Bertens, Hans and Theo D'haen, Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2001, Crime Files). Synopsis: ‘This accessible, lively, and informative study gives a clear, comprehensive overview of recent trends in American crime fiction. Building on a discussion of the immediate predecessors, Bertens and D'haen focus on the work of popular and award-winning authors of the last 15 years. Particular attention is given to writers who have reworked established conventions and explored new directions, especially women and those from ethnic minorities.’
Chernaik, Warren, Martin Swales and Robert Vilain (eds), The Art of Detective Fiction (Palgrave, 2000). Editorial review from amazon.com: ‘The contributors of this volume pay tribute to and seek to account for the astonishing durability if the detective story as a genre. The essays take a variety of theoretical approaches and include detective fiction in languages other than English. Particular attention is paid to the 'Golden Age' of English detective story writing and to the 'hard-boiled' American version of the genre.’
Christian, Ed, The Post-Colonial Detective (Palgrave-Macmillan, 2001, Crime File Series) Synopsis: 'Post-colonial detection combines western influenced police methods and plot conventions, and indigenous cultural insights and wisdom in exotic settings. This introduction establishes a context in which to view more than a dozen notable detectives and authors from around the world.’
Cochran. David, America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (Smithsonian Institution Press, 2000). Editorial review from amazon.com: 'Cochran details how, at the height of the Cold War, ten writers and filmmakers challenged such social pieties as the superiority of American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone related stories of victims of vast, faceless bureaucratic powers. Jim Thompson's The Grifters portrayed the ravages of capitalism on those at the bottom of the social ladder. Patricia Highsmith's The Talented Mr. Ripley featured an amoral con man who infiltrated the privileged class and wreaked havoc once there. All of these artists helped to set the stage for the 1960s counterculture's challenge to the established order. In doing so, they blurred the lines between "high" and "low" art.’
Collins, Max Allan, The History of Mystery (Collectors Press, 2001, Art Fiction Series) Editorial review from Publishers Weekly (quoted by amazon.com): ‘Edgar nominee and Shamus Award-winner Max Allan Collins a bestselling author whose graphic novel Road to Perdition is the foundation of a DreamWorks film due out in March [2002] turns his attention to the evolution of his favorite form in The History of Mystery, a gift book and reference tome for all whodunit fans. Nearly 400 illustrations (of dime novel covers, comic strips, movie posters and album graphics) reveal the genre in all its garish glory.’
Delamater, Jerome H. and Ruth Prigozy (eds), The Detective in American Fiction, Film, and Television (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1998, Contributions to the Study of Popular Culture). Editorial review from amazon.com: 'The detective, as a pre-eminent figure in all forms of American popular culture, has become the subject of a variety of theoretical exploration. By investigating that figure, these essays demonstrate how the genre embodies all the contradictions of American society and the ways in which literature and the media attempt to handle those contradictions. Issues of class, gender, and race; the interaction of film and literature; and generic evolution are fundamental to any understanding of the American detective in all of his or her forms.
Delamater, Jerome H. and Ruth Prigozy (eds), Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction (Greenwood Publishing Group, 1997). Editorial review from amazon.com: 'Combining theoretical and practical approaches, this collection of essays explores classic detective fiction from a variety of contemporary viewpoints. Among the diverse perspectives are those which interrogate the way the genre reflects important social and cultural attitudes, contributes to a reader's ability to adapt to the challenges of daily life, and provides alternate takes on the role of the detective as an investigator and arbiter of "truth."’
