The Reader and the Detective Story is unique it treats the detective story as a special case of reading, governed by special rules and shaped by a highly specialized formula. The method of interpretation is the application of the principles of response theory (especially those developed by Hans-Georg Gadamer, Wolfgang Iser, and Hans Robert Jauss) to the reading of a tale of detection.
George Dove demonstrates how the English soft-boiled mystery and the American private-eye story, although they have different settings and develop different plots, belong in the same subgenre and...

Dove states that the purpose of this book is to develop a theoretical base for a critical approach to the interpretation of the formula story. Such an approach should take into account the relationship between author and reader that determines such tacit agreements as the two axioms of formula fiction, the reader-knowledge convention, and the signals that pass between author and reader. Specifically, the chief concern of this book will be the criticism/interpretation of the mystery.

Ed McBain is a master of tone. He turns his material just a little off-axis. George Dove's study of McBain's imaginary city is both insightful and realistic. He gets at the heart of this major writer of police procedurals by examining the geography, the day-to-day happenings, and literary quality.

In the late 1940s and early 1950s a new kind of detective story appeared on the scene. This was a story in which the mystery is solved by regular police detectives, usually working in teams and using ordinary police routines. This kind of narrative is customarily called the police procedural story. And it is the subject of this book. Though there has been numberless writers of these stories, there has never been a book of criticism before.