Bücher der Reihe Crime Files

Agatha Christie and the Guilty Pleasure of Poison examines Christie's female poisoners in the context of Christie's own experience in pharmacy and of detective fiction. In doing so, it uncovers an overlooked dynamic in which female poisoners deliver well-deserved comeuppance for gendered and classed wrongdoing ordinarily accepted in everyday life. While critics have long recognized male outlaws, like Robin Hood, who use crime to oppose a corrupt system, this book contends that female outlaws - witches and poisoners - offer a similar heritage of empowered femininity. Far from cozy and formulaic, Agatha Christie's outlaw poisoners offer readers the surprising pleasures of comeuppance, and they set the stage for contemporary detective fiction writers, more recent films depicting poisoning as empowering, and even poison gardens, which are tourist destinations that offer visitors the guilty pleasure of poison.

This book provides a critical discussion of True Crime literature, arguing for the deconstruction of the genre into subgenres that better reflect a work¿s contents. In analysing seminal and lesser-known works, the areas of authenticity, accuracy, and author proximity are considered to form a framework on which an individual publication¿s subgenre (re)categorisation can be assessed. The book considers the likes of Ann Rule, Truman Capote, and Maggie Nelson, among other notable authors. Their works ¿ those that fit into True Crime and those that defy categorisation within the genre as it exists ¿ are reviewed, and their defining features critiqued. Topics such as narrative methodologies, figurative language, and utilisation of research are considered in support of this. These strands combine to a larger discussion regarding a deconstruction of True Crime, and the ways in which this will improve the social responsibility of the genre, and encourage a more conscientious consumerism of it.

This open access book examines how the form of the list features as a tool for meaning-making in the genre of detective fiction from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. The book analyzes how both readers and detectives rely on listing as an ordering and structuring tool, and highlights the crucial role that lists assume in the reading process. It extends the boundaries of an emerging field dedicated to the study of lists in literature and caters to a newly revived interest in form and New Formalist approaches in narratological research. The central aim of this book is to show how detective fiction makes use of lists in order to frame various conceptions of knowledge. The frames created by these lists are crucial to decoding the texts, and they can be used to demonstrate how readers can be engaged in the act of detection or manipulated into accepting certain propositions in the text.

Food, Consumption, and Masculinity in American Hardboiled Fiction draws on three related bodies of knowledge: crime fiction criticism, masculinity studies, and the cultural analysis of food and consumption practices from a critical eating studies perspective. In particular, this book focuses on food as an analytical category in the study of tough masculinity as represented in American hardboiled fiction. Through an examination of six American novels: Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon, Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep, Leigh Brackett's No Good from a Corpse, Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place, Jim Thompson's The Killer Inside Me, and Rex Stout's Champagne for One, this book shows how these novels reflect the gradual process of redefining consumption and consumerism in America, which traditionally has been coded as feminine. Marta Usiekniewicz shows thatfood and eating also reflect power relations and larger social and economic structures connected to class, gender, geography, sexuality, and ability, to name just a few.

From Sherlock Holmes onwards, fictional detectives use lenses: Ocular Proof and the Spectacled Detective in British Crime Fiction argues that these visual aids are metaphors for ways of seeing, and that they help us to understand not only individual detectives¿ methods but also the kinds of cultural work detective fiction may do. It is sometimes regarded as a socially conservative form, and certainly the enduring popularity of ¿Golden Age¿ writers such as Christie, Sayers, Allingham and Marsh implies a strong element of nostalgia in the appeal of the genre. The emphasis on visual aids, however, suggests that solving crime is not a simple matter of uncovering truth but a complex, sophisticated and inherently subjective process, and thus challenges any sense of comforting certainties. Moreover, the value of eye-witness testimony is often troubled in detective fiction by use of the phrase ¿the ocular proof¿, whose origin in Shakespeare¿s Othello reminds usthat Othello is manipulated by Iago into misinterpreting what he sees. The act of seeing thus comes to seem ideological and provisional, and Lisa Hopkins argues that the kind of visual aid selected by each detective is an index of his particular propensities and biases.

