Making a generous and relevant use of the reading you have done for the course, discuss five of the following quotations from any point of view that you think will produce an informed, original, and cogent answer.

1. –“Detective literature is seventy-five percent moralism.”

2. –“Three conditions must co-exist to form a climate in which the detective story can flourish. First, a tradition of integrity in the police force; second a readiness in the reader to accept a “hero” played perfectly straight, a detective who never fails; and third, an eagerness in the reader to take pleasure in the special activity of observation.”

3. –“The Sherlock Holmes corpus provides the best picture ever set down of the focal point of the world at one of the high points of human history.”

4. –“Every murder mystery poses symbolically (in the form of the initial murder) the problem of Evil—and resolves it; every detective story therefore meets a deep metaphysical need.”

5. –“The detective story is modern man’s Passion Play.”

6. –“Mystery stories are bloodstained fairy tales which enact the cycle, Paradise Lost, Paradise Sought For, Paradise Regained. They allow us to play, vicariously, the roles of different kinds of Savior.”

7. –“The detective story is the one clearly defined modern genre of prose fiction impeccably classical in form.”

8. –“What we are looking for in the detective-story ritual, through which the person whose guilt was presumed proves innocent and the person who appeared outside the circle of suspicion turns out to be guilty, is an escape from reality and a return to an imagined primal innocence where we can know love as love and not as the law.”

9. –“The psychological reason for the weakening of the detective story in recent years is a weakening in the sense of sin. Where an awareness of sin in religious terms does not exist, the detective as witch doctor has no function.”

10. –“The first essential value of the detective story lies in this, that it is the earliest and only form of popular fiction—literature—in which is expressed some sense of the poetry of modern life.”

11. –“The detective story is the normal recreation of noble minds.”

12. –“The detective story, both the story of pure deduction and the hard-boiled story, is dead.”