Like a detective novel, these books are characterized by a central mystery and the process of detection that leads to solving that mystery. The mystery, however, is not a crime—it’s a life. A person, usually only tangentially related to the subject (the latter is often deceased), becomes engrossed in the discovery of this person’s life, and in the best of the genre we also discover more about the detective’s self along the way.
Writing for LitHub, Nicola DeRobertis-Theye explores the genre of “biographical detection” and provides a reading list for this newly-named literary device.
