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Small-town settings have long been commonplace in crime and mystery fiction, but usually only in cozy mysteries. Typically, the crimes in these novels were solved by amateur sleuths like Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, whose efforts restored peace and tranquilly to the quiet community. But in recent years, writers of realistic crime fiction about cops, private eyes, and county sheriffs who might ordinarily have set their novels in big cities have discovered fresh creative possibilities in small-t...

An engaging and absorbing study of the detective genre running up to 1968.

Greed and guilt, near-indecipherable codes, murder plots born of madness--these motifs drive the best modern mysteries, but they are rooted in the early nineteenth century and the carefully constructed fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's methods of storytelling and suspense remain relevant, reappearing in detective novels and on screens large and small. This work examines a wide selection of today's mystery and thriller novels, films, television programs, and video games to explore Poe's ongoing i...

Framed uses fin de siecle British crime narrative to explore a central question: why do female criminal characters tend to be alluring and appealing while fictional male criminals of the era are unsympathetic or even grotesque? In this elegantly argued study, Elizabeth Carolyn Miller examines popular literary and cinematic culture of the fin de siecle era - roughly 1880 to 1914 - to shed light on an otherwise overlooked social and cultural type: the conspicuously glamorous New Woman criminal. Dr...

This collection establishes new perspectives on the idea of mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining the ways it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Breaking new ground by moving beyond the critical preoccupation with classification of historical types and generic determinants, contributors examine the effect of my...

A volume in the Cultural Studies Series edited by Samir Dayal An innovative and entertaining look at genre, popular culture, enjoyment, and psychoanalysis. Detective fiction, a category that, broadly defined, runs the gamut from Oedipus Rex to "The Purloined Letter," continues to draw a range of fans and scholars, and to play a pivotal role in popular entertainment, contemporary literature, and psychoanalytic theory. But how do we derive pleasure from reading about or watching a detective’s ex...

If God is the greatest mystery of them all, then why not, in pursuit of God, consult the greatest detective of them all? In this imaginative and surprisingly profound book, Stephen Kendrick reveals Sherlock Holmes as spiritual guide. Drawing on the teachings of Christianity, Buddhism, and Judaism--as well as a host of thinkers as varied as Albert Einstein, Gandhi, and Vincent van Gogh--Kendrick explores the stories of Sherlock Holmes and finds remarkably prescient religious insights. He shows...

Detective fiction and philosophy3/4moral philosophy in particular3/4may seem like an odd combination. Working within the framework offered by neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics, this book makes the case that moral philosophers ought to take murder mysteries seriously, seeing them as a source of ethical insight, and as a tool that can be used to spark the ethical imagination. Detective fiction is a literary genre that asks readers to consider questions of good and evil, justice and injustice, virtue...

Poisoning occurs in over half of Agatha Christie's many novels and stories. In fact, she used a larger number and broader selection of poisons and medicines, for a wider variety of purposes, with greater frequency, ingenuity, and scientific accuracy than any other detective fiction writer. Yet very little has been written on the use of drugs, poisons, and chemicals in Christie's fiction. The Poisonous Pen of Agatha Christie entertainingly and authoritatively fills this gap. Michael Gerald explor...

The detective novel is both a product of the twentieth century and a response to the needs of readers forced to deal with social and political insecurities of the time. Thus codes of modernity are the essence of the genre, and its plausibility relies upon the degree of the readers' expectations, demands, and vicarious experiences. Even one of mystery fiction's hallmarks, the seemingly improbable but consequential encounter with strangers, is assimilated in the modern sensibility, which has been...

Serial Crime Fiction is the first book to focus explicitly on the complexities of crime fiction seriality. Covering definitions and development of the serial form, implications of the setting, and marketing of the series, it studies authors such as Doyle, Sayers, Paretsky, Ellroy, Marklund, Camilleri, Borges, across print, film and television.

Winner of the 2019 H.R.F. Keating Award for the best biographical or critical book related to crime fiction Originally published by Gryphon Books in 1993, Difficult Lives was one of the earliest attempts to track the legacy of original paperback writers such as Jim Thompson, David Goodis and Chester Himes. The individual essays on these three first appeared in literary magazines. Difficult Lives visits a rare moment when daylight was showing around the seams of American society and visions quite...

Conan Doyle s name is synonymous with "The Strand" magazine, chiefly because of the Sherlock Holmes stories but also due to many of his other contributions, such as the Professor Challenger stories, his articles on spiritualism and fairies, and his coverage of the major battles of World War I. From 1891 until his death in 1930, almost 300 contributions by Doyle were published in "The Strand," including 120 stories, 9 serialized novels, and dozens of other items including poetry and interviews. I...