Barry Forshaw, the UK's principal crime fiction expert, presents a celebration and analysis ofthe Scandinavian crime genre; from Sjowall and Wahloo's Martin Beck series, through Henning Mankell's Wallander, to Stieg Larsson's demolition of the Swedish Social Democratic ideal in the publishing phenomenon The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

Reading the Animal in the Literature of the British Raj explores representations of animals during British rule in India-the tigers, elephants, boars, furs, and feathers that sometimes all but obscured the human beneath and behind them, and that were integral in the creation and maintenance of the hierarchies of colonialism. The book exists on two levels: one offers a sophisticated view of how power and oppression work within constellations of species, race, class, gender, and nationhood, and the other is a deeply suggestive meditation on our humanness and how we locate it within a spectrum...

Barry Forshaw celebrates with enthusiasm the British horror film and its fascination for macabre cinema. A definitive study of the genre, British Gothic Cinema discusses the flowering of the field, with every key film discussed from its beginnings in the 1940s through to the 21st century.

The 1991 film The Silence of the Lambs, based on Thomas Harris's bestseller, was a game-changer in the fields of both horror and crime cinema. FBI trainee Clarice Starling was a new kind of heroine, vulnerable, intuitive, and in a deeply unhealthy relationship with her monstrous helper/opponent, the serial killer Hannibal Lecter.

Jonathan Demme's film skillfully appropriated the tropes of police procedural, gothic melodrama and contemporary horror and produced something entirely new. The resulting film was both critically acclaimed and massively popular, and went on to have an...

Sex and Film is a frank, comprehensive analysis of the cinema's love affair with the erotic. Forshaw's lively study moves from the sexual abandon of the 1930s to filmmakers' circumvention of censorship, the demolition of taboos by arthouse directors and pornographic films, and an examination of how explicit imagery invaded modern mainstream cinema.