Crime Files
2 total works
Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story is the first full-length study to concentrate on the engagement between detective fiction and the ghost story, one of the central relationships in all popular genres. It features works from many of the giants in both traditions including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, M. R. James, John Dickson Carr, Susan Hill and Tony Hillerman. The Haunted Text includes a new and lively reading of The Hound of the Baskervilles, a comparison between Susan Hill's The Woman in Black and the Simon Serrailler novels, and discussions on the ghost-haunted city of Rebus's Edinburgh and Tony Hillerman's novels about the Navajo people of the Southwestern United States. What emerges is a surprising picture of a long and influential association which has had a major effect on the development of detective fiction. This fascinating book will be of interest to both scholars and general readers alike.
The locked room has long fascinated readers of detective fiction with its images of entrapment and entombment. Narratives of Enclosure is the first full length critical study of the Locked Room Mystery, tracing its origins in Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', the first detective story, up to the modern era. Looking beyond the facade of the impossible crime to examine stories by Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, John Dickson Carr and Paul Auster, Michael Cook uses critical and thematic contexts to show how the idea of enclosure has informed detective fiction at every stage in its history. Whether in the narrative itself, as in John Dickson Carr's classic Golden Age novel The Hollow Man, or the psychological relationship with physical environments in Dickens's 'The Signalman', the metaphor of the locked room casts a long shadow on the wider genre.