Arriving college students find themselves unprepared for the demands of academic writing. Despite the sometimes condescending critical attitudes of its literary worth and the pressures of composition specialists to use nonfiction texts as instructional aids, detective fiction, like any fiction, favors the underlying characteristics students entering various academic disciplines need to learn to enter a professional discourse community and accomplish any of the communicative purposes that community requires. By putting readers into context specific situations and promoting interpretation and debate, novel reading enhances critical thinking and the ability to manipulate texts. Detective fiction, in particular, offers a number of features beneficial to the teaching of writing, such as: (1) consistency and integrity; (2) actors and agents with varying degrees of complexity; (3) a transparent prose style; (4) an integrated, rich, "fleshed out" narrative; (5) a sense of closure; (6) a recognizable perspective; (7) an ability and strategy to show important elements (setting/situation, actors/agents, dialogue/discussion, action/evaluation or recommendations) over telling; (8) a way to represent information and teach it over summarizing; (9) a notion of proportion; (10) an understanding of sophistication; (11) an understanding of how voice 'creates' the writer in readers' imagination and 'fictionalizes' the audience for the writer; and (12) a willingness to use, abuse, or confuse conventions. Genre fiction fits into the professional interests of those most frequently teaching academic discourse. It open up ways to talk about academic discourse and the peculiarities of its style. Teachers of writing know writing is writing, good writing is good writing, and to educate students about writing, teachers use whatever the student is doing. That is, people write from their imaginations; for a teacher to take away a writer's genre, focus, or perspective because of teacher prejudice will not help writers improve their writing. (Contains 10 notes, an overview of the presentation, and several appended exercises.) (TB)