In 1929, Ronald Knox, a prominent member of the English Detection Club, included in his tongue-in-cheek Ten Commandments for Detective Novelists the rule that ?No Chinaman must figure in the story.? In 1983, Ruth Rendell published Speaker of Mandarin, reflecting not only a change in British detective fiction but also a dramatic change in the British cultural landscape. Like much of the rest of British popular culture, the detective novel became more and more ethnically diverse and populated by characters with increasingly varied religious backgrounds. The ten essays in this work examine the...

During the interwar "golden age" of British detective fiction, women writers like Dorothy L. Sayers and Agatha Christie reigned sovereign, but their work remains tame compared to today's crime novels. Elements of sexuality and gender, including soft porn and sexual psychopathy, pervade contemporary detective fiction. The 10 essays in this collection explore issues of gender and sexuality in crime writing by women from 1985 to 2011, surveying works about girl sleuths, parodies, hard-boiled detective fiction, police procedurals, and recent serial killer series. They examine the relationship...

Crime fiction world of the late 1970s, with its increasingly diverse landscape, is a natural beginning for this collection of critical studies wherein the intersection of class, culture, and crime gets foregrounded - each nuanced with shades of gender, ethnicity, race, and politics. This collection of ten essays attempts to raise broad and complicated questions about the role of class and culture in transatlantic crime fiction beyond the Golden Age: How is "class" understood in detective fiction, other than as a socio-economic marker? Without indulging in myths or exaggerations, can we...