Download or read book Talking About Detective Fiction written by P. D. James and published by Knopf Canada. This book was released on 2009-12-01 with total page 143 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: P. D. James examines the genre of detective fiction from top to bottom, beginning with the mystery plots at the hearts of such novels as Great Expectations and Jane Eyre, and bringing us firmly into the present with such writers as Amanda Cross and Henning Mankell. Along the way she writes about Arthur Conan Doyle, Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, and Josephine Tey, among many others. She traces the facts of their lives into and out of their work; clarifies their individual styles; and gives us indelible portraits of the characters they've created: from Sherlock Holmes, "the unchallenged Great Detective," to Sara Paretsky's spunky, sexually liberated female investigator, V. I. Warshawski. She compares British and American "Golden Age" mystery writing, including the groundbreaking work of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. She discusses detective fiction as social history; the stylistic components of the genre; her own process of writing; how critics have reacted over the years (Edmund Wilson hated it, W.H. Auden was "addicted"); and what she sees as a renewal of detective stories—and of the detective hero—in recent years. Here is the perfect marriage of writer and subject—essential reading for every lover of detective fiction.
Download or read book Adapting Detective Fiction written by Neil McCaw and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2010-11-18 with total page 209 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adapting Detective Fiction is a study of specific instances of adaptation, with close readings of both the originating sources and adapted texts. But it is also more than this. It is a study of the politics of representation in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the role television detective fiction plays in this. It is about the mutually-informing interrelation of cultural texts and political rhetoric, about the connection between the popular-cultural depiction of crime and criminality and how we come to understand human behaviour and culpability; most of all, it is a detailed consideration of what the process of adaptation reveals about the shifting nature of the world in which we live. With specific reference to television series such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Cadfael, and Midsomer Murders, Adapting Detective Fiction uses adaptation as the basis for an exercise in later twentieth-century cultural history, illustrating the fundamental role detective fictions play in popular beliefs about the nature of crime and Englishness.
Download or read book Theory and Practice of Classic Detective Fiction written by Jerome H. Delamater and published by Praeger. This book was released on 1997-10-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays explores classic detective fiction from a variety of contemporary viewpoints. Among the diverse perspectives are those which interrogate how the genre reflects social and cultural attitudes and interpret the role of the detective as arbiter of "truth".
Download or read book Adapting Detective Fiction written by Neil McCaw and published by A&C Black. This book was released on 2011-01-20 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: >
Download or read book Queering Agatha Christie written by J.C Bernthal and published by Springer. This book was released on 2016-09-02 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and has become synonymous with a nostalgic, conservative tradition of crime fiction. J.C. Bernthal reads Christie through the lens of queer theory, uncovering a playful, alert, and subversive social commentary. 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. Christie engaged with debates around human identity in a unique historical period affected by two world wars. The final chapter considers twenty-first century Poirot and Marple adaptations, with visible LGBT characters, and poses the question: might the books be queerer?
Download or read book Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World written by Dr Marc Singer and published by Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.. This book was released on 2013-04-28 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.
Download or read book The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn written by Colin Dexter and published by Pan Macmillan. This book was released on 2011-02-10 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn is the third novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series. Morse had never ceased to wonder why, with the staggering advances in medical science, all pronouncements concerning times of death seemed so disconcertingly vague. When the newly-appointed and gifted member of the Oxford Examinations Syndicate is murdered in his north Oxford home, so starts a formidably complicated homicide case for Chief Inspector Morse. For tracking down the killer will involve navigating the insular and labyrinthine world of Oxford colleges . . . The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn is followed by the fourth Inspector Morse book, Service of All the Dead.
Download or read book The First Detective written by Edgar Allan Poe and published by . This book was released on 2009-05 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The 'first detective' of fiction steps out 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' by Edgar Allan Poe is widely considered to be the first true detective story; also in this volume are the author's two other detective fiction classics featuring the same central character-'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' & 'The Purloined Letter.' The French detective who features in all three is Chevalier Auguste Dupin, an amateur sleuth who puts himself in the position of the criminal and then uses logical deduction to discover how a crime was committed. This is an opportunity for lovers of classic crime and detective fiction to own and read these important and groundbreaking mysteries in a single volume, available in paperback or hardback with dust jacket for collectors.
Download or read book It s a Print written by William Reynolds and published by Popular Press. This book was released on 1994 with total page 254 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The mechanistic age of the twentieth century has required a mechanized medium for expression: the production of filmdependent from the start on machines such as cameras, projectors, lights, and now more heavily reliant on computers, sensitive films, miniaturization, and sophisticated sound recording devices - has flowered in this century not only as a means of popular entertainment, but as a critically acclaimed art form. These essays highlight true cinematic adaptations as completely different products from films based loosely on the gimmick or plot or character of a certain fiction.
