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Perplexing Plots
Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder
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Nominated, 2024 Edgar Allan Poe Award in the category of best critical/biographical, Mystery Writers of America
Shortlisted, 2024 Agatha Awards - Best Mystery Nonfiction, Malice Domestic
Posthumous Winner - 2023 IFCA Book Prize, International Crime Fiction Association
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.
About the Author:
David Bordwell is the Jacques Ledoux Professor Emeritus of Film Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His many books include, most recently, Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (2017), as well as the widely used textbook Film Art: An Introduction (twelfth edition, 2020). He cohosts the “Observations on Film Art” series of video essays on the Criterion Channel.
Press Reviews:
David Bordwell has a brain I envy, one that makes connections and associations about books, film, and the arts that are breathtakingly unorthodox and exactly correct. I learned so much from reading Perplexing Plots about how crime narratives are situated in the larger literary and cinema spheres, and rejoiced in how much pleasure Bordwell's criticism provided, once more and always. Sarah Weinman, author of Scoundrel: How a Convicted Murderer Persuaded the Women Who Loved Him, the Conservative Establishment, and the Courts to Set Him Free
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 Contexts
Perplexing 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 Creators
Bordwell'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 Film
Perplexing 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. New Review of Film and Television Studies
Wildly illuminating. The Film Stage
A highly recommended title. Popcultureshelf.com
Like the great detectives he writes about, Bordwell shows off his encyclopedic knowledge and his dazzling analytic powers, laying out his case with an abundance of evidence. . . . Highly recommended. Choice Reviews
Bordwell, America’s finest film scholar, has connected the dots between movies and popular detective stories . . . for a thrilling X-ray of genre. Phillip Lopate, The Millions
Highly recommended. Journal of Popular Culture
[A] brilliant book . . . Bordwell has been one of the great exponents of precise formal analysis for whom methods of narration are never to be taken for granted. His writing is at once impeccably scholarly and acutely sensitive to the human use of stories and the part they play in people’s lives . . . I was exhilarated by Bordwell’s multiple demonstrations of the pleasures of deflection and distraction, shapely detours and sidewise turns, in the service of what he calls the "playful experience of form." Geoffrey O’Brien, New York Review of Books
A deeply researched dive into the history of crime fiction on the page and on the screen. It’s a perfect capper to a career that revelled in the intricate, puzzle-like nature of film construction—the way that shots, cuts, sounds, and images clue us in to deeper patterns of meaning. Justin Chang, The New Yorker
See the publisher website: Columbia University Press
> From the same author:
Film History (2021)
An Introduction
by Kristin Thompson, David Bordwell and Jeff Smith
Subject: History of Cinema
Reinventing Hollywood (2017)
How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling
Subject: History of Cinema
The Classical Hollywood Cinema (2015)
Film Style and Mode of Production to 1960
Minding Movies (2011)
Observations on the Art, Craft, and Business of Filmmaking
by David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson
Subject: General
> On a related topic:
Screening Sherlock (2025)
A Cultural History of the Great Detective on Film and Television
Watching the Cops (2023)
Essays on Police and Policing in 21st Century Film and Television
Dir. Marcus K. Harmes, Barbara Harmes and Meredith A. Harmes
Encyclopedia of Weird Detectives (2019)
Supernatural and Paranormal Elements in Novels, Pulps, Comics, Film, Television, Games and Other Media
by Paul Green
Sherlock Holmes Faq (2015)
All That's Left to Know About the World's Greatest Private Detective
by Dave Thomson
Gender and the Modern Sherlock Holmes (2015)
Essays on Film and Television Adaptations Since 2009
Dir. Nadine Farghaly
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