The Literary Detective

It may seem obvious -- but it is not! How to read a book, a novel? How to increase your joy at reading an old or a new work? How to inject new vitality into an old and, perhaps, boring activity? Is there a method or a technique in reading a novel which can illuminate the meanings behind the story? This book answers these questions in a bold, imaginative and accessible manner! Reading is similar to a treasure hunt. You set out, you collect clues and you hope to discover a treasure, or solve a mystery. How does it work? Great detectives start out with an open mind, unaware of what lies ahead of them. They investigate, they examine the evidence, they collect the clues, they ask questions, they think things through, until they solve the mystery. Glen Hammond argues that anybody -- a casual reader, a student, or a teacher -- can learn the techniques of this new kind of literary detection. In eighteen chapters -- Sleuthing, The Creative Relationship, Tools of the Trade, Villains, Method, Title, Repetition, Characterisation, Setting, Associative Pairing, Page Space, Case Closed, Expert Witnesses -- Glenn Hammond introduces you to the excitement of reading and the treasures to be found in literary work.

The Literary Detective is an omnibus edition of John Sutherland's three best-selling collections of literary puzzles, Is Heathcliffe a Murderer?, Can Jane Eyre be Happy?, and Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? Investigating a variety of anomalies, enigmas, and conundrums such as 'Why does RobinsonCrusoe find only one footprint?' and 'Where does Fanny Hill keep her contraceptives?', Professor Sutherland explores the questions readers often ask and critics rarely discuss. His forensic skills focus on authors from Defoe and Fielding to Wells and Woolf, relishing in particular thenineteenth-century novelists, Austen, Collins, Dickens, and the Brontes.By addressing 'real world' questions John Sutherland has brought lit. crit. Down from the rarefied heights of academe and into the everyday discourse of ordinary readers, who bring their own expertise to bear on these novels. In his introduction he quotes from some of the many letters he hasreceived, which demonstrate that we can all be astute and entertaining critics. The 'Sherlock Holmes of Literature', as he has been called, John Sutherland reminds us of the sheer pleasure and excitement that good books inspire, and of their endless ability to surprise and delight us.

This book begins with a history of the detective genre, coextensive with the novel itself, identifying the attitudes and institutions needed for the genre to emerge in its mature form around 1880. The theory of the genre is laid out along with its central theme of the getting and deployment of knowledge. Sherlock Holmes, the English Classic stories and their inheritors are examined in light of this theme and the balance of two forms of knowledge used in fictional detection--cool or rational, and warm or emotional. The evolution of the genre formula is driven by changes in the social climate in which it is embedded. These changes explain the decay of the English Classic and its replacement by noir, hardboiled and spy stories, to end in the cul-de-sac of the thriller and the nostalgic Neo-Classic. Possible new forms of the detective story are suggested.

Computational linguistics can be used to uncover mysteries in text which are not always obvious to visual inspection. For example, the computer analysis of writing style can show who might be the true author of a text in cases of disputed authorship or suspected plagiarism. The theoretical background to authorship attribution is presented in a step by step manner, and comprehensive reviews of the field are given in two specialist areas, the writings of William Shakespeare and his contemporaries, and the various writing styles seen in religious texts. The final chapter looks at the progress computers have made in the decipherment of lost languages. This book is written for students and researchers of general linguistics, computational and corpus linguistics, and computer forensics. It will inspire future researchers to study these topics for themselves, and gives sufficient details of the methods and resources to get them started.

P. D. James, the undisputed queen of mystery, gives us an intriguing, inspiring and idiosyncratic look at the genre she has spent her life perfecting. Examining mystery from top to bottom, beginning with such classics as Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and then looking at such contemporary masters as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell, P. D. James goes right to the heart of the genre. Along the way she traces the lives and writing styles of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and many more. Here is P.D. James discussing detective fiction as social history, explaining its stylistic components, revealing her own writing process, and commenting on the recent resurgence of detective fiction in modern culture. It is a must have for the mystery connoisseur and casual fan alike.

This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have originated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press. The volume traces how police officers, detectives, criminals, and the criminal justice system were discussed in the pages of a variety of magazines and journals, and argues that this affected how the wider nineteenth-century society perceived organised law enforcement and detection. This, in turn, helped to shape detective fiction into the genre that we recognise today. The book also explores how periodicals and newspapers contained forgotten, non-canonical examples of ‘detective fiction’, and that these texts can help complicate the narrative of the genre’s evolution across the mid- to late nineteenth century.

'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.

This book maps the development of the boy detective in British children’s literature from the mid-nineteenth to the early-twentieth century. It explores how this liminal figure – a boy operating within a man’s world – addresses adult anxieties about boyhood and the boy’s transition to manhood. It investigates the literary, social and ideological significance of a vast array of popular detective narratives appearing in ‘penny dreadfuls’ and story papers which were aimed primarily at working-class boys. This study charts the relationship between developments in the representation of the fictional boy detective and changing expectations of and attitudes towards real-life British boys during a period where the boy’s role in the future of the Empire was a key concern. It emphasises the value of the early fictional boy detective as an ideological tool to condition boy readers to fulfil adult desires and expectations of what boyhood and, in the future, proper manhood should entail. It will be of particular importance to scholars working in the fields of children’s literature, crime fiction and popular culture.