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The Modern Library: The 200 Best Novels in English Since 1950
By Carmen Callil, Colm Toibin. 2011
For Colm Toíbín and Carmen Callil there is no difference between literary and commercial writing - there is only the…
good novel: engrossing, inspirational, compelling. In their selection of the best 200 novels written since 1950, the editors make a case for the best and the best-loved works and argue why each should be considered a modern classic. Enlightening, often unexpected and always engaging this tour through the world of fiction is full of surprises, forgotten masterpieces and a valuable guide to what to read next. Authors in the collection include Agatha Christie, Georgette Heyer, Daphne du Maurier, Patrick Hamilton, Carson McCullers, J. D. Salinger, Bernard Malamud; Flannery O'Connor, Mulk Raj Anand, Raymond Chandler, L. P. Hartley, Amos Tutuola, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Samuel Beckett, Patricia Highsmith, Chinua Achebe, Isak Dineson, Alan Sillitoe, Ivy Compton-Burnett, Grace Paley, Harper Lee, Olivia Manning and Mordecai Richler.The Ambivalent Detective in Victorian Sensation Novels studies how the detective as a literary character evolved through the mid-nineteenth century…
in England, as seen in sensation novels. In contrast to most assumptions about the English detective, Yoon argues that the detective was more often tolerated than admired following the establishment of professional detectives in the London Metropolitan Police Force in 1842. Through studying the historical and literary contexts between the 1840s to the 1860s, Yoon argues that the detective was seen as a suspicious, even mistrusted and disdained, figure who was nonetheless viewed as necessary to combat rising levels of crime. The detective as a literary character responded to the often contradictory values and aspirations of the middle class, representing an independent masculinity and laying claim to scientific authority. This study surveys novels by Charles Dickens, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Wilkie Collins, alongside lesser-known writers like William Russell, James Redding Ware (pseudonym Andrew Forrester), and William Stephens Hayward. This book contributes to the study of mid-nineteenth-century Victorian culture and connects with broader studies of the detective fiction genre.Studying Crime in Fiction: An Introduction
By Eric Sandberg. 2024
The primary aim of Studying Crime in Fiction: An Introduction is to introduce the emerging cross-disciplinary area of study that…
combines the fields of crime fiction studies and criminology. The study of crime fiction as a genre has a long history within literary studies, and is becoming increasingly prominent in twenty-first-century scholarship. Less attention, however, has been paid to the ways in which elements of criminology, or the systematic study of crime and criminal behaviour from a wide range of perspectives, have influenced the production and reception of crime narratives. Similarly, not enough attention has been paid to the ways in which crime fiction as a genre can inform and enliven the study of criminology. Written largely for undergraduate and graduate students, but also for scholars of crime fiction and criminology interested in thinking across disciplinary boundaries, Studying Crime in Fiction: An Introduction provides full coverage of the backgrounds of the related fields of crime fiction studies and criminology, and explores the many ways they are reciprocally illuminating. The four main chapters in Section 1 (Orient You) familiarize readers with the history and contours of the broad fields within which Studying Crime in Fiction: An Introduction operates. It introduces the history of crime and criminology, as well the history of crime fiction and the academic field dedicated to its study. In its final chapter it looks at the ways these areas of study can be conceptually interrelated. Section 2 of the book (Equip You) is dedicated to examining aspects of criminological theory in relation to various forms of crime fiction. It highlights a range of the most relevant theories, paradigms, and problematics of criminology that appear in, shed light on, or can be effectively illuminated through reference to crime fiction. Its five chapters deal with the definition of crime; explanations for crime and criminal behaviour; investigations into crime; the experience of crime; and, finally, punishments for crime. All of these areas are examined alongside examples of crime fiction drawn from across the genre’s history. Section 3 (Enable You) presents six case studies. Each of these reads a work of crime fiction alongside one or more criminological approaches. Each case study is supplemented with a set of questions addressing issues central to the study of crime in fiction.The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction
By Pamela Bedore. 2024
Who are the most important Canadian crime and detective writers? How do they help represent Canada as a nation? How…
do they distinguish Canada’s approach to questions of crime, detection, and social justice from those of other countries? The Routledge Introduction to Canadian Crime Fiction provides a much-needed investigation into how crime and detection have been, are, and will be represented within Canada’s national literature, with an attention to contemporary popular and literary texts. The book draws together a representative set of established Canadian authors who would appear in most courses on Canadian crime and detective fiction, while also introducing a few authors less established in the field. Ultimately, the book argues that crime fiction is a space of enormously productive hybridity that offers fresh new approaches to considering questions of national identity, gender, race, sexuality, and even genre.The art of mystery: the search for questions (Art Of... Ser.)
