This book explores the three aspects of deviance that contemporary crime fiction manipulates: linguistic, social, and generic. Gregoriou conducts case studies into crime series by James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell, and investigates the way in which these novelists correspondingly challenge those aforementioned conventions.

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.

Now in paperback, this book considers crime fighting from the perspective of the civilian city-goer, from the mid-Victorian garotting panics to 1914. It charts the shift from the use of body armour to the adoption of exotic martial arts through the works of popular playwrights and novelists, examining changing ideals of urban, middle-class heroism.

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.

This edited collection is distinctive in covering a wide range of media, geographical locations, genres and perspectives, with a central focus on the enduring and ubiquitous appeal of the figure of Sherlock Holmes. It positions Holmes in relation to intellectual history and, in so doing, uses Holmes as a lens of thinking about a range of pressing social issues. The underlying argument in this book, then, is twofold: it demonstrates how Holmes has historically engaged with contemporary social issues, and shows some of the new directions of this tradition across contemporary reincarnations.

Legal thrillers constitute a crime-fiction sub-species focusing on the legal procedures in connection with crime. This exciting and informative new book traces the history of the legal thriller, looking at John Grisham, Scott Turow, George Simenon and Earl Stanley Gardner, amongst others, exploring the relationship between law in literature through this popular genre.

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 challenges the traditional view of the 'femme fatale' as merely a dangerous and ravenous sexual predator who leads men into ruination. It proposes alternative ways of viewing the femme fatale by showing how she can also serve as a figure for imagining female agency. Focusing on a particular character type that is distinct from the general archetype of the femme fatale, the 'criminal femme fatale' uses her sexual appeal and irresistible wiles both to manipulate men and to commit criminal acts, usually murder, in order to advance her goals with deliberate intent and culpability. This...

This is the first comprehensive study of the English crime play, presenting a survey of 250 plays performed in the London West End between 1900 and 2000. The first part is historically orientated while the second one establishes a tentative poetics of the genre. The third part presents an analysis of some 20 plays adapted from detective fiction.

Serial Crime Fiction is the first book to focus explicitly on the complexities of crime fiction seriality. Covering definitions and development of the serial form, implications of the setting, and marketing of the series, it studies authors such as Doyle, Sayers, Paretsky, Ellroy, Marklund, Camilleri, Borges, across print, film and television.