[PW] Fiction Plotted Backwards

[Dennis Lien]

At 06:23 PM 11/29/2007, you wrote:

>I don't mean mysteries, of course, where the detective is presented a
>problem and then unravels it through the course of his or her investigation.
>That's a pretty normal way mysteries are constructed.  I mean where the
>viewer or reader sees the normally last scene first, and the first scene
>last.
>
>And is there a name for this style of writing?


Among mysteries, there is the genre of "inverted detective stories" in
which the reader first follows the action of the murderer (or whatever)
in commiting the crime, usually seemingly "perfect," and only after that
follows the action of the detective who after all does unravel it.  The
subgenre is usually associated first with R. Austin Freeman's 1912
collection THE SINGING BONE; another prolific author at short story
length who uses the model routinely is Roy Vickers in his "Department
of Dead Ends" series, which I like a lot (a lot more than Freeman, for
starters).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inverted_detective_story

In sf, there's a small subgenre of "time runs backward" novels which
might also be of interest; Martin Amis' TIME'S ARROW and Philip K.
Dick's COUNTERCLOCK WORLD are a couple of novel-length examples.
Some of the stories cited in this list qualify thus:

http://www.sff.net/people/richard.horton/timecon.htm


Dennis Lien / U of Minnesota Libraries // d-lien at umn.edu