Learning all the tricks: critiquing crime fiction in a creative writing PhD

In the late 1920s Dorothy L. Sayers, despite her impressive contributions to the crime fiction genre, wrote of the idea that the genre would fall into a decline, that there ‘certainly does seem a possibility that the detective story will some time come to an end, simply because the public will have learnt all the tricks’ ([1928]1947: 108). This article takes this idea, of learning ‘all the tricks’, and applies it to the process of producing an artefact (a crime novel) and exegesis for a creative writing doctoral program. Specifically, this article looks at the notion of how the artefact and exegesis should work together, as two halves of a single whole. In addition, this article explores the idea of how the task of writing an historical crime fiction novel, and accompanying exegesis, can draw on both crime fiction and on crime fiction criticism. This base, of the creative and critical, can inform the production of a work that offers an aesthetic quality and an academically rigorous contribution to conversations around one of the world’s best-selling genres.