Bücher der Reihe Crime Files

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.

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 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.

This book represents the first serious consideration of the 'domestic noir' phenomenon and, by extension, the psychological thriller.

This book undertakes a study of the trope of possessed child in literature and film. It argues that the possessed child is fundamentally an American phenomenon which, first, may be traced to the Calvinist bias of the US as a nation founded on Puritanism and, second, to the rise of Catholicism in that country, to which Puritanism owes its origins.

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.

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 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.

This book of interdisciplinary essays serves to situate the original Sherlock Holmes, and his various adaptations, in a contemporary cultural context. This collection is prompted by three main and related questions: firstly, why is Sherlock Holmes such an enduring and ubiquitous cultural icon;

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.

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.

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.

In doing so, this collection of essays examines how the relationship between global crime, capitalism, and policing produces new configurations of violence in crime fiction - and asks whether the genre can find ways of analyzing and even opposing such violence as part of its necessarily limited search for justice both within and beyond the state.