The Great Courses: Mystery & Suspense Fiction (36 Lessons)

TV Screen Shot from "The Return of the Classic Detective," Lesson 10

Many library systems around the country make the online service called Kanopy available to its library card holders. With the exception of one short time-blip of a few weeks when the county decided Kanopy was just not in its budget, my library has given its patrons limited use of the service for the last 2-3 years. We are, however, limited to four movies, documentaries or series per month, so I assume that there may be different tiers on Kanopy depending on how much a library is willing to pay for the service. 

But four has always been plenty for me with the exception of the months when two or three of my movie choices turn out to be so bad that I can't finish them. Honestly, though, the real reason I keep coming back to Kanopy every month is that the service also offers quite a few educational courses from the Great Courses franchise. The good news is that each Great Course - even those that include as many as thirty-six  individual lessons - counted as only one selection against my allotted four. But Kanopy got even better after I received an email saying that my library no longer counts a Great Course as even one selection. In practical terms, that probably doesn't mean much since I have never gotten through more than one of the courses in a calendar month anyway, but it does make it possible for me now to fearlessly sample the courses without the risk of squandering my four selections in the process.

And,  that brings me to a course I'm doing there right now called "Mystery & Suspense Fiction," a thirty-six-lesson class that covers the history and evolution of both genres from their beginnings to 2016 (when the lectures were filmed). Each of the lessons are about thirty-five minutes long, and they are all presented by the same lecturer, Professor David Schmid, a man to whom I can gladly listen for all  twenty-one hours of "Mystery & Suspense Fiction." 

David Schmid is a New York Professor of English and Political Science

To this point, I've listened to eleven of the lessons, including: Murder in Cozy Spaces, African American Mysteries, Nordic Noir, The Sidekick, and The Criminal. 

The full course encompasses:

1. Mystery Fiction's Secret Formula
2. The Detective Is Born
3. The Criminal
4. The Sidekick
5. Detecting Clues
6. Case Closed? The Problem with Solutions
7. The Locked Room
8. The Dime Novel
9. Murder in Cosy Places
10. Return of the Classic Detective
11. The City Tests the Detective
12. The Private Eye Opens
13. African American Mysteries
14. The Femme Fatale
15. The Private Eye Evolves
16. Latino Detectives on the Border
17. The Lady Detective
18. Violence Waits in the Wings
19. Violence Takes Center Stage
20. Psychopaths and Mind Hunters
21. Police as Antagonist
22. Police as Protagonist
23. Native American Mysteries
24. The European Mystery Tradition
25. Nordic Noir
26. Japanese and Latin American Mysteries
27. Precursors to True Crime
28. True Crime in the 20th Century
29. Historical Mysteries
30. Spies, Thrillers, and Conspiracies
31. Female-Centered Mystery and Suspense
32. Poetic Justice
33. Courtroom Drama
34. Gay and Lesbian Mystery and Suspense
35. Adapting the Multimedia Mystery
36. Mysterious Experiments

I've already learned a lot about mysteries and how they've evolved over the centuries, and I highly recommend the class to other fans of either genre. If you are into mystery and suspense, as so many book bloggers and readers are, this one is not only great fun; it helps you appreciate the genre even more.

If any of you try this or one of the other Great Courses - or already have- I would love to hear what you think of them.