A historical and critical introduction to the genre of crime fiction, this book concentrates chiefly on three branches of crime stories: the classic detective 'whodunit', the thriller in which the protagonist is opposed either to a powerful conspiracy or to society at large, and the hardboiled private-eye story, or detective thriller, which mixes aspects of the other two.

While historians of science have focused significant attention on Erasmus Darwin's scientific ideas and milieu, relatively little attention has been paid to Darwin as a literary writer. In The Poetry of Erasmus Darwin: Enlightened Spaces, Romantic Times, Martin Priestman situates Darwin's three major poems - The Loves of the Plants (1789), The Economy of Vegetation (1791) and The Temple of Nature (1803) - and Darwin himself within a large, polymathic late-Enlightenment network of other scientists, writers, thinkers and social movers and shakers. Interpreting Darwin's poetry in terms of...