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A volume in the Writers and Their Work series, which draws upon recent thinking in English studies to introduce writers and their contexts. Each volume includes biographical material, an examination of recent criticism, a bibliography and a reappraisal of a major work by the writer.

Georges Simenon's 75 novels and 28 short stories featuring Chief Inspector Jules Maigret provide us with a great deal of information about the French police detective-but only in small, episodic doses. As readers become acquainted with Maigret one detail at a time, he slowly takes on a flesh-and-bone realism-not merely a character in a story, but someone we would like to meet in real life. This book presents all the canonical facts and details about the detective and his world in one place, pres...

WINNER OF THE HRF KEATING AWARD FOR BEST NON-FICTION CRIME BOOK 2018An entertaining history of British thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed, in which award-winning crime writer Mike Ripley reveals that, though Britain may have lost an empire, her thrillers helped save the world. With a foreword by Lee Child. When Ian Fleming dismissed his books in a 1956 letter to Raymond Chandler as 'straight pillow fantasies of the bang-bang, kiss-kiss variety' he was being typically...

This study explores women's crime fiction writing in the mid to late 19th century in three national contexts: American, Australian and British. It also opens up critical histories of the genre. The bringing of women's ""criminographic"" fiction to critical attention will help correct a broader critical occlusion of crime fiction in the decades of 1860 to 1880, as generic forms and boundaries (including the rise of sensation fiction) shifted and altered.

This book views the Dutch Sinologist, Robert van Gulik's Judge Dee mysteries as a hybrid East-West form of detective fiction and uses the concept of transculturation to discuss their hybrid nature with respect to their sources, production, and influence. The Judge Dee Mysteries authored by Robert van Gulik (1910-1967) were the first detective stories to be set in ancient China. These hybrid narrative combine Chinese historical figures, traditional Chinese crime literature and Chinese history a...

A Companion to Crime Fiction presents the definitive guide to this popular genre from its origins in the eighteenth century to the present day A collection of forty-seven newly commissioned essays from a team of leading scholars across the globe make this Companion the definitive guide to crime fictionFollows the development of the genre from its origins in the eighteenth century through to its phenomenal present day popularityFeatures full-length critical essays on the most significant author...

The quintessential international genre, detective fiction often works under the guise of popular entertainment to expose its extensive readership to complex moral questions and timely ethical dilemmas. The first book-length study of interwar Japanese detective fiction, Murder Most Modern considers the important role of detective fiction in defining the country’s emergence as a modern nation-state.   Kawana explores the interactions between the popular genre and broader discourses of modernity...

Sherlock Holmes, Byomkesh Bakshi, and Feluda: Negotiating the Centre and the Periphery presents a postcolonial reading of Conan Doyle's canonical detective texts-Sherlock Holmes adventures, and some lesser known detective texts written by two Bengali (Indian) writers-Sharadindu Bandyopadhyay (1899-1970), and Satyajit Ray (1921-1992). The book proposes that in a postcolonial reading situation, the representation of Holmes problematizes the act of reading and also the act and discourse of inquiry....