Download or read book The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories written by Patricia Craig and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 554 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Essential reading for all armchair detectives, this collection of 33 classic whodunits is the cream of crime writing.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Detective Stories written by Patricia Craig and published by Oxford University Press on Demand. This book was released on 2002 with total page 587 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The field of detective fiction is vast, and The Oxford Book of Detective Stories brings together the best short fiction from around the world to show how different nationalities have imposed their own stamp on the genre. As well as English and American stories from acknowledged masters such as Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie, the anthology includes stories by Simenon, Conan Doyle, Sarah Paretsky, and Ian Rankin, and roams across Europe and further afield to embrace Japan, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. Women detectives, police procedurals, the amateur sleuth, locked-room mysteries are all here, and in her introduction Patricia Craig examines the figure of the detective in international literature.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Detective Stories written by Patricia Craig and published by . This book was released on 2000 with total page 608 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Oxford Book of Detective Stories is a thorough, broad, and representative collection of short stories intended to reflect the best of detective fiction from around the world. Drawing on works dating from the middle 1800s up to the present, editor Patricia Craig shows us how different nationalities have imposed their own stamp on this highly popular and relatively young literary genre. Alongside English and American fiction by such acknowledged masters as Ellery Queen, Dashiell Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Agatha Christie, we find stories by Georges Simenon, Arthur Conan Doyle, Sarah Paretsky, and Ian Rankin. The anthology roams across Europe and further afield to embrace Japan, Denmark, Holland, Italy, Argentina, Czechoslovakia, and other countries. This is a book that will delight any fan or student of detective fiction. Women detectives, police procedurals, the amateur sleuth, locked-room mysteries, and the classic or pioneering models of the genre are all represented here--and in her perceptive and inclusive introduction Craig examines the figure of the detective in international literature.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories written by Tony Hillerman and published by . This book was released on 1996 with total page 712 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgar Allan Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" launched the detective story in 1841. The genre began as a highbrow form of entertainment, a puzzle to be solved by a rational sifting of clues. In Britain, the stories became decidedly upper crust: the crime often committed in a world of manor homes and formal gardens, the blood on the Persian carpet usually blue. But from the beginning, American writers worked important changes on Poe's basic formula, especially in use of language and locale. As early as 1917, Susan Glaspell evinced a poignant understanding of motive in a murder in an isolated farmhouse. And with World War I, the Roaring '20s, the rise of organized crime and corrupt police with Prohibition, and the Great Depression, American detective fiction branched out in all directions, led by writers such as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, who brought crime out of the drawing room and into the "mean streets" where it actually occurred. In The Oxford Book of American Detective Stories, Tony Hillerman and Rosemary Herbert bring together thirty-three tales that illuminate both the evolution of crime fiction in the United States and America's unique contribution to this highly popular genre. Tracing its progress from elegant "locked room" mysteries, to the hard-boiled realism of the '30s and '40s, to the great range of styles seen today, this superb collection includes the finest crime writers, including Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, Rex Stout, Ellery Queen, Ed McBain, Sue Grafton, and Hillerman himself. There are also many delightful surprises: Bret Harte, for instance, offers a Sherlockian pastiche with a hero named Hemlock Jones, and William Faulkner blends local color, authentic dialogue, and dark, twisted pride in "An Error in Chemistry." We meet a wide range of sleuths, from armchair detective Nero Wolfe, to Richard Sale's journalist Daffy Dill, to Robert Leslie Bellem's wise-cracking Hollywood detective Dan Turner, to Linda Barnes's six-foot tall, red-haired, taxi-driving female P.I., Carlotta Carlyle. And we sample a wide variety of styles, from tales with a strongly regional flavor, to hard-edged pulp fiction, to stories with a feminist perspective. Perhaps most important, the book offers a brilliant summation of America's signal contribution to crime fiction, highlighting the myriad ways in which we have reshaped this genre. The editors show how Raymond Chandler used crime, not as a puzzle to be solved, but as a spotlight with which he could illuminate the human condition; how Ed McBain, in "A Small Homicide," reveals a keen knowledge of police work as well as of the human sorrow which so often motivates crime; and how Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer solved crime not through blood stains and footprints, but through psychological insight into the damaged lives of the victim's family. And throughout, the editors provide highly knowledgeable introductions to each piece, written from the perspective of fellow writers and reflecting a life-long interest--not to say love--of this quintessentially American genre. American crime fiction is as varied and as democratic as America itself. Hillerman and Herbert bring us a gold mine of glorious stories that can be read for sheer pleasure, but that also illuminate how the crime story evolved from the drawing room to the back alley, and how it came to explore every corner of our nation and every facet of our lives.
Download or read book 12 English Detective Stories written by Michael Cox and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1998 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These twelve stories provide an entertaining exploration of this extensive and fascinating corner of English popular fiction, celebrating the detective's intellectual and intuitive powers when confronted with murder, theft, and other mysteries. The main focus of this collection is from the 1890s to the 1920s, the period when the classic English detective story was at its confident and original best, but it also offers examples from earlier and later periods. Presenting a balance of classic and more unusual stories, and featuring works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Michael Innes, this anthology will appeal to both the newcomer and aficionado of the genre.
