History of Mystery: Studies in 200 Years of Detective Fiction
Explore 200 years of detective fiction with this curated collection—from Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie to scholarly studies by Stephen Knight and Martin Priestman.
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Crime Fiction, 1800-2000
by Stephen Knight
Stephen Knight's book is a full analytic survey of crime fiction from its origins in the nineteenth century to the most recent developments. Knight explains how and why the various forms of the genre evolved, explores major authors and movements, and argues that the genre as a whole has three parts: the early development of Detection, the growing emphasis on Death, and the modern celebration of Diversity. The best criticism is cited and the book provides full references and a helpful chronology, making this a highly readable complete study of a popular and still relatively underexamined genre.
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The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction
by Martin Priestman
This Companion covers British and American crime fiction from the eighteenth century to the end of the twentieth. As well as discussing the 'detective' fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, it considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. It also includes chapters on the treatment of crime in the eighteenth-century literature, French and Victorian fiction, women and black detectives, crime on film and TV, police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form.
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Detective Fiction
by Charles J. Rzepka
'Detective Fiction' is a clear and compelling look at some of the best known, yet least-understood characters and texts of the modern day. Undergraduate students of Detective and Crime Fiction and of genre fiction in general, will find this book essential reading.
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Bloody Murder
by Julian Symons
In celebration of distinguished author/critic Julian Symons' 80th year, here is the third and final revised edition of his classic history of mystery fiction. The views expressed here are as candid as ever. One bestselling writer is called unreadable, another compared to writers of "strip cartoon stories". But the general tone is warmly appreciative of every sort of book within the genre.
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Crime and Mystery: The 100 Best Books
by Perseus
Traces the growth of the mystery genre and selects what he considers to be the top one hundred, giving a perceptive and informative account of each
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100 Favorite Mysteries of the Century
by Jim Huang
Offer additional personal recommendations and comments. Book jacket.
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The Triumph of the Thriller
by Patrick Anderson
"In his provocative, caustic, and often hilarious survey of today's popular fiction, Anderson shows us who the best thriller writers are - and the worst. He shows how Michael Connelly was inspired by Raymond Chandler, how George Pelecanos toiled in obscurity while he mastered his craft, how Sue Grafton created the first great woman private eye, and how Thomas Harris transformed an insane cannibal into the charming man of the world who made FBI agent Clarice Starling his lover."--BOOK JACKET.
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Whodunit?:A Who's Who in Crime and Mystery Writing
by Rosemary Herbert
Who populates the pages of crime and mystery writing? Who are the characters we willingly follow into the mystery genre's uneasy imaginative territory? And who created those characters in the first place? What life experience and expertise informs their work? What are the sources of their themes, regional accents, and even the axes that some grind? Why do some wish to give us a good laugh, while others seem hell-bent on making us shudder?Whodunit? answers these questions and more. Here mystery expert Rosemary Herbert brings together enlightening and entertaining information on hundreds of classic and contemporary characters and authors. Some--such as P.D. James, Ian Rankin, Sherlock Holmes, and Kinsey Millhone--appear in individual entries. Still more keep company in articles about characters we admire, such as the Clerical Sleuth, and in pieces about those we love to hate, including the Femme Fatale and Con Artist. There is even an article on a figure that haunts so many great works of mystery --The Corpse.Drawing on the Edgar Award-nominated volume The Oxford Companion to Crime & Mystery Writing, Herbert has added 101 new entries on the hottest new names in works ranging from puzzling whodunits to chilling crime novels.
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The Crown Crime Companion
by Mystery Writers Of America, Inc.
The Crown Crime Companion The Top 100 Mystery Novels Of All Time Selected by the Mystery Writers Of America Annotated by 0tto Penzler and Compiled by Mickey Friedman For The Crown Crime Companion, the Mystery Writers of America have compiled a list of the best 100 mystery novels of all time, as well as a list of favorites in ten categories. Fully annotated and reviewed by Otto Penzler, this list of the top 100 mysteries will be a valuable resource to fans, introducing them to new novels and reminding them about books by favorite writers they may have missed. Each of the ten category lists is introduced by a master of that category: Classics: Suspense: Hardboiled/Private Eye: Police Procedural: Espionage/Thriller: Criminal: Cozy/Traditional: Historical: Humorous: Legal/Courtroom: H.R.F. Keating Mary Higgins Clark Sue Grafton Joseph Wambaugh John Gardner Richard Condon Margaret Maron Peter Lovesey Gregory Mcdonald Scott Turow
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They Died in Vain
by Jim Huang
Mystery experts introduce you to personal favorites: obscure classics, up-and-coming new writers, great books that unaccountably disappeared and lesser-known titles by bestselling authors. ... This book takes you beyond the bestsellers, beyond the familiar, with essays recommending over 100 mystery novels.
