“No More Detective Work, or I'll write to Mum!”: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Popular Detective Fiction

Routledge argues that “Although magic and the supernatural are everywhere in the [Harry Potter] novels, they are presented as a normal part of life … they are not mysterious as such. Instead, the real source of mystery at the center of each of the … novels is a detective mystery” (204‐05). In a similar fashion, Chris McGee also suggests that “the Harry Potter books are built around readerly pleasure embedded in the mystery form, with its delayed secrets, its capable narrator, its potent author, its complex world of villains and heroes” (58). Thus, J. K. Rowling's globally loved Harry Potter series is widely understood not only as children's (or young‐adult's) fantasy‐fiction centered on magic and a constant battle between good and evil, but also as a series of formulaic, investigative detective stories. A reevaluation of the series’ second volume, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (1998), can reveal how Rowling employs narrative features that characterize the novel as a blending of different traditions of the detective genre, which it directly uses to allow the protagonist to maintain control of the narrative and his position as the series’ hero. This technique causes Chamber of Secrets to stand out from the other novels in the series in terms of its connection to the history of crime fiction. Understanding the novel through this lens improves scholarly understanding of the legacy of various kinds of crime writing, which continue to exist both in their own retrospectively produced forms and also in the narrative structures of other genres of popular fiction.1