A History Of American Crime Fiction

A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.

Classic American Crime Writing of the 1920s—including House Without a Key, The Benson Murder Case, The Tower Treasure, The Roman Hat Mystery, The Tower Treasure, and Little Caesar—offers some of the very best of that decade’s writing. Earl Derr Biggers wrote about Charlie Chan, a Chinese-American detective, at a time when racism was rampant. S. S. Van Dine invented Philo Vance, an effete, rich amateur psychologist who flourished while America danced and the stock market rose. Edwin Stratemeyer, a man of mystery himself, singlehandedly created the juvenile mystery, with the beloved Hardy Boys series. The quintessential American detective Ellery Queen leapt onto the stage, to remain popular for fifty years. W. R. Burnett, created the indelible character of Rico, the first gangster antihero. Each of the five novels included is presented in its original published form, with extensive historical and cultural annotations and illustrations added by Edgar-winning editor Leslie S. Klinger, allowing the reader to experience the story to its fullest. Klinger's detailed foreword gives an overview of the history of American crime writing from its beginnings in the early years of America to the twentieth century.

This Companion examines the range of American crime fiction from execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programmes like The Sopranos.

Ever since Sir Arthur Conan Doyle delighted readers with the fictional genius detective, Sherlock Holmes, crime fiction has been plumbed by mystery writers everywhere. This volume of 12 stories spans crime from the Bronze Age to World War II, and will appeal to the current readers of The Mammoth Book of New Sherlock Holmes Adventures and Best British Mysteries.

Owners of mystery bookshops will tell you that there are several sorts of buyers: those who purchase on impulse or whim; genre addicts who buy paperbacks by the week and by the armful; and those who have caught up on canonical texts and regularly buy new novels by select authors in hardcover. Richard B. Schwartz belongs in the last group, with his own list of approximately seventy favorite writers. Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction explores the work of these writers, building upon 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.

Leonard Cassuto's cultural history of the hard-boiled crime genre recovers the fascinating link between tough guys and sensitive women

This book examines how Latin American detective stories portray individualism and the state through the figures of the private eye and the police. Fabricio Tocco argues that these portrayals constitute a far more radical critique than the one developed by the Anglo-American canon, culminating in a transnational “poetics of failure” rooted in dissatisfaction with the neoliberal state.