Fine, David M., Imagining Los Angeles: A City in Fiction (University of New Mexico Press, 2000). ‘Fine presents nine chapters including Los Angeles-related writers from F. Scott Fitzgerald, Carl Van Vetchen, and Anita Loos to John Rechy, Luis Valdez, and Carolyn See.…In many ways, Fine's Los Angeles is a cultural Frankenstein possessing no soul or center…Its architecture consists of fantasy and promotional kitsch; freeways loop its meaninglessness. In the years between the unreal plaster, ersatz-Babylonian sets of D. W. Griffith's Intolerance and the repressive Hayes Office, a certain darkness emerges, evolving into the noir culture of the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, replete with tough guy detective stories and movies such as The Postman Always Rings Twice (1946) and Sunset Boulevard (1950). Only Latino culture exemplified by the Pachuco and La Raza movements of the 1940s and 1970s give the city any promise of heart or focus.’ (from review in The Western Historical Quarterly (http://www.historycooperative.org/journals/whq/32.2/br_16.html)
Gillis, Stacy and Philippa Gates (editors), The Devil Himself: Villainy in Detective Fiction and Film (Greenwood Press, 2001). Synopsis, amazon.com: 'This study of the villain in detective fiction and film examines such questions as what the villains reflect about the heroes, what they reflect aobut society, and what defines villainous activity. The texts discussed span the end of the eighteenth through the twentieth century and range from Charles Brockden Brown's Weiland (1798) to the film Se7en (1995). As the villains reflect the changing ethics of society, the shift in such nebulous moral boundaries can be traced through the changing depictions of these dark characters. Correspondingly, essays address issues of gender, genre, race, and class. In addition to Weiland and Se7en, books and films discussed include Dickins's Bleak House, Wilkie Collins's Woman in White, the works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the films of Alfred Hitchcock, the James Bond novels and films, the novels of P.D. James, Ruth Rendell, and Dorothy Sayers, A. S. Byatt's Possession, Patricia Conrwall's Scarpetta mysteries, Margaret Atwood's Robber Bride, and the movie The Usual Suspects. As one of the most successful literary genres, detective fiction appeals to a wide audience. This study will interest scholars of 19th and 20th century literature, of film, and of popular culture. Each chapter concludes with a select bibliography and filmography, where applicable.'
Haining, Peter, The Classic Era of Crime Fiction (Chicago Review Pr, 2002). Editorial review, amazon.com: 'This lavishly illustrated history features rare covers and classic illustrations, revealing how crucial artists were to establishing the identity and popularity of crime fiction. During its "classic era"-from 1850 to 1950-a variety of writers developed every important element of the genre: the police detective, the professional sleuth, the hard-boiled private eye, the secret agent, and of course, the criminal masterminds, crooks, and gangsters. From Sherlock Holmes and James Bond to Edgar Allan Poe and Joseph Conrad, this book explores an exciting cultural history. Crime enthusiasts can here see how famous (and sometimes infamous) works of crime fiction originally looked, and how unknown writers and illustrators became responsible for one of the cornerstones of popular culture.'
Horsley, Lee, The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001). Editorial review from amazon.com: ‘A good treatment of the fiction, its cultural relevance, cinematic parallels and criticism…’ Synopsis: ‘What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? In considering such questions, this study ranges over hundreds of novels, analyzing the politics and poetics of noir from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain to the exciting diversity of nineties thrillers, with sections on the tough investigators, gangsters, and victims of the Depression years; the first-person killers, femmes fatales, and black protagonists of mid-century; the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of contemporary thrillers and future noir.’
Moddelmog, William E., Reconstituting Authority: American Fiction in the Province of the Law (University of Iowa Press, 2001). Editorial review from amazon.com: ‘In Reconstituting Authority, William Moddelmog explores the ways in which American law and literature converged in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through close readings of significant texts from the era, he reveals not only how novelists invoked specific legal principles and ideals in their fictions but also how they sought to reconceptualize the boundaries of law and literature in ways that transformed previous versions of both legal and literary authority…Moddelmog argues that because the law was instrumental in setting the terms by which concepts such as race, gender, nationhood, ownership, and citizenship were defined in the nineteenth century, authors challenging those definitions had to engage the law on its own terrain: to place their work in a dialogue with the law by telling stories that were already authorized (though perhaps suppressed) by legal institutions.’
Nickerson, Catherine Ross, The Web of Iniquity: Early Detective Fiction by American Women (Duke Univ Pr, 1999). Editorial review from The Women's Review of Books (quoted amazon.com): ‘Nickerson explores the historical and literary contexts within which detective fiction emerged. Her book makes an important contribution to the study of the ways popular genre fiction written and read by middle class women-fiction traditionally considered conservative-challenged domestic ideology. . . . Nickerson's plot summaries are clear and sufficient to permit readers to appreciate her thoughtful analysis; anyone interested in women's literature and its relationship to social history should find this book illuminating. . . . The discussion is well informed by Nickerson's knowledge of other critical work on domestic fiction and the gothic, as well as literature of the period… Happily, in spite of firm theoretical grounding and even a footnote cameo by Derrida, this intelligent and engaging book is written for a broad audience of feminist readers and scholars.’
