What are the roots of detective fiction, in history and literature, and what is its distinctive merit? Why did the Fascists and Nazis find detective fiction so threatening, so incompatible with their values, that they felt compelled to ban it?

Topics will include reason as the means of explaining the mysterious and achieving justice; cognitive strategies of problem-solving in detective fiction and detective fact; evil as a phenomenon that can be defined, discovered, and destroyed; the mistreatment of detective fiction by contemporary literary theory; the moral/political universe in which victory is attainable through the efforts of the individual mind.