The Oxford Companion To Crime And Mystery Writing

"Entertaining and authoritative, this alphabetically arranged companion is an indispensable reference guide to crime and mystery writing. Unique in its biographical and critical treatment of major detective writers, it is a comprehensive digest to the gen

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 adds 101 new entries on the hottest new names in works ranging from puzzling whodunits to chilling crime novels.

The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction 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 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. The collection, by an international team of established specialists, offers students invaluable reference material including a chronology and guides to further reading. The volume aims to ensure that its readers will be grounded in the history of crime fiction and its critical reception.

Contributors delineate the range of relationships among women writers, women detectives in mystery fiction, and women readers, examining detective fiction through the eyes of actual and hypothetical women readers in a gender- and genre-specific analysis. They offer a theoretical and critical investigation of both historical and contemporary models of mystery fiction. Authors discussed include Sara Paretsky, Joan Hess, Sue Grafton, and D.R. Meredith. No index. Paper edition (unseen), $12.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

This Boston-based mystery stars smart and sassy Beantown Banner reporter Liz Higgins, who rails at being assigned only light news highlighted in front page teasers. She vows to change that by finding a missing mom and nailing front-page news in the process. Liz's quest takes her into Boston's lively Irish pub/Celtic music scene, the elegant Wellesley landscape, and as far as Fiji. Along the way, she courageously pursues a tangle of clues and falls for two very different men: the enigmatic forensics expert Dr. Cormack Kinnaird and the warmhearted Tom Horton, who pastes ads on the huge billboard that dwarfs Liz's tiny house on the edge of the Mass Pike.

Crime fiction has been one of the most popular genres since the 19th century, but has roots in works as varied as Sophocles, Herodotus, and Shakespeare. In this Very Short Introduction Richard Bradford explores the history of the genre, by considering the various definitions of 'crime fiction' and looking at how it has developed over time. Discussing the popularity of crime fiction worldwide and its various styles; the role that gender plays within the genre; spy fiction, and legal dramas and thrillers; he explores how the crime novel was shaped by the work of British and American authors in the 18th and 19th centuries. Highlighting the works of notorious authors such as Edgar Allan Poe, Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, and Raymond Chandler — to name but a few — he considers the role of the crime novel in modern popular culture and asks whether we can, and whether we should, consider crime fiction serious 'literature'. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.