When torture was removed from the repertoire of European police forces at the beginning the nineteenth century, the task fell upon the prosecution to establish guilt through rational inquiry. The detective embodied society's faith in rationality; the detective's task was to safeguard this society's existence. The detective soon became a dominant figure in fiction writing. The belief in rationality predates the detective; from its inception in the seventeenth century this belief is bound up with science and empiricism, and with theories of language as a system of signifiers capable of transmitting truth. In the eighteenth century, rationality also came to be viewed as a means to social and ethical progress. These discourses the detective narrative inherits, without awareness of their formative influence on itself and hence without reflection on the detective.

This changes from the nineteen fifties onward, as a body of texts begins to form that has been termed 'anti-detective literature.' These texts trouble the detective, either by casting doubt upon his integrity or by depicting a failure of rational inquiry. The detectives' failures reflect shifts in the perception of science and rationality and skepticism regarding the possibility of social and ethical progress.

The dissertation examines anti-detective narratives by three authors, Ernst Jünger, Peter Ackroyd, and Friedrich Dürrenmatt. While Jünger's text depicts to which extent political power may deform the detective's character, Ackroyd's narratives pose the question how a figure driven by a faith in the descriptive powers of language can operate in texts designed in accordance with post-structuralist theories, and Dürrenmatt's texts question whether justice is attainable by deductive reasoning. The failure of a fictional detective challenges the assumptions that lay back of the institutionalization of the real-life detective: that rationality delivers the truth, that truth is communicable, and that society will improve by applying rationality—hence such a failure is symptomatic of modified perceptions of language, reality, and the human being, as they have arisen in the later twentieth century.