Sally Harris, University of Tennessee-Knoxville – Teaching the Detectives

On this Uncommon Courses segment: Critical thinking can be taught in many ways.

Sally Harris, teaching professor of English at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, leans into storytelling to make the pitch.

Sally C. Harris is a Teaching Professor in the English Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Dr. Harris teaches workplace writing, technical writing, British literature, detective & crime literature, and drama.

Teaching The Detectives

I teach Whodunit?: The Detective Story. While crime and mystery stories have been around since Cain and Abel, Whodunit? covers British and American works from the mid-nineteenth to twenty-first century. Students learn that even their favorite crime shows are indebted to their predecessors; students develop their critical thinking and analytical skills by discussing how events in history shape ideas of crime and justice.

After starting with a quick discussion of the Gothic forebears, the class delves into some detective firsts, including Edgar Allan Poe’s “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which was published before the noun “detective” was in regular use. Poe’s amateur detective served as the puzzle-solving model for Sherlock Holmes and other fictional detectives, amateur and professional.

Historically, the nineteenth-century development of organized police forces paved the way for the first police detectives in fiction, including Wilkie Collins’s Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone, who was modeled on a non-fictional nineteenth-century London police detective.

The class also traces the development of science in the stories. Detectives develop from surreptitiously searching through drawers to dusting for finger prints, testing for blood type, scouring CCTV tapes, swabbing for DNA, and searching social media, as in some Ian Rankin and Anthony Horowitz stories. The means for crime and detection change, but detective stories show that human nature hasn’t—greed, jealousy, and self-preservation still top the motive charts.

When discussing works such as J. B. Priestly’s An Inspector Calls, we also think about what constitutes a crime, who delivers justice, and the forms justice takes: divine, social, moral, legal, and even poetic.

In Whodunit? students search the literary texts for clues to make sense of the story—thinking critically about language and about how social and historical contexts shape our thoughts about crime and justice.