Books in the Crime Files series

This open access book examines how the form of the list features as a tool for meaning-making in the genre of detective fiction from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The book analyzes how both readers and detectives rely on listing as an ordering and structuring tool, and highlights the crucial role that lists assume in the reading process. It extends the boundaries of an emerging field dedicated to the study of lists in literature and caters to a newly revived interest in form and New Formalist approaches in narratological research. The central aim of this book is to show how detective fiction makes use of lists in order to frame various conceptions of knowledge. The frames created by these lists are crucial to decoding the texts, and they can be used to demonstrate how readers can be engaged in the act of detection or manipulated into accepting certain propositions in the text.

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role¿either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective¿s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children¿s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.

From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell is the first book to consider seriously the hugely popular and influential works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of forty-two key novels, this volume introduces these authors for students and the general reader in the context of their lives, and of critical debates on gender, colonialism, psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and feminism. It includes interviews with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe's C.

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres.

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders.

This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. After considering Christie's emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha Christie Bernthal explores homophobic stereotypes, gender performativity, queer children, and masquerade in key texts published between 1920 and 1952.

The locked room mystery is one of the iconic creations of popular fiction. Michael Cook's critical study reveals how this archetypal form of the puzzle story has had a significant effect in shaping the immensely popular genre of detective fiction. The book includes analysis of texts from Poe to the present day.

In 1888 the name Jack the Ripper entered public consciousness with the brutal murders of women in the East End of London. Nineteenth-century history, art and literature, psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung and feminist film theory are all used to deconstruct the representation of Jack the Ripper on screen.

Overviewing the legal thriller, where most of the titles have been written by professionals such as lawyers and judges, this book takes a gender focused approach to analyzing recent titles and argues for the genre both in the way its narrative pattern parallels that of an actual court trial, and how it reflects the concerns of contemporary society.

This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.

Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story is a lively series of case studies celebrating the close relationship between detective fiction and the ghost story. It features many of the most famous authors from both genres including Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, M. R. James and Tony Hillerman.

This book reveals subversive representations of gender, race and class in detective dime novels (1860-1915), arguing that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses-theorized as contamination and containment-explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner.

This is a feminist study of a recurring character type in classic British detective fiction by women - a woman who behaves like a Victorian gentleman. Exploring this character type leads to a new evaluation of the politics of classic detective fiction and the middlebrow novel as a whole.

Presenting a social history of British crime film, this book focuses on the strategies used in order to address more radical notions surrounding class, politics, sex, delinquency, violence and censorship. Spanning post-war crime cinema to present-day "Mockney" productions, it contextualizes the films and identifies important and neglected works.

Barry Forshaw, the UK's principal crime fiction expert, presents a celebration and analysis of the Scandinavian crime genre, from Sjoewall and Wahloeoe's Martin Beck series through Henning Mankell's Wallander to Stieg Larsson's demolition of the Swedish Social Democratic ideal in the publishing phenomenon The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo .

The study of Hollywood detectives has often overlooked the B-Movie mystery series in favour of hard-boiled film. Hollywood's Detectives redresses this oversight by examining key detective series of the 1930s and 1940s to explore their contributions to the detective genre.

Now in paperback, this book considers crime fighting from the perspective of the civilian city-goer, from the mid-Victorian garotting panics to 1914. It charts the shift from the use of body armour to the adoption of exotic martial arts through the works of popular playwrights and novelists, examining changing ideals of urban, middle-class heroism.

This book is a study of the 'mothers' of the mystery genre. Traditionally the invention of crime writing has been ascribed to Poe, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, but they had formidable women rivals, whose work has been until recently largely forgotten. The purpose of this book is to 'cherchez les femmes', in a project of rediscovery.

This book takes a look at the evolution of crime fiction. Considering 'criminography' as a system of inter-related sub-genres, it explores the connections between modes of literature such as revenge tragedies, the gothic and anarchist fiction, while taking into account the influence of pseudo-sciences such as mesmerism and criminal anthropology.

What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? Lee Horsley's updated study of the genre, now available in paperback, ranges over hundreds of novels from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler and Cain to the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of contemporary thrillers and future noir.

Why do true crime stories exert such popular fascination? Embracing a range of non-fiction accounts - true crime book and magazines, law and order television, popular journalism - it traces how they harness and explore current concerns about law and order, crime and punishment and personal vulnerability.

This study of crime and masquerade in fiction focuses upon the criminal as a 'performer'. Through stimulating discussions of a wide range of criminal types, Peach argues for the importance of novels that have been neglected. The book integrates incisive literary and cultural criticism with arguments about gender, masquerade, crime and culture.

This book explores the three aspects of deviance that contemporary crime fiction manipulates: linguistic, social, and generic. Gregoriou conducts case studies into crime series by James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell, and investigates the way in which these novelists correspondingly challenge those aforementioned conventions.

This study shows how she sought to reconcile her attachment to the Victorian past with her recognition of a new society that undermined established order and in doing so gave more opportunities to women, confused class-boundaries, extended tolerance, allowed the cult of pleasure and self-assertion and revealed the ambiguities of respectability.

This exploration into the development of women's self-defence from 1850 to 1914 features major writers, including H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Robins and Richard Marsh, and encompasses an unusually wide-ranging number of subjects from hatpin crimes to the development of martial arts for women.

Analysing seventies texts about crime, police, detectives, corruption, paranoia and revenge, The American Thriller aims to open debates on genre in the light of audience theory, literary history and the place of popular fiction at the moment of its production.