Narrative innovation is typically seen as the domain of the avant-garde. However, techniques such as nonlinear timelines, multiple points of view, and unreliable narration have long been part of American popular culture. How did forms and styles once regarded as “difficult” become familiar to audiences?

In Perplexing Plots, David Bordwell reveals how crime fiction, plays, and films made unconventional narrative mainstream. He shows that since the nineteenth century, detective stories and suspense thrillers have allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. Tales of crime and mystery became a training ground where audiences learned to appreciate artifice. These genres demand a sophisticated awareness of storytelling conventions: they play games with narrative form and toy with audience expectations. Bordwell examines how writers and directors have pushed, pulled, and collaborated with their audiences to change popular storytelling. He explores the plot engineering of figures such as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Patricia Highsmith, Alfred Hitchcock, Dorothy Sayers, and Quentin Tarantino, and traces how mainstream storytellers and modernist experimenters influenced one another’s work. A sweeping, kaleidoscopic account written in a lively, conversational style, Perplexing Plots offers an ambitious new understanding of how movies, literature, theater, and popular culture have evolved over the past century.

"Perplexing Plots is a must. Rare is scholasticism this engaging — you’ll put it down with more than a handful of authors to discover, not to mention the movies adapted from them." - Boulder Weekly

"Bordwell’s work is exceptionally well-researched and offers fascinating examinations of plot devices, patterns, and structure in crime fiction. This book is sure to be enjoyed by fans of crime fiction and film noir." - Hometowns to Hollywood

"[Bordwell's] voluminous work on film underpins his sensitivity to questions of narrative voice, points of view and misdirection in novel-writing. Better yet, his writing radiates an enthusiasm that will please both genre fans and literary scholars. The book is readable and very entertaining." - Sight and Sound

"An engaging study of how twentieth- and twenty-first-century storytellers across literature, film, radio, and stage have coaxed audiences along as collaborators in the narrative process . . . reading Perplexing Plots is a hell of a lot of fun." - Noir City Magazine

"[A] terrific book." - Washington Post

"Perplexing Plots is unfailingly rich and fascinating, and Bordwell’s exegeses on popular narrative will be central to studies of the concept far into the future." - New Review of Film and Television Studies

"Wildly illuminating." - The Film Stage

"A highly recommended title." - Popcultureshelf.com

"Like the great detectives he writes about, Bordwell shows off his encyclopedic knowledge and his dazzling analytic powers, laying out his case with an abundance of evidence. . . . Highly recommended." - Choice Reviews

"Bordwell, America’s finest film scholar, has connected the dots between movies and popular detective stories . . . for a thrilling X-ray of genre." - The Millions

"Highly recommended." - Journal of Popular Culture

"[A] brilliant book . . . Bordwell has been one of the great exponents of precise formal analysis for whom methods of narration are never to be taken for granted. His writing is at once impeccably scholarly and acutely sensitive to the human use of stories and the part they play in people’s lives . . . I was exhilarated by Bordwell’s multiple demonstrations of the pleasures of deflection and distraction, shapely detours and sidewise turns, in the service of what he calls the “playful experience of form.”" - New York Review of Books