The following paper describes and problematizes the notion of detective criticism that can be found in the trilogy by the French author Pierre Bayard which includes the books Qui a tue Roger Ackroyd? (1998), Enquete sur Hamlet (2002), and L'affaire du chien des Baskerville (2008). We are interested in analyzing the concept of detective criticism with the aim of studying its impact on concepts from literary theory such as reading, genre, interpretation, and frame of reference so that we can problematize the following hypothesis: detective criticism implies an interpretative operation which reads over and over the same story: the allegory of reading.