Final work on the abstract.

SILENCE. I know I said last night that I was probably done.

Revision 6:

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. Without the investigator, without some figure fortified by curiosity and determination, much of the work of  HP Lovecraft would not have been possible.

In the HBO series True Detective, the investigator has evolved into the "artist-investigator." This term is most often used in theater--and then only by a few groups--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. These are critical omissions.

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. 

(265 words, not counting this count marker)

I think this may be it. I feel this niggling urge to add something about the epistemology of investigation to the final paragraph, but that may not be necessary for this abstract.

Revision 7:

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. Without the investigator, without some figure fortified by curiosity and determination, much of the work of  HP Lovecraft would not have been possible.

In the HBO series True Detective, the investigator has evolved into the "artist-investigator." This term is most often used in theater--and then only by a few groups--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. These are critical omissions.

In this talk, 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, will show 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. 

(269 words, not counting this count marker)

I think I'm really, really close on this version. 

See, the hard part begins after this: the book chapters. So I diddle with the abstract. But hey, it needed diddling, or something.