Download or read book Twelve American Detective Stories written by Edward D. Hoch and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 260 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A virtual cornucopia of whodunits from the true masters of the craft, including Edgar Alan Poe, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Craig Rice, Ellery Queen, and Raymond Chandler, this anthology contains some genuine rarities.
Download or read book Murderous Schemes written by Donald E. Westlake and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1996 with total page 530 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An anthology of detective fiction with examples of its sub-genres, armchair detective, the locked room and so on. The first is represented by Agatha Christie's In Blue Geranium, where the detective solves a crime from a conversation, the second by The Leopold Locked Room, in which a policeman is found in a locked room with his wife killed by his gun, but he didn't do it.
Download or read book 12 Women Detective Stories written by Laura Marcus and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 248 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Whether a housekeeper, secretary, lodger, or pawn-broker in a seedy area of Victorian London, the woman detective's powers of observation and deduction are most effective in uncovering and resolving crimes. These 12 engaging mysteries gives us a glimpse of some of the most memorable characters ever created--such as Miss Marple, Carlotta Carlyle, Sharon McCone and other beloved heroines of the detective novel--by both men and women writers.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Travel Stories written by Patricia Craig and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2002 with total page 441 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Travel, associated as it is with strangeness, marvels, and excitement, has always proved an irresistible subject for writers. 'The Oxford Book of Travel Stories' brings together some of the best short fiction on this most exhilarating of subjects from writers as diverse as Anthony Trollope,Edith Wharton, Ring Larner, William Trevor, Sylvia Townsend Warner, John Cheever, Beryl Bainbridge, and V. S. Pritchett.Readers of this anthology will be able to revel in the atmosphere of nineteenth-century Palestine, the Riviera of the 1920s, or a botanical tour of Greece. There are stories set in far distant locations - China, Australia - and others closer to home, such as Benedict Kiely's entrancing 'A Journey tothe Seven Streams'. Most are high-spirited, in keeping with the theme, some are wonderfully funny and one or two productively unsettling, such as Flannery O'Connor's 'A Good Man is Hard to Find'. Some deal with the journey itself, and encounters on train or boat; others see travel as a literal riteof passage, an escape or a sudden growing-up. All of them illustrate, in various ways, how travel has to do with stimulus, enrichment, and a sense of achievement - 'Not fare well', as T. S. Eliot has it, 'but fare forward, voyagers'.
Download or read book The Oxford Book of Modern Women s Stories written by Patricia Craig and published by . This book was released on 1994 with total page 552 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The inadequate acknowledgement of women short story writers in standard anthologies is a cause for wonder or affront. How else, indeed, can you view it, given the riches overlooked?" So states editor Patricia Craig in her introduction to The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories, a rich, wide-ranging collection that, at last, redresses this historical imbalance by bringing together forty examples of the very best women's stories--from established authors such as Edith Wharton, Virginia Woolf, Eudora Welty, and Katherine Mansfield, to such modern masters as Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Bharati Mukherjee, and Amy Tan. Here readers will find humor, passion, eccentricity, forcefulness, elan, intellectual vigor, subversion--indeed every shading of tone and mood, from ironic detachment to full-blooded engagement. Each writer has her own, perfectly realized angle of vision, whether it's the zestfulness of Angela Carter, the breathtaking evocations of Willa Cather, the quirkiness of Grace Paley, or the pungency of Flannery O'Connor. Breaking with tradition, editor Patricia Craig offers few stories about traditional "women's" topics. Instead, the entries in this collection range from an unforgettable tale of racism in South Africa to explorations of adultery, immigration, the importance of cultural identity, and the rootlessness of American cities. Craig also includes some provocative offerings from outside the mainstream of twentieth century fiction--a ghost story by Edith Wharton, a delightful fairy tale, and several engaging historical pieces. Eloquent and captivating, The Oxford Book of Modern Women's Stories offers a dazzling assortment of classic stories and overlooked gems that will amuse, intrigue, and challenge every lover of fine fiction.
Download or read book Victorian Detective Stories written by Michael Cox and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1993 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: During the Victorian era, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Dickens, Arthur Conan Doyle and a host of others pioneered a genre of fiction that remains among the most popular today. In this new Oxford anthology, Cox provides a sampling of 31 of the finest detective stories written from the 1840s to the early 20th century.
Download or read book The Young Oxford Book of Timewarp Stories written by and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2001 with total page 228 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of stories about time, exploring all the different ways that we can twist and play with time. The stories take in trips to the future, package holidays to the past, visitors from other times with unwelcome messages, a thief with the power to stop time altogether, a man in lovewith someone who died years before he was born, a star fleet that paradoxically caused its own destruction, and many more. With a sure appeal for everyone who likes an exciting, thought-provoking story, as well as fans of science fiction and ghost stories, this is a wonderfully entertaining collection of stories to amuse, amaze, and enthral.
