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Memento

Professor Todorov-
I realize that your recent viewing of Memento has left some concern about its inclusion into your well-defined detective genre. You must be pondering many aspects of the film, such as its awkward, non-sequential presentation, to its apparent lack of an unsolved crime. You must wonder why, if the audience knows the outcome in the first scene, does the story remain classified as a mystery thriller?
Memento may significantly differ from the detective stories you are accustomed to, where "the first story, that of the crime, ends before the second, [that of the investigation], begins" (Todorov pg.44). It is you, though, who also clearly outlines in the work The Typology of Detective Fiction how the detective genre is continually evolving. As old, tried formulas cease to amaze audiences, new forms which change and elaborate on the genre are called for to heighten the experience, and they are achieved by accompanying new subtleties and ideas into the presentation and plot. Upon close examination of the movie, I believe you will realize how Memento rightfully fits in to the genre, since, at its core, it is a suspense thriller, although the audience is left to anticipate the past instead of the future.
To start out, Memento follows S.S. Van Dine's rules for the detective genre, with only a slight exception:
3. Love has no place in detective fiction.
Though you might be compelled to use this as a case against the movie, you should accept that the love depicted of Leonard for his wife only happens as flashbacks, not in the past, thus serving as Leonard's motivation to kill. Memento, otherwise, conforms to the rest of the rules, and, on this basis alone, justifies its genre of detective thriller.
Viewers eventually realize during the showing of Memento (or maybe after) that the movie does contain a storyline that is sequential and that contains no gaps, albeit the scenes are not presented in the typical order. Andy Klein, in his essay "Everything...