Just Who Is Watching the Detectives?

Looking for a great whodunit? A hard-boiled detective story? Or death by sandwich? South Orange's own literary private eye John Cullen Gruesser is on the case.

Words hosted a book celebration on Saturday night for the South Orange literary sleuth who uncovered the gems of the genre in a new book, "A Century of Detection: Twenty Great Mystery Stories, 1841-1940." The anthology provides a sampling of some the best-known stories, plus works by lesser-known authors, and unknown mysteries.

Gruesser is a professor of English at Kean University. He has published broadly on crime writing and teaches a course on detective fiction.

In his new book, Gruesser provides a chronological and thematic survey of the first 100 years of detection. The volume includes Mark Twain's "The Stolen White Elephant" and Arthur Conan Doyle's most celebrated detective, Sherlock Holmes.  His students helped in the investigation.

"Despite its association in many people's minds with British authors, manners, and settings," Gruesser pens in the introduction, "writers from the United States pioneered its two major varieties -- the classic or analytical story, invented by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, and hard-boiled fiction, which began to appear in the early 1920s."

The 20 stories in the collection make sense of the early history and suggest how the genre has evolved. "Poe would be surprised – shocked," Gruesser told his audience on Saturday, "that two generations after his death, women and African Americans would embrace detection as a means of addressing social and political issues of particular concern to themselves."

Gruesser expects technology to play an increasingly larger role in the thrillers of the future. But for now his favorites come from a simpler time, stories like "Murder at the Automat" by Cornell Woolrich. In this case, the murder weapon was a sandwich.