This book establishes the genealogy of a subgenre of crime fiction that Antoine Dechêne calls the metacognitive mystery tale. It delineates a corpus of texts presenting 'unreadable' mysteries which, under the deceptively monolithic appearance of subverting traditional detective story conventions, offer a multiplicity of motifs ¿ the overwhelming presence of chance, the unfulfilled quest for knowledge, the urban stroller lost in a labyrinthine text ¿ that generate a vast array of epistemological and ontological uncertainties. Analysing the works of a wide variety of authors, including Edgar Allan Poe, Jorge Luis Borges, and Henry James, this book is vital reading for scholars of detective fiction.

Antoine Dechêne holds a PhD from the Université de Liège, Belgium. His research deals with all aspects of the metaphysical detective story in the USA and in France. He is co-editor with Michel Delville of the first volume dedicated to the genre in French: Le Thriller métaphysique d'Edgar Allan Poe à nos jours (2016). 

I. The Problem of Knowledge.- 1. From the Metaphysical Detective Story to the Metacognitive Mystery Tale.- 2. Enigmas of the Sublime and the Grotesque.- II. From the flâneur to the Stalker.- 3. Edgar Allan Poe's "The Man of the Crowd".- 4. Jorge Luis Borges's Textual Labyrinths.- 5. Paul Auster's The New York Trilogy.- III The Grotesque.- 6. Herman Melville's "Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street".- 7. Samuel Beckett's Molloy.- 8. Roberto Bolaño's Monsieur Pain.- IV. The Sublime.- 9. Henry James's "The Figure in the Carpet".-10. Horacio Quiroga's "The Pursued".- V. In Lieu of a Conclusion: Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Wakefield".