David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how popular culture has evolved over the past century.

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.

Acknowledgments
Introduction: Mass Art as Experimental Storytelling
Part I
1. The Art Novel Meets 1910s Formalism
2. Making Confusion Satisfactory: Modernism and Other Mysteries
3. Churn and Consolidation: The 1940s and After
Part II
4. The Golden Age Puzzle Plot: The Taste of the Construction
5. Before the Fact: The Psychological Thriller
6. Dark and Full of Blood: Hard-Boiled Detection
7. The 1940s: Mysteries in Crossover Culture
8. The 1940s: The Problem of Other Minds, or Just One
Part III
9. The Great Detective Rewritten: Erle Stanley Gardner and Rex Stout
10. Viewpoints, Narrow and Expansive: Patricia Highsmith and Ed McBain
11. Donald Westlake and the Richard Stark Machine
12. Tarantino, Twists, and the Persistence of Puzzles
13. Gone Girls: The New Domestic Thriller
Conclusion: The Power of Limits
Notes
Index