SOURCE: DePorte, Michael. “The Consolations of Fiction: Mystery in Caleb Williams.” Papers on Language and Literature 20, no. 2 (spring 1984): 154-64.

In the following essay, DePorte discusses Godwin's use of standard mystery story elements in Caleb Williams.

Caleb Williams has long been recognized as a prototype of the mystery story. It contains a notorious, supposedly solved murder; an amateur detective who gets more than he bargained for; a compelling sequence of capture, escape, and pursuit; and a climax in which the true murderer makes a public confession.¹ Of course, the novel can also be read as a good deal more than a mystery story. It can be read as a powerful dramatization of the arguments Godwin had made a year before in Political Justice,² or as a psychological novel, the intensity and insight of which anticipate Dostoevsky and Kafka.³

Much recent Caleb Williams criticism calls attention to the curious lack...