By Maud Casey. 2018
Where does mystery reside in a work of fiction Maud Casey takes us into the Land of Un a space…
of uncertainty and unknowing to find out and looks at the variety of ways mystery is created through character, image, structure, and haunted texts, including the novels of Shirley Jackson, Paul Yoon, J. M. Coetzee, and more. Casey's wide-ranging discussion encompasses spirit photography, the radical nature of empathy, and contradictory characters, as she searches for questions rather than answers. Adult. UnratedSouthland
By Nina Revoyr. 2003
A compelling story of race, love, murder, and history against the backdrop of an ever-changing Los Angeles. "I'm an LA…
native with a lot of love for LA crime fiction, but instead of preaching to the noir choir about The Long Goodbye, I'd like to gush about Southland by Nina Revoyr. It's a brilliant, ambitious, moving literary crime novel about two families in South Los Angeles and their tangled history between the 1930s and the 1990s. The central mystery is the death of four black boys in a Japanese-American man's store during the Watts Rebellion of 1965. It's a powerful book, one that I think about often, as well as a huge influence on my work. Right up there with Chandler." --Stephanie Cha (of the LARB) in GQ on "The Greatest Crime Novelists on Their Favorite Crime Novels Ever" "A story about injustice dressed up as a detective novel, Southland reminds us that activism is both an ongoing project and a deeply personal choice." --Vallaire Wallace in Electric Lit on "The Novel That Shows Us How to Face our Past to Change Our Future" "Jackie Ishida's grandfather had a store in Watts where four boys were killed during the riots in 1965, a mystery she attempts to solve." --New York Times Book Review, Ross MacDonald on "Where Noir Lives in the City of Angels" "It is the kind of saga that often epitomizes and shocks LA--friction and violence between races and cultures." --Los Angeles Times, named one of the 20 Essential LA Crime Books "When I started working on Your House Will Pay, I hoped to write something that was half as smart and affecting as Southland. Revoyr's novel takes place in the Crenshaw district of Los Angeles, following two families--one black, one Japanese--over several decades. It's a character-driven saga with the engine of a crime novel, unravelling a horrific multiple murder that took place in the chaotic days of the Watts Rebellion in 1965." --The Guardian (UK), one of Steph Cha's Top 10 Books About Trouble in Los Angeles "[A]n absolutely compelling story of family and racial tragedy. Revoyr's novel is honest in detailing southern California's brutal history, and honorable in showing how families survived with love and tenacity and dignity." --Susan Straight, author of Highwire Moon Southland brings us a fascinating story of race, love, murder and history, against the backdrop of an ever-changing Los Angeles. A young Japanese-American woman, Jackie Ishida, is in her last semester of law school when her grandfather, Frank Sakai, dies unexpectedly. While trying to fulfill a request from his will, Jackie discovers that four African-American boys were killed in the store Frank owned during the Watts Riots of 1965. Along with James Lanier, a cousin of one of the victims, Jackie tries to piece together the story of the boys' deaths. In the process, she unearths the long-held secrets of her family's history. Southland depicts a young woman in the process of learning that her own history has bestowed upon her a deep obligation to be engaged in the larger world. And in Frank Sakai and his African-American friends, it presents characters who find significant common ground in their struggles, but who also engage each other across grounds--historical and cultural--that are still very much in dispute. Moving in and out of the past--from the internment camps of World War II, to the barley fields of the Crenshaw District in the 1930s, to the streets of Watts in the 1960s, to the night spots and garment factories of the 1990s--Southland weaves a tale of Los Angeles in all of its faces and forms.The figure of the detective: a literary history and analysis