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The Complete Christie
by Matthew Bunson
Painstakingly researched, this illustrated reference captures the spirited imagination of Dame Agatha and the intriguing atmosphere of her tales. Includes a comprehensive Christie biography, cross-referenced with plot synopses and character listings. Photos throughout.
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Hardboiled Mystery Writers
by Matthew Joseph Bruccoli
An illustrated guide to the mystery genre's hardest hitting writers focuses on the three men who created a uniquely American brand of detective fiction--Raymond Chandler, Dashiell HAmmett, and Ross Macdonald, the creators of such famed fictional private detectives as PHilip Marlowe, Sam Spade, and Lew Archer. Original.
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Raymond Chandler in Hollywood
by Al Clark
Raymond Chandler in Hollywood is an entertaining and comprehensive assessment of Chandler's turbulent association with Hollywood, both as a screenwriter whose credits included Double Indemnity, The Blue Dahlia, and Strangers on a Train and as the provider of source material - his six filmed novels have so far yielded ten movies. The author's extensive research included interviewing many of the Hollywood figures who were associated with Chandler and his films, including Lauren Bacall, Edward Dmytryk, Alfred Hitchcock, John Houseman, Fred MacMurray, Robert Montogomery, and Audrey Totter. Illustrated with rare stills, posters, and location photographs, this book provides a special insight into the work of the world's most acclaimed writer of detective fiction.
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Gumshoe America
by Sean McCann
DIVSees hard-boiled crime fiction in relation to a changing literary marketplace and as an arena for conflicts about citizenship, class culture, and democracy during the New Deal./div
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Mystery Muses
by Jim Huang
Modern mystery writers describe classic mystery books that influenced them.
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Behind the Mystery
by Stuart M. Kaminsky
Stuart Kaminsky takes the readers into the personal lives and homes of well-known contemporary mystery writers.
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Cornell Woolrich from Pulp Noir to Film Noir
by Thomas C. Renzi
Extremely popular and prolific in the 1930s and 1940s, Cornell Woolrich still has diehard fans who thrive on his densely packed descriptions and his spellbinding premises. A contemporary of Hammett and Chandler, he competed with them for notoriety in the pulps and became the single most adapted writer for films of the noir period. Perhaps the most famous film adaptation of a Woolrich story is Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window (1954). Even today, his work is still onscreen; Michael Cristofer's Original Sin (2001) is based on one of his tales. This book offers a detailed analysis of many of Woolrich's novels and short stories; examines films adapted from these works; and shows how Woolrich's techniques and themes influenced the noir genre. Twenty-two stories and 30 films compose the bulk of the study, though many other additions of films noirs are also considered because of their relevance to Woolrich's plots, themes and characters. The introduction includes a biographical sketch of Woolrich and his relationship to the noir era, and the book is illustrated with stills from Woolrich's noir classics.
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The Web of Iniquity
by Catherine Ross Nickerson
Post-Civil War detective fiction, written mostly by women, considered in relation to other forms of sentimental and domestic fiction.
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Twentieth-century Crime Fiction
by Lee Horsley
Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction aims to enhance understanding of one of the most popular forms of genre fiction by examining a wide variety of the detective and crime fiction produced in Britain and America during the twentieth century. It will be of interest to anyone who enjoys reading crime fiction but is specifically designed with the needs of students in mind. It introduces different theoretical approaches to crime fiction (e.g., formalist, historicist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, feminist) and will be a useful supplement to a range of crime fiction courses, whether they focus on historical contexts, ideological shifts, the emergence of sub-genres, or the application of critical theories. Forty-seven widely available stories and novels are chosen for detailed discussion. In seeking to illuminate the relationship between different phases of generic development Lee Horsley employs an overlapping historical framework, with sections doubling back chronologically in order to explore the extent to which successive transformations have their roots within the earlier phases of crime writing, as well as responding in complex ways to the preoccupations and anxieties of their own eras. The first part of the study considers the nature and evolution of the main sub-genres of crime fiction: the classic and hard-boiled strands of detective fiction, the non-investigative crime novel (centered on transgressors or victims), and the "mixed" form of the police procedural. The second half of the study examines the ways in which writers have used crime fiction as a vehicle for socio-political critique. These chapters consider the evolution of committed, oppositional strategies, tracing the development of politicized detective and crime fiction, from Depression-era protests against economic injustice to more recent decades which have seen writers launching protests against ecological crimes, rampant consumerism, Reaganomics, racism, and sexism.
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Detecting Women Pocket Guide
by Willetta L. Heising
This pocket guide checklist written by women includes: over 200 new authors since the last edition; more than 800 series detectives created by living women authors; over 3,700 mystery titles in correct series order; more than 650 titles from 1997-98.
