Download or read book Talking About Detective Fiction written by P. D. James and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2011-05-03 with total page 210 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: P. D. James, the undisputed queen of mystery, gives us an intriguing, inspiring and idiosyncratic look at the genre she has spent her life perfecting. Examining mystery from top to bottom, beginning with such classics as Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and then looking at such contemporary masters as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell, P. D. James goes right to the heart of the genre. Along the way she traces the lives and writing styles of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and many more. Here is P.D. James discussing detective fiction as social history, explaining its stylistic components, revealing her own writing process, and commenting on the recent resurgence of detective fiction in modern culture. It is a must have for the mystery connoisseur and casual fan alike.

Download or read book 100 Greatest Literary Detectives written by Eric Sandberg and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2018-04-12 with total page 251 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Crime fiction is one of the most popular literary genres and has been for more than a century. At the heart of almost all forms of mysteries—from the Golden Age puzzler to the contemporary police procedural, from American hardboiled fiction to the Japanese timetable mystery—is the investigator. He—or, increasingly, she—can be a private eye, a police officer, or a general busybody. But whatever forms these investigators take, they are the key element of crime fiction. Criminals and their crimes come and go, while our attention is captured by these fascinating characters who exist at the intersection of so many different literary and social roles. 100 Greatest Literary Detectives offers a selection of the most influential, important, and intriguing fictional sleuths—amateur or professional—from around the world. From Sherlock Holmes to Harry Hole, Kinsey Millhone to Kiyoshi Mitarai, the detectives profiled here give readers a broader picture of one of fiction’s most popular genres. Each entry summarizes the distinctive features of notable investigators and their approaches to crime, provides a brief outline of major features of their fictional careers, and makes a case for their importance based on literary-historical impact, novelty, uniqueness, aesthetic quality, or cultural resonance. The characters profiled here include Lew Archer, Martin Beck, Father Brown, Brother Cadfael, Adam Dalgliesh, Mike Hammer, Miss Jane Marple, Hercule Poirot, Ellery Queen, Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Kay Scarpetta, Sam Spade, Phillip Trent, V. I. Warshawski, Lord Peter Wimsey, Nero Wolfe, and many others. Readers will find some of their favorite detectives here, learn more about their literary and cultural significance, and discover other great sleuths—old and new, local and international—in this engaging volume. 100 Greatest Literary Detectives provides a fascinating look into some of the most intriguing fictional characters of all time.

Download or read book First Class Murder written by Robin Stevens and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2017-04-04 with total page 336 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A murdered heiress, a missing necklace, and a train full of shifty, unusual, and suspicious characters leaves Daisy and Hazel with a new mystery to solve in this third novel of the Wells & Wong Mystery series. Hazel Wong and Daisy Wells are taking a vacation across Europe on world-famous passenger train, the Orient Express—and it’s clear that each of their fellow first-class travelers has something to hide. Even more intriguing: There’s rumor of a spy in their midst. Then, during dinner, a bloodcurdling scream comes from inside one of the cabins. When the door is broken down, a passenger is found murdered—her stunning ruby necklace gone. But the killer has vanished, as if into thin air. The Wells & Wong Detective Society is ready to crack the case—but this time, they’ve got competition.

Download or read book Detective Fiction written by Charles J. Rzepka and published by Polity. This book was released on 2005-09-30 with total page 298 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 'Detective Fiction' is a clear and compelling look at some of the best known, yet least-understood characters and texts of the modern day. Undergraduate students of Detective and Crime Fiction and of genre fiction in general, will find this book essential reading.

Download or read book Latin American Detectives against Power written by Fabricio Tocco and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2022-04-06 with total page 249 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines how Latin American detective stories portray individualism and the state through the figures of the private eye and the police. Fabricio Tocco argues that these portrayals constitute a far more radical critique than the one developed by the Anglo-American canon, culminating in a transnational “poetics of failure” rooted in dissatisfaction with the neoliberal state.

Download or read book The Figure of the Detective written by Charles Brownson and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2014-01-16 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book begins with a history of the detective genre, coextensive with the novel itself, identifying the attitudes and institutions needed for the genre to emerge in its mature form around 1880. The theory of the genre is laid out along with its central theme of the getting and deployment of knowledge. Sherlock Holmes, the English Classic stories and their inheritors are examined in light of this theme and the balance of two forms of knowledge used in fictional detection--cool or rational, and warm or emotional. The evolution of the genre formula is driven by changes in the social climate in which it is embedded. These changes explain the decay of the English Classic and its replacement by noir, hardboiled and spy stories, to end in the cul-de-sac of the thriller and the nostalgic Neo-Classic. Possible new forms of the detective story are suggested.

