What may actually be the final draft of the abstract.

So here's revision 4:

The investigator as a literary figure is a contentious one. Born out of traditions established by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and, in fact, going back to Daniel and the story of Bel and the Dragon in the Bible, the first locked room mystery), the investigator changed radically in 20th-century detective fiction--moving from amateur to professional, investigator to criminal--and continues to do so today.

That investigator has become the artist-investigator. The term "artist-investigator" is used in theater studies--and then only by a select group--to describe someone who pushes against established boundaries in that discipline. It is not typically used to describe an epistemology of investigation or the figure employing that epistemology, nor does the extant body of detective fiction criticism address this figure as part of its canon. This is a critical omission.
 
A review of selected works by Robert W. Chambers and HP Lovecraft through the lens of detective fiction tropes and conventions shows how the investigators in True Detective are a new kind of detective derived from atelier fiction, weird fiction, and detective fiction. This new character, based on the aesthetics of crime and redemption, pits the artistic sensibilities of the detective against those of the criminal. This paper sheds new light on the little-recognized figure of the artist-investigator. 

Revision 5:

The investigator as a literary figure is a contentious one. Born out of traditions established by Edgar Allan Poe and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (and tracing back to the Biblical Daniel and the story of Bel and the Dragon, the first locked room mystery), the investigator changed radically in 20th-century detective fiction--moving from amateur to professional, investigator to criminal--and continues to change within the genre.


In the HBO series True Detective, the investigator has now evolved into the "artist-investigator." This term is used in theater studies--and then only by a select group--to describe an artist, employed by a theater company, who pushes against theater's current boundaries. Noteworthy is that the term is not used to describe an epistemology of investigation or the figure employing that epistemology, nor does the extant body of detective fiction criticism address the artist-investigator as part of its canon. This is a critical omission.


A review of selected works by Robert W. Chambers and HP Lovecraft through the lens of detective fiction tropes and conventions, along with a discussion of True Detective, shows how the investigators in True Detective are a new kind of character derived from atelier fiction, weird fiction, and detective fiction. This new character, based on the aesthetics of crime and redemption, pits the artistic sensibilities of the detective against those of the criminal. This paper, by closely examining the above elements, sheds new light on the little-recognized figure of the artist-investigator. 

(243 words, not counting this count marker) 

I'm now at the point of making minor word-level changes, so I'll let this rest. This may actually be it.