Download or read book New Perspectives on Detective Fiction written by Casey Cothran and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2015-10-14 with total page 264 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection establishes new perspectives on the idea of mystery, as it is enacted and encoded in the genre of detective fiction. Essays reclaim detective fiction as an object of critical inquiry, examining the ways it shapes issues of social destabilization, moral ambiguity, reader complicity, intertextuality, and metafiction. Breaking new ground by moving beyond the critical preoccupation with classification of historical types and generic determinants, contributors examine the effect of mystery on literary forms and on readers, who experience the provocative, complex process of coming to grips with the unknown and the unknowable. This volume opens up discussion on publically acclaimed, modern works of mystery and on classic pieces, addressing a variety of forms including novels, plays, graphic novels, television series, films, and ipad games. Re-examining the interpretive potential of a genre that seems easily defined yet has endless permutations, the book closely analyzes the cultural function of mystery, the way it intervenes in social and political problems, as well as the literary properties that give the genre its particular shape. The volume treats various texts as meaningful subjects for critical analysis and sheds new light on the interpretive potential for a genre that creates as much ambiguity as it does clarity. Scholars of mystery and detective fiction, crime fiction, genre studies, and cultural studies will find this volume invaluable.
Download or read book Creatures of Darkness written by Gene D. Phillips and published by University Press of Kentucky. This book was released on 2014-07-11 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: More than any other writer, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) is responsible for raising detective stories from the level of pulp fiction to literature. Chandler's hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe set the standard for rough, brooding heroes who managed to maintain a strong sense of moral conviction despite a cruel and indifferent world. Chandler's seven novels, including The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953), with their pessimism and grim realism, had a direct influence on the emergence of film noir. Chandler worked to give his crime novels the flavor of his adopted city, Los Angeles, which was still something of a frontier town, rife with corruption and lawlessness. In addition to novels, Chandler wrote short stories and penned the screenplays for several films, including Double Indemnity (1944) and Strangers on a Train (1951). His work with Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock on these projects was fraught with the difficulties of collaboration between established directors and an author who disliked having to edit his writing on demand. Creatures of Darkness is the first major biocritical study of Chandler in twenty years. Gene Phillips explores Chandler's unpublished script for Lady in the Lake, examines the process of adaptation of the novel Strangers on a Train, discusses the merits of the unproduced screenplay for Playback, and compares Howard Hawks's director's cut of The Big Sleep with the version shown in theaters. Through interviews he conducted with Wilder, Hitchcock, Hawks, and Edward Dmytryk over the past several decades, Phillips provides deeper insight into Chandler's sometimes difficult personality. Chandler's wisecracking Marlowe has spawned a thousand imitations. Creatures of Darkness lucidly explains the author's dramatic impact on both the literary and cinematic worlds, demonstrating the immeasurable debt that both detective fiction and the neo-noir films of today owe to Chandler's stark vision.
Download or read book Detective Fiction in a Postcolonial and Transnational World written by Nels Pearson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-04-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.
Download or read book Hispanic and Luso Brazilian Detective Fiction written by Renée W. Craig-Odders and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2006-03-20 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The image of the hard-boiled private investigator from gritty pulp fiction, a terse and mysterious figure, has become increasingly universal as the detective novel crosses more and more borders. A booming genre in Latin America, Spain and other Hispanic cultures, detective fiction has transcended the limitations of its influences. Hispanic authors relatively new to the genre have published novels and series popular with the public, while a number of well-known writers have adapted the genre to reflect the concurrent globalization of modern society and the crimes within it. This volume presents a compilation of 11 critical essays on genero negro--contemporary detective fiction in the Hispanic and Luso-Brazilian canon. Surveying the last twenty years, the text analyzes emerging trends in this rapidly evolving genre, as well as the mutations and innovations taking place within the style. The first section of the book is dedicated to the detective fiction of Spain and Portugal. The second section surveys works from Latin America and the United States, where topics touch on universal subjects like crime, identity and feminism.
Download or read book Detective written by Arthur Hailey and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2015-10-20 with total page 390 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A death row confession sparks an investigation that will tear Miami apart in this “engrossing thriller” from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author (Booklist). Detective-Sergeant Malcolm Ainslie, a former Catholic priest, is about to start his vacation when a call comes in from death row. Before serial killer Elroy Doil is taken to the electric chair, he wants to make a full confession to the cop who put him away. To close the books on additional murder cases in which Doil is a suspect, Ainslie drives four hundred miles to Florida State Prison. Although Doil confesses to ten other homicides, he insists that he didn’t commit the crime for which he will be executed the following day: the grisly slaying of a city commissioner and his wife. In his search for the real killer, Ainslie will discover that the upper levels of Miami’s government—including some of his closest colleagues—are more corrupt and dangerous than he ever imagined.
Download or read book The Female Detective written by Andrew Forrester (Jun.) and published by . This book was released on 1864 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction written by Catherine Ross Nickerson and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2010-07-08 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This Companion examines the range of American crime fiction from execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programmes like The Sopranos.
Download or read book Detective Fiction and the Ghost Story written by M. Cook and published by Springer. This book was released on 2014-07-15 with total page 231 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.