Download or read book The Origins of the American Detective Story written by LeRoy Lad Panek and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2015-01-24 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgar Allan Poe essentially invented the detective story in 1841 with Murders in the Rue Morgue. In the years that followed, however, detective fiction in America saw no significant progress as a literary genre. Much to the dismay of moral crusaders like Anthony Comstock, dime novels and other sensationalist publications satisfied the public's hunger for a yarn. Things changed as the century waned, and eventually the detective was reborn as a figure of American literature. In part these changes were due to a combination of social conditions, including the rise and decline of the police as an institution; the parallel development of private detectives; the birth of the crusading newspaper reporter; and the beginnings of forensic science. Influential, too, was the new role model offered by a wildly popular British import named Sherlock Holmes. Focusing on the late 19th century and early 20th, this volume covers the formative years of American detective fiction. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Download or read book The Murders in the Rue Morgue written by Edgar Allan Poe and published by SAMPI Books. This book was released on 2024-01-24 with total page 20 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The Rue Morgue Murders" is a pioneering tale in the mystery genre, in which detective Auguste Dupin uses his acute observation and logic to solve a brutal double murder in Paris, revealing a surprising and unusual outcome.

Download or read book The Savage Detectives Reread written by David Kurnick and published by Columbia University Press. This book was released on 2022-02-01 with total page 151 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Savage Detectives elicits mixed feelings. An instant classic in the Spanish-speaking world upon its 1998 publication, a critical and commercial smash on its 2007 translation into English, Roberto Bolaño’s novel has also been called an exercise in 1970s nostalgia, an escapist fantasy of a romanticized Latin America, and a publicity event propped up by the myth of the bad-boy artist. David Kurnick argues that the controversies surrounding Bolaño’s life and work have obscured his achievements—and that The Savage Detectives is still underappreciated for the subtlety and vitality of its portrait of collective life. Kurnick explores The Savage Detectives as an epic of social structure and its decomposition, a novel that restlessly moves between the big configurations—of states, continents, and generations—and the everyday stuff—parties, jobs, moods, sex, conversation—of which they’re made. For Kurnick, Bolaño’s book is a necromantic invocation of life in history, one that demands surrender as much as analysis. Kurnick alternates literary-critical arguments with explorations of the novel’s microclimates and neighborhoods—the little atmospheric zones where some of Bolaño’s most interesting rethinking of sexuality, politics, and literature takes place. He also claims that The Savage Detectives holds particular interest for U.S. readers: not because it panders to them but because it heralds the exhilarating prospect of a world in which American culture has lost its presumptive centrality.

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 The Big Book of Female Detectives written by Otto Penzler and published by Vintage Crime/Black Lizard. This book was released on 2018-10-16 with total page 2582 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Edgar Award-winning editor Otto Penzler's new anthology brings together the most cunning, resourceful, and brilliant female sleuths in mystery fiction. A Vintage Crime/Black Lizard Original. For the first time ever, Otto Penzler gathers the most iconic women of the detective canon over the past 150 years, captivating and surprising readers in equal measure. The 74 handpicked stories in this collection introduce us to the most determined of gumshoe gals, from debutant detectives like Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange to spinster sleuths like Mary Roberts Rinehart's Hilda Adams, from groundbreaking female cops like Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly to contemporary crime-fighting P.I.s like Sue Grafton's Kinsey Millhone, and include indelible tales from Agatha Christie, Carolyn Wells, Edgar Wallace, L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, Sara Paretsky, Nevada Barr, Linda Barnes, Laura Lippman, and many more.

Download or read book In Cold Blood written by Truman Capote and published by Modern Library. This book was released on 2013-02-19 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Selected by the Modern Library as one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time From the Modern Library’s new set of beautifully repackaged hardcover classics by Truman Capote—also available are Breakfast at Tiffany’s and Other Voices, Other Rooms (in one volume), Portraits and Observations, and The Complete Stories Truman Capote’s masterpiece, In Cold Blood, created a sensation when it was first published, serially, in The New Yorker in 1965. The intensively researched, atmospheric narrative of the lives of the Clutter family of Holcomb, Kansas, and of the two men, Richard Eugene Hickock and Perry Edward Smith, who brutally killed them on the night of November 15, 1959, is the seminal work of the “new journalism.” Perry Smith is one of the great dark characters of American literature, full of contradictory emotions. “I thought he was a very nice gentleman,” he says of Herb Clutter. “Soft-spoken. I thought so right up to the moment I cut his throat.” Told in chapters that alternate between the Clutter household and the approach of Smith and Hickock in their black Chevrolet, then between the investigation of the case and the killers’ flight, Capote’s account is so detailed that the reader comes to feel almost like a participant in the events.