Download or read book The Oxford Companion to Crime and Mystery Writing written by Rosemary Herbert and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1999 with total page 535 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "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
Download or read book The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories written by Patricia Craig and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1990 with total page 584 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The detective story, with its roots in Poe's Chevalier Dupin mysteries and Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone, first achieved mass popularity in the 1890s with The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes. Its success has a good deal to do with its pungency, and with its power to intrigue and absorb thereader while abiding by the rules of the genre (however flexible these have become). Every age has produced a kind of detective fiction which exemplifies its distinctive manners and customs, from the sedate tales which began to appear in the wake of Sherlock Holmes to the debonair detection of the1920s and after.The sleuth short story took off in many directions, with such writers as Anthony Berkeley, Freeman Wills Crofts, Carter Dickson, and Edmund Crispin bringing the upmost expertise and ingenuity to bear on the detective theme. An increasing realism is apparent in the post-war era, though with nodiminution in entertainment value, and as we come up to the present, the detective story has been adapted further to accommodate sexual comedy and other facets of modern life.This collection of 33 stories shows the scope, vigour, and enduring fascination of the detective story, as well as indicating its importance as a barometer of social attitudes and literary practices. It gathers together a wide range of stories, many unfamiliar by writers of the calibre of AgathaChristie, Julian Symons, Ngaio Marsh, G. K. Chesterton, P. D. James, Ruth Rendell, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Nicholas Blake, Michael Innes, and H. R. F. Keating.
Download or read book Detective Stories from the Strand written by Jack Adrian and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1992 with total page 406 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Strand Magazine, launched in January 1891, was one of the most successful and influential popular magazines of all time. Making its mark immediately with the publication of the first Sherlock Holmes stories, the magazine continued to publish high-quality detective fiction for half a million readers until 1950. Now, in the centenary of its launch, this collection offers twenty-five classic stories of mystery and detection, all first published in the Strand. It features tales of some of the most celebrated detectives of all time--Agatha Christie's Poirot, G.K. Chesterton's Father Brown, and E.C. Bentley's Philip Trent--as well as stories from Sapper, Edgar Wallace, Somerset Maugham, Aldous Huxley, and A.E.W. Mason. And, of course, this volume would not be complete without Sherlock Holmes, who makes his appearance in three classic cases. With little-known stories by famous authors, and ingenious works by almost-forgotten writers, Detective Stories from the Strand is a treasure trove of remarkable ingenuity, guaranteed to delight all enthusiasts of crime fiction.
Download or read book Detective Stories written by Philip Pullman and published by . This book was released on 2004-06-21 with total page 223 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book features a marvellous collection of murderous, greedy and immoral villains brought to book by the greatest fictional detectives, who date from the golden age of crime literature as well as the present day. Follow in the footsteps of criminal masterminds and marvel at the inspired deductions of Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot and the brilliant (if timid) Mr Budd. Nick Hardcastle's line drawings make these riveting stories come alive
Download or read book The Oxford Book of English Love Stories written by John Sutherland and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 1997 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Adulterous love, marital love, virginal love, religious devotion, agape, lust, eros: there are an infinite variety of meanings that can be packed into the four letters that spell love, and writers of fiction have been trying for centuries to plumb its depths. We turn to literature in large part to learn what love is and what it should be, and readers of The Oxford Book of English Love Stories will find consolation and inspiration in equal measure from some of the sharpest observers of this most essential human emotion. From the bittersweet ending of Trollope's ultra-Trollopian "The Parson's Daughter of Oxney Colne;" to the intricate rituals of courtship in Sylvia Plath's "Stone Boy with Dolphin;" to Paul Theroux's sardonic study of innocence in "An English Unofficial Rose," this collection is a looking glass into the many moods of love. Editor John Sutherland has searched two centuries of English literature to select twenty-eight wholly original works, choosing those that best represent the rich and varied nature of love itself. Readers will find stories by Mary Shelley, W. M. Thackeray, Thomas Hardy, H. G. Wells, John Galsworthy, Virginia Woolf, Aldous Huxley, Graham Greene, and many others, all of which explore the infinite varieties of love and its shifting rules. Indeed, the rules of the game of love tend to change with every new set of players and with each generation. In D.H. Lawrence's "Samson and Delilah," the game is violent and fraught with physical injury. In Katherine Mansfield's "Something Childish but very Natural," love is more reminiscent of two people playing chess blindfolded. And, in Joyce Cary's "The Tunnel," it seems that the lovers cannot, tantalizingly, even get themselves on to the same playing field. Bittersweet endings, ironic angles on traditional platitudes, and other surprises make the insights of writers such as Elizabeth Bowen, W. Somerset Maugham, or V. S. Pritchett always fresh and challenging. Simple or sophisticated, sometimes hilarious and often very moving, The Oxford Book of English Love Stories brings a delightful perspective to the mysteries of love.
