The Happy-Ending Deception; or, Uncovering the Subversive Potential of Detective Dirne Novels

Abstract

From marketing materials and cover art, we might expect Dirne novels to conclude with happy endings embedded in simplistic moral frameworks that offer a point of identification to an adolescent male readership. And indeed, many of them do. An 1883 Dirne novel, Young Sleuth, The Keen Detective, from the New York Detective Library, for example, provides such Nash Smith leads us to expect from these texts:

Well, this story is about wound up.

The mystery is cleared up, the fathers have found their sons, the cousins — Hal and Joe — have been brought together; everybody is happy, vice is justly punished, virtue is rewarded after long years of patient suffering, and having no more events to chronicle concerning the characters of this story, we take leave of the reader and of Young Sleuth, the Keen Detective, still believing him to be ‘THE SHARPEST BOY IN NEW YORK’