Download or read book Detectives in the Shadows written by Susanna Lee and published by Johns Hopkins University Press. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For anyone interested in crime fiction and television, or for those wanting to understand America's idolization of the good guy with a gun, Detectives in the Shadows is essential reading.

Download or read book The Harry Bosch Novels written by Michael Connelly and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2001-10-22 with total page 824 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For the first time in one volume, the three novels that introduced Michael Connelly's great LAPD homicide detective, maverick Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch. The Black Echo (Winner of the Edgar Award for Best First Novel) For Harry Bosch-hero, loner, nighthawk-the body stuffed in a drainpipe off Mulholland Drive isn't just another statistic. This one is personal. Billy Meadows was a fellow Vietnam "tunnel rat," fighting the VC and the fear they used to call the Black Echo. Harry let Meadows down once. He won't do it again. The Black Ice The corpse in the hotel room seems to be that of a missing LAPD narcotics officer. Rumors abound that the cop had crossed over-selling a new drug called Black Ice. Now Harry's making some dangerous connections, leading from the cop to a string of bloody murders, and from Hollywood Boulevard's drug bazaar to Mexico's dusty back alleys. In this lethal game, Harry is likely to be the next victim. The Concrete Blonde When Harry Bosch shot and killed Norman Church, the police were convinced it marked the end of the hunt for the Dollmaker-L.A.'s most bizarre serial killer. But now Church's widow is accusing Harry of killing the wrong man-a charge that rings terrifyingly true when a new victim is discovered with the Dollmaker's macabre signature. For the second time, Harry must hunt the murderer down, before he strikes again. Together, these three novels are the perfect way to discover, or rediscover, the sleuth the New York Times Book Review called a "wonderful, old-fashioned hero who isn't afraid to walk through the flames."

Download or read book A Good Girl s Guide to Murder written by Holly Jackson and published by Delacorte Press. This book was released on 2020-02-04 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE MUST-READ MULTIMILLION BESTSELLING MYSTERY SERIES—COMING SOON TO NETFLIX! • This is the story about an investigation turned obsession, full of twists and turns and with an ending you'll never expect. Everyone in Fairview knows the story. Pretty and popular high school senior Andie Bell was murdered by her boyfriend, Sal Singh, who then killed himself. It was all anyone could talk about. And five years later, Pip sees how the tragedy still haunts her town. But she can't shake the feeling that there was more to what happened that day. She knew Sal when she was a child, and he was always so kind to her. How could he possibly have been a killer? Now a senior herself, Pip decides to reexamine the closed case for her final project, at first just to cast doubt on the original investigation. But soon she discovers a trail of dark secrets that might actually prove Sal innocent . . . and the line between past and present begins to blur. Someone in Fairview doesn't want Pip digging around for answers, and now her own life might be in danger. And don't miss the sequel, Good Girl, Bad Blood! "The perfect nail-biting mystery." —Natasha Preston, #1 New York Times bestselling author

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 Edwardian Detectives written by G. K. Chesterton and published by Resurrected Press. This book was released on 2012-07-01 with total page 478 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The exploits of the great Victorian Detectives, Poe's C. Auguste Dupin, Gaboriau's Lecoq, and most famously, Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, are well known. But what of those fictional detectives that came after, those of the Edwardian Age? The period between the death of Queen Victoria and the First World War had been called the Golden Age of the detective short story, but how familiar is the modern reader with the sleuths of this era? And such an extraordinary group they were, including in their numbers an unassuming English priest, a blind man, a master of disguises, a lecturer in medical jurisprudence, a noble woman working for Scotland Yard, and a savant so brilliant he was known as "The Thinking Machine." To introduce readers to these detectives, Resurrected Press has assembled a collection of stories featuring these and other remarkable sleuths in The Edwardian Detectives. The Case of Laker, Absconded by Arthur Morrison The Fenchurch Street Mystery by Baroness Orczy The Crime of the French Cafe by Nick Carter The Man with Nailed Shoes by R Austin Freeman The Blue Cross by G. K. Chesterton The Case of the Pocket Diary Found in the Snow by Augusta Groner The Ninescore Mystery by Baroness Orczy The Riddle of the Ninth Finger by Thomas W. Hanshew The Knight's Cross Signal Problem by Ernest Bramah The Problem of Cell 13 by Jacques Futrelle The Conundrum of the Golf Links by Percy James Brebner The Silkworms of Florence by Clifford Ashdown The Gateway of the Monster by William Hope Hodgson The Affair at the Semiramis Hotel by A. E. W. Mason The Affair of the Avalanche Bicycle & Tyre Co., LTD by Arthur Morrison