Why do true crime stories exert such popular fascination? What do they have to say about the fear of crime in the present moment? This book examines the historical origins and development of true crime and its evolution into distinctive contemporary forms. Embracing a range of non-fiction accounts - true crime book and magazines, law and order television, popular journalism - it traces how they harness and explore current concerns about law and order, crime and punishment and personal vulnerability.

In 1888 the name Jack the Ripper entered public consciousness with the brutal murders of women in the East End of London. Nineteenth-century history, art and literature, psychoanalytical theories of Freud and Jung and feminist film theory are all used to deconstruct the representation of Jack the Ripper on screen.

This book is the first fully theorized queer reading of a Golden Age British crime writer. Agatha Christie was the most commercially successful novelist of the twentieth century, and her fiction remains popular. She created such memorable characters as Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple, and has become synonymous with a nostalgic, conservative tradition of crime fiction. J.C. Bernthal reads Christie through the lens of queer theory, uncovering a playful, alert, and subversive social commentary. After considering Christie s emergence in a commercial market hostile to her sex, in Queering Agatha...

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.

What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? In considering such questions, this study ranges over hundreds of novels, analyzing the politics and poetics of noir.

This book is a comprehensive exploration of 90 years of film and television adaptations of the world s best-selling novelist s work. Drawing on extensive archival material, it offers new information regarding both the well-known and forgotten screen adaptations of Agatha Christie s stories, including unmade and rare adaptations, some of which have been unseen for more than half a century. This history offers intriguing insights into the discussions and debates that surrounded many of these screen projects something that is brought to life through previously unpublished correspondence from...

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.

This book represents the first serious consideration of the 'domestic noir' phenomenon and, by extension, the psychological thriller.