Detective fiction is widely acknowledged as a quintessentially modern genre, and for a variety of reasons. The form enacts a rational scientific approach to problems, arises through modern models of production and circulation, and is ubiquitous in the modern world, as the most prolifically produced and consumed genre of last 150 years. However, it is also explicitly modern in another, deeper way, as it responds to anxiety over a fundamental problem of modern life: the way modernization produces alienation, and in particular tends to dissolve community. This is the ironic connection between a set of processes that empowers individual agency and creativity, and brings individuals into ever greater connection, yet erases those individuals' capacity to make use of these gains collectively, or interact in a meaningful way.

"A Very Modern Mystery" argues that detective fiction, emerging as it does from an awareness of how modernity brings community into question, provides a specific laboratory for recovering and redefining a sense of community in the modern world. It revolves around a figure that is undeniable modern, yet who struggles to think about making use of modern ideas and processes in a way that is mindful of the active interconnection that these might otherwise compromise. My reading of the genre's development across the last 150 years shows that its evolution from this original concern develops a way to move through the modern towards a rehabilitation of authentic community, rather than to participate in its ongoing erasure.

My project begins with a re-presentation of mystery as a productive modern phenomenon, and then examines the evolving investigation of it from Poe to Pynchon, so as to present detective fiction as a way to think about being both modern and communal for the first time. This is an important contribution to the study of detective fiction, as it evolves the counter-Enlightenment reading of the genre (as appears in John Irwin or Michael Saler) in a way that acknowledges detection's departure from mere problem solving, but still insists on its practical effects in the world. It also presents the process of investigation---whether as a literary or historical experience---as a way to insist upon and maintain the active sense of community that is essential to modern life, and the practical basis for its just and meaningful elaboration. This enters into an important aspect of contemporary debates on community theory, which struggle with how to retain a political dimension, beyond abstract ethical concerns, as when Jodi Dean criticizes Judith Butler's writing about community as an ethics lacking a politics, or Janell Watson's suggestion that Roberto Esposito's formulation risks validating Neoliberal models of governance. In both cases, to read the detective at work in the world becomes an ongoing model for recognizing authentic community as the basis of the shared world, and acting in a way that not only affirms it, but seeks to develop that affirmation as the basis for new beginnings.