author of Approaches to Carpalistics: Movement and Gesture in Art, Literature and FilmPerplexing Plots is a must. Rare is scholasticism this engaging -- you'll put it down with more than a handful of authors to discover, not to mention the movies adapted from them.-- "Boulder Weekly"
Bordwell's work is exceptionally well-researched and offers fascinating examinations of plot devices, patterns, and structure in crime fiction. This book is sure to be enjoyed by fans of crime fiction and film noir.-- "Hometowns to Hollywood"
[Bordwell's] voluminous work on film underpins his sensitivity to questions of narrative voice, points of view and misdirection in novel-writing. Better yet, his writing radiates an enthusiasm that will please both genre fans and literary scholars. The book is readable and very entertaining.-- "Sight and Sound"
An engaging study of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century storytellers across literature, film, radio, and stage have coaxed audiences along as collaborators in the narrative process . . . reading Perplexing Plots is a hell of a lot of fun.-- "Noir City Magazine"
[A] terrific book.--Michael Dirda "Washington Post"
Perplexing Plots is unfailingly rich and fascinating, and Bordwell's exegeses on popular narrative will be central to studies of the concept far into the future.--Harrison Whitaker "New Review of Film and Television Studies"