Panek, Leroy (ed), New Hard-Boiled Writers, 1970S-1990s (Popular Press, 2000). Editorial review from amazon.com: ‘Beginning in the 1970s a new generation of writers took over the hard-boiled storyreated by Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett and remade it to fit the realities of their world…With an eye toward the origins and development of the hard-boiled story, LeRoy Lad Panek comments both on the way it has changed over the past three decades and examines the work of ten significant contemporary hard-boiled writers. Chapters on Robert B. Parker, James Crumley, Loren Estleman, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Carl Hiaasen, Earl Emerson, Robert Crais, James Lee Burke, and Walter Mosley show how the new writers have used the hard-boiled story and the hard-boiled hero to make powerful statements about reality in the last quarter of the twentieth century.’
Rowland, Susan, From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Palgrave and St. Martin's Press, 2001, Crime Files). Editorial review from amazon.com: ‘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, Nag Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of 42 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.’
Pyrhonen, Heta, Mayhem and Murder: Narrative and Moral Problems in the Detective Story (Univ of Toronto Pr, 1999, Toronto Studies in Semiotics). No review available on amazon.com.
Roth, Marty, Foul & Fair Play: Reading Genre in Classic Detective Fiction (University of Georgia Press, 1995). Editorial review from Midwest Book Review (quoted amazon.com): ‘Foul and Fair Play is an examination of classic detective fiction as a genre - an attempt to read a wide variety of texts by different authors as variations on a common and relatively tight set of conventions. Mary Roth covers the period from the "prehistory" of detective fiction in Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Wilkie Collins, Robert Louis Stevenson, and H. G. Wells up to the 1960s, which marked the end of the classic period. The detective fiction genre, as Roth defines it, includes analytic detective fiction, hard-boiled detective fiction, and the spy thriller. Roth insists on the structural common ground of these three types of writing and places them in the larger system (conventions of character and epistemology) of mystery fiction that precedes and surrounds them. An extremely original study, Foul and Fair Play offers many insights into the literary and cultural history of a very popular genre.’
Schwartz, Richard B., Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction (Univ of Missouri Pr, 2002). Synopsis, online at http://www.system.missouri.edu/upress/spring2002/schwartz.htm: Schwartz builds on ‘a reading of almost seven hundred novels from the 1980s and 1990s. By looking at recurring themes in these mysteries, Schwartz offers readers new ways to approach the works in relation to contemporary cultural concerns. With sensitivity to a culture consisting of frontiers and borders, Schwartz examines the position of the vigilante in art and society, racial bridges and divides, the absence of divine presence and compensating narrative strategies, the unresolved nature of the crime plot and its roots in chivalric romance. The special importance of setting and the growing importance of grotesque humor in the fiction studied here are addressed by the author, as is the journalistic/instructional dimension of the field and the importance of crossover narratives.’
Thomas, Ronald R., Detective Fiction and the Rise of Forensic Science (Cambridge University Press, 2000, Cambridge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Literature and Culture, No 26). Editorial review from amazon.com: ‘This is the first book about the relationship between the development of forensic science in the nineteenth century and the new literary genre of detective fiction in Britain and America--from Maupassant, Dickens and Hawthorne through Twain and Conan Doyle to Hammett, Chandler and Christie. Ronald R. Thomas is especially concerned with the authority the literary detective manages to secure through the 'devices'--fingerprinting, photography, lie detectors--and the way in which those devices relate to broader questions of cultural authority at decisive moments in the history of the genre.’
Thoms, Peter, Detection & Its Designs: Narrative & Power in 19th Century Detective Fiction (Ohio Univ Pr, 1998). ‘Thoms offers close readings of nineteenth-century detective fiction, starting with Caleb Williams, moving to Poe's Dupin tales, and culminating with three classics of the genre - Bleak House, The Moonstone, and The Hound of the Baskervilles. The detective, he argues, is an authorial figure who strives to apprehend and contain the criminal plot and thus appropriate the entire story. Nor is this drive for narrative mastery an innocent one…In his desire to control others and their plots, Thoms argues, the detective…bears a disturbing resemblance to the criminal. Thoms's series of close readings convincingly reveals detective fiction to be essentially and pervasively self-conscious, a genre which almost obsessively examines the subject of storytelling itself.’ (Reviewed online in University of Toronto Quarterly - Volume 69, No. 1 Winter 1999/2000 - http://www.utpjournals.com/product/utq/691/designs87.html)
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