By Charles Brownson. 2014
"This book begins with a history of the detective genre, coextensive with the novel itself, identifying the attitudes and institutions…
needed for the genre to emerge in its mature form around 1880. The theory of the genre is laid out along with its central theme of the getting and deployment of knowledge. Sherlock Holmes, the English Classic stories and their inheritors are examined in light of this theme and the balance of two forms of knowledge used in fictional detection--cool or rational, and warm or emotional. The evolution of the genre formula is driven by changes in the social climate in which it is embedded. These changes explain the decay of the English Classic and its replacement by noir, hardboiled and spy stories, to end in the cul-de-sac of the thriller and the nostalgic Neo-Classic. Possible new forms of the detective story are suggested." -- Provided by publisherGaston Leroux, le vrai Rouletabille
By Gaston Leroux. 2003
"Né à Paris le 6 mai 1868, Gaston Leroux est mort à Nice le 15 avril 1927. Entre ces dates,…
le temps d'une oeuvre remplie d'énigmes a fait de son auteur un maître du roman policier. Gaston Leroux a donc vécu un peu plus d'un demi-siècle, mais avec l'éternité devant lui. Des générations de lecteurs ont prolongé son existence bien au-delà de ses rêves d'écrivain voulant échapper aux incertitudes terrestres. Ses deux romans les plus célèbres, Le Mystère de la chambre jaune et Le Parfum de la dame en noir, suffisent à sa gloire qui s'est incarnée à travers le personnage du jeune journaliste Joseph Rouletabille. Gaston Leroux, lui-même reporter, a été chasseur de mystères, aussi débrouillard que son héros lancé dans des aventures extraordinaires. Le vrai Rouletabille, c'est lui, comme le raconte Jean-Claude Lamy dans cette biographie, la seule existante à ce jour. Les Six Histoires épouvantables qui complètent ce volume montrent aussi de quelle merveilleuse façon ce constructeur d'intrigues incroyables pouvait faire irruption dans le fantastique - sans pour autant perdre le bon bout de la raison ." -- 4e de couvStaging Detection: From Hawkshaw to Holmes (Routledge Advances in Theatre & Performance Studies)
By Isabel Stowell-Kaplan. 2021
Staging Detection reveals how the new figure of the stage detective emerged in nineteenth-century Britain. The first book to explore…
the productive intersections between detection and performance across a range of Victorian plays, Staging Detection foregrounds the role of the stage detective in shaping important theatrical modes of the period, from popular melodrama to society comedy. Beginning in 1863 with Tom Taylor’s blockbuster play, The Ticket-of-Leave Man, the book criss-crosses London following the earliest performances of stage detectives. Centring the work of playwrights, novelists, critics and actors, from Sarah Lane and Horace Wigan to Wilkie Collins and Oscar Wilde, Staging Detection sheds new light on Victorian acting styles, furthers our understanding of melodrama, and resituates the famous Wildean dandy as a successor to the stage detective. Drawing on histories of masculinity and gender performance as well as developing scientific theory and nineteenth-century visual culture, Staging Detection shows how the earliest stage portrayals of the detective shaped broader Victorian debates concerning fraud, omniscience and earned authority. This book will be of great interest to students and scholars of theatre history, Victorian literature and popular culture – as well as anyone with an interest in the figure of the detective.Adios Muchachos
By Carlos Lopez, Daniel Chavarría. 2012
Alicia is a smart, confident and gorgeous prostitute in Havana. She is not a street-walker. Rather, she displays her wares…
