Mr. Sanders clearly delights in playing up the bumbling, spoof aspects of this detective yarn, especially during its climactic but unavoidably funny denouement.

As Mr. Spence's story unfolds, it takes on the qualities of a detective yarn and a picaresque tale involving a strange cast of characters.

But in dealing with the death of my uncle I must begin at the other end from where our old detective yarns began.

Intricate and self-contradicting, the narrative has the addictive pull of a detective yarn, a cosmic version in which the clues do and do not add up to a clear solution.

Any viewer with a slight knowledge of old detective yarns can supply his own lines and incidents for such a caper.

It's an amusing and engaging romp through the spurious borders of the detective yarn.

But the story unfolding around Mr. Kotler, who Mr. Litman said has made a living as a commercial diver, seemed both tantalizing detective yarn and battle over science.

The typical detective yarn, for example, provides a trace of unpredictability--who-dunnit?

In a way, a Robison story is a high-end game, like a detective yarn, in which we collect clues - offhand remarks, half-conscious gestures - that betray the occulted wounds in her characters' lives.

"Tell me, Jean-Luc, I know you have a childish fondness for hard-boiled detective yarns."