This book analyses the gender roles and political contexts of spy fiction narratives published during the years of the Cold War. It offers an introduction to the development of spy fiction both in England and in the United States and explores the ways in which issues such as the atomic bomb, double agents, paranoia, propaganda and megalomania manifest themselves within the genre. The book examines the ongoing marginalization of women within spy fiction texts, exploring the idea that this unique period in global history is responsible for the active promotion and celebration of masculinity and male superiority. From James Bond to Jason Bourne, the book evaluates the ongoing enforcement of patriarchal ideas and oppressions that, in the name of national security and patriotic duty, have contributed to the development of a genre in which discrimination and bias continue to dominate.

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role¿either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective¿s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children¿s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.

100 British Crime Writers explores a history of British crime writing between 1855 and 2015 through 100 writers, detailing their lives and significant writing and exploring their contributions to the genre.

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders.

Truth to Post-Truth in American Detective Fiction examines questions of truth and relativism, turning to detectives, both real and imagined, from Poe's C.

This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres.

Focusing on contemporary crime narratives from different parts of the world, this collection of essays explores the mobility of crimes, criminals and investigators across social, cultural and national borders.

This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. After considering Christie's emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha Christie Bernthal explores homophobic stereotypes, gender performativity, queer children, and masquerade in key texts published between 1920 and 1952.

The locked room mystery is one of the iconic creations of popular fiction. Michael Cook's critical study reveals how this archetypal form of the puzzle story has had a significant effect in shaping the immensely popular genre of detective fiction. The book includes analysis of texts from Poe to the present day.

100 British Crime Writers explores a history of British crime writing between 1855 and 2015 through 100 writers, detailing their lives and significant writing and exploring their contributions to the genre.

In 1888 the name Jack the Ripper entered public consciousness with the brutal murders of women in the East End of London. Nineteenth-century history, art and literature, psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung and feminist film theory are all used to deconstruct the representation of Jack the Ripper on screen.

Overviewing the legal thriller, where most of the titles have been written by professionals such as lawyers and judges, this book takes a gender focused approach to analyzing recent titles and argues for the genre both in the way its narrative pattern parallels that of an actual court trial, and how it reflects the concerns of contemporary society.

This book investigates the development of crime fiction in the 1880s and 1890s, challenging studies of late-Victorian crime fiction which have given undue prominence to a handful of key figures and have offered an over-simplified analytical framework, thereby overlooking the generic, moral, and formal complexities of the nascent genre.

Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story is a lively series of case studies celebrating the close relationship between detective fiction and the ghost story. It features many of the most famous authors from both genres including Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, M. R. James and Tony Hillerman.

This book reveals subversive representations of gender, race and class in detective dime novels (1860-1915), arguing that inherent tensions between subversive and conservative impulses-theorized as contamination and containment-explain detective fiction's ongoing popular appeal to readers and to writers such as Twain and Faulkner.

This is a feminist study of a recurring character type in classic British detective fiction by women - a woman who behaves like a Victorian gentleman. Exploring this character type leads to a new evaluation of the politics of classic detective fiction and the middlebrow novel as a whole.

Barry Forshaw, the UK's principal crime fiction expert, presents a celebration and analysis of the Scandinavian crime genre, from Sjoewall and Wahloeoe's Martin Beck series through Henning Mankell's Wallander to Stieg Larsson's demolition of the Swedish Social Democratic ideal in the publishing phenomenon The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo .

This book is a study of the 'mothers' of the mystery genre. Traditionally the invention of crime writing has been ascribed to Poe, Wilkie Collins and Conan Doyle, but they had formidable women rivals, whose work has been until recently largely forgotten. The purpose of this book is to 'cherchez les femmes', in a project of rediscovery.

Why do true crime stories exert such popular fascination? Embracing a range of non-fiction accounts - true crime book and magazines, law and order television, popular journalism - it traces how they harness and explore current concerns about law and order, crime and punishment and personal vulnerability.

This study of crime and masquerade in fiction focuses upon the criminal as a 'performer'. Through stimulating discussions of a wide range of criminal types, Peach argues for the importance of novels that have been neglected. The book integrates incisive literary and cultural criticism with arguments about gender, masquerade, crime and culture.

This exploration into the development of women's self-defence from 1850 to 1914 features major writers, including H.G. Wells, Elizabeth Robins and Richard Marsh, and encompasses an unusually wide-ranging number of subjects from hatpin crimes to the development of martial arts for women.

Analysing seventies texts about crime, police, detectives, corruption, paranoia and revenge, The American Thriller aims to open debates on genre in the light of audience theory, literary history and the place of popular fiction at the moment of its production.