Narrative innovation is often thought to be the domain of the avant-garde or the experimental. However, manipulations of viewpoint and timelines and other unconventional techniques, have been part of popular American culture and storytelling since at least the 1940s. How did different forms and styles once regarded as "difficult," become mainstream and familiar to audiences? As David Bordwell demonstrates in Perplexing Plots, popular narratives have balanced innovation and convention to develop its own experimental impulses that both familiarize and surprise the viewer or readers. Bordwell argues that thrillers and detective tales, in particular, have been a major way in which popular culture allowed ambitious storytellers to experiment with narrative. They became a training ground for audiences' development of skills in understanding and enjoying complex fictions. Bordwell traces this history through the works and film adaptations of writers such as Patricia Highsmith, Erle Stanley Gardner, Rex Stout, and Richard Stark. While he focuses on the 1940s as a period when innovative storytelling began to become a permanent feature in popular culture, he also looks back to techniques from over more than a century. He also considers how these techniques have shaped the work of filmmakers from the 1940s on. Examining novels, plays, films, and radio drama. Bordwell shows how the mystery-based plot, usually hinging on a murder, and its variants have enlarged the techniques available to authors and the skill sets of audiences.