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Anatomy of Murder
by Carl Darryl Malmgren
Mystery fiction takes place in a centered world, one whose most distinctive characteristic is motivation (of behavior and signs). Built on a faith in foundations, it insists upon the solidity of social life, the validity of social conventions, and the sanctity of signs. Mystery assures us that motives exist for both words and deeds.".
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Synod of Sleuths
by Jon L. Breen
In this collection of original essays, several prominent writers and critics of the genre examine the interface of theology and detection. Edward D. Hoch discusses Roman Catholic sleuths; James Yaffe discusses Jews in detective fiction; Marvin Lachman discusses the use of religious cults as mystery story backgrounds; co-editor Breen writes of Protestant religious mysteries and on Mormonism in the mystery; and four authors of mysteries about religious detectives--William X. Kienzle, Ellis Peters, Harry Kemelman, and Sister Carol Anne O'Marie--respond to a series of questions about their work.
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The Beautiful Cigar Girl: Mary Rogers, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Invention of Murder
by Stashower, Daniel
No summary available.
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Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science
by Ronald R. Thomas
This is a book about the relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and the invention of the new literary genre of detective fiction in Britain and America. Ronald R. Thomas examines the criminal body as a site of interpretation and enforcement in a wide range of fictional examples, from Poe, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie. He is especially concerned with the authority the literary detective manages to secure through the 'devices' - fingerprinting, photography, lie detectors - with which he discovers the truth and establishes his expertise, and the way in which those devices relate to broader questions of cultural authority at decisive moments in the history of the genre. This is an interdisciplinary project, framing readings of literary texts with an analysis of contemporaneous developments in criminology, the rules of evidence, and modern scientific accounts of identity.
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Resisting Arrest
by Robert A. Rushing
Looks at the detective genre in its many different cultural manifestations, from popular fiction to high literature, from art films to popular television series, and finds that the genre is in fact constituted principally by the promises on which it fails to deliver.
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Arthur Conan Doyle
by Arthur Conan Doyle
An ambitious author and a fearless adventurer, Conan Doyle always considered Sherlock Holmes to be one of his less interesting achievements. He was a ship's surgeon on an Arctic whaling ship at only twenty years of age; traveled to exotic regions of the world; served as a war correspondent and military historian; used his fame as an author to promote social reform, overturn unjust convictions, and run for Parliament twice; and became the world's foremost spokesman for the new religion of Spiritualism.
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Conan Doyle, Detective
by Peter Costello
Arthur Conan Doyle did not rely on imagination for the amazing cases tackled by his hero, Sherlock Holmes, after all. Drawing on new research that follows the tracks the author left in the real world, Peter Costello details how Conan Doyle's fictional outpourings were the direct result of his hidden career as an amateur detective and criminologist. This fascinating book shows how many of Holmes's methods of deduction were actually methods his creator used to solve real crimes, and how real-life Scotland Yard had a Sherlock Holmes of its own: Arthur Conan Doyle. Eight pages of rare photographs are featured in this updated, revised edition of The Real World of Sherlock Holmes.
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Final Séance
by Massimo Polidoro
Details the five-year friendship during which "Houdini and Conan Doyle exchanged views about Spiritualism; conducted investigations of notable mediums of their day, such as Mina 'Margery' Crandon; and even enjoyed vacationing together at Atlantic City."--Jacket.
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The Man Who Created Sherlock Holmes
by Andrew Lycett
A biography of the creator of Sherlock Holmes shows how Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, beginning as a small-town doctor, became a friend to the famous, a celebrated writer, and a psychic investigator.
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The 8:55 to Baghdad
by Andrew Eames
In 1928, Agatha Christie, the world's most widely read author, was a thirty-something single mother.
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Agatha Christie and the Eleven Missing Days
by Jared Cade
This volume gives a meticulously researched account of the disappearance of Agatha Christie over the Christmas period of 1926. It is based upon interviews with close family relatives and features a number of previously unpublished photographs.
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Agatha Christie
by Mark Campbell
Pocket Essential guide to Agatha Christie, legendary author of high grade whodunits and author of the longest running play in the history of British theatre. Campbell provides an informed introduction to the Christie phenomenon, including a biography of the great author, in-depth profiles of ten of her most popular characters, analyses of the stories and a section on film, TV and stage adaptations. Appendices include an exhaustive biography and an overview of the best Christie websites around.
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Dorothy L. Sayers
by Barbara Reynolds
Mystery writer Dorothy Sayers is loved and remembered, most notably, for the creation of sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Harriet Vane. As this biography attests, Sayers was also one of the first women to be awarded a degree from Oxford, a playwright, and an essayist--but also a woman with personal joys and tragedies. Here, Reynolds, a close friend of Sayers, presents a convincing and balanced portrait of one of the 20th century's most brilliant, creative women. 30 b&w photos.
