BOOK DATA David Bordwell, Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder. New York: Columbia University Press, 2023. $130.00 hardcover; $32.00 paper. 491 pages.
In his hefty new tome, Perplexing Plots: Popular Storytelling and the Poetics of Murder, veteran film scholar David Bordwell focuses on more than a century of crime writing and how it has affected both literature and film. This book feels like a successor to his Reinventing Hollywood: How 1940s Filmmakers Changed Movie Storytelling (University of Chicago Press, 2017), which includes sections linking film structures to literary structures. The new book starts with a historical overview of literary developments from the first half of the twentieth century (part 1); it then looks at three dominant mystery structures: whodunit, psychological thriller, and hard-boiled (part 2); and finally it examines writing and film throughout the rest of the twentieth century and the first two decades of...