on bicycle, seducing men through the irresistible pull of her fine derrière. John King, her new client, is a Canadian businessman with a striking resemblance to movie star Alain Delon. This is no ordinary "John" and Alicia's feelings for him grow; she sees in their relationship the possibility of escape from her dead-end life in a Havana plagued with scarcity. When John King's wealthy and sexually deviant boss is suddenly killed, Alicia and John hatch a get-rich-quick scheme. A web of deception is woven, but just as quickly unraveled disastrously, and only one person is able to say "adiós" to the dilapidated island of Cuba.Daniel Chavarría was born in Uruguay in 1933. He spent the 1960s involved in several South American liberation struggles. He fled the continent and settled in Havana, Cuba, where he has resided since 1969. From 1975 to 1986, Chavarría worked as a translator of literature into Spanish, and taught Latin, Greek and Classical Literature at the University of Havana. His novels, short stories, literary journalism, and screenplays have reached audiences across Latin America, Europe, and Asia. Chavarría has won numerous literary awards around the world, including a 1992 Dashiell Hammett Award. Adiós Muchachos is his first novel to be translated into English. In 2002, Akashic Books will publish his mystery novel, The Eye of Cybele, set in ancient Greece.“If you love Sherlock Holmes, you’ll love this book…the best account of Baker Street mania ever written.”?Michael Dirda, TheWashington PostWinner of…
the Agatha Award for best nonfiction workEdgar Award finalist for best critical/biographical workAnthony Award finalist for best critical/nonfiction workEveryone knows Sherlock Holmes. But what made this fictional character, dreamed up by a small-town English doctor in the 1880s, into such a lasting success, despite the author’s own attempt to escape his invention?In From Holmes to Sherlock, Swedish author and Baker Street Irregular Mattias Boström recreates the full story behind the legend for the first time. From a young Arthur Conan Doyle sitting in a Scottish lecture hall taking notes on his medical professor’s powers of observation to the pair of modern-day fans who brainstormed the idea behind the TV sensation Sherlock, from the publishing world’s first literary agent to the Georgian princess who showed up at the Conan Doyle estate and altered a legacy, the narrative follows the men and women who have created and perpetuated the myth. It includes tales of unexpected fortune, accidental romance, and inheritances gone awry, and tells of the actors, writers, readers, and other players who have transformed Sherlock Holmes from the gentleman amateur of the Victorian era to the odd genius of today. From Holmes to Sherlock is a singular celebration of the most famous detective in the world—a must for newcomers and experts alike.“Riveting…[A] wonderfully entertaining history.”?TheWall Street Journal“Celebrates the versatility of one of fiction’s most beloved characters…terrific.”?TheChristian Science MonitorSchlock homes: the complete Bagel Street saga (Novels, Novelas, Short Stories Ser.)
By Robert L. Fish, Robert L Fish. 1990
Thirty-two short stories about the exploits of the inimitable Schlock Homes and his cohorts: brother Criscroft Homes, confidant Dr. Watney,…
Scotland Yard police inspector Balustrade, and the various villains they expose. The author, a civil engineer by profession, created the Bagel Street parodies one Sunday afternoon in 1959 and doing so began a second career as a mystery writerThe red hot typewriter: the life and times of John D. MacDonald
By Hugh Merrill. 2000
Biography of prolific author John D. MacDonald (1916-1986), creator of the character Travis McGee. Following trends in the publishing industry,…
MacDonald's work first appeared in pulp magazines, then as original paperbacks, and finally as bestsellers. Traces his development as a writer as well as his private life. 2000The man with the golden arm: 50th Anniversary Critical Edition
By Nelson Algren, Kurt Vonnegut, Art Shay, William J. Savage, Daniel Simon, Mike Royko, Studs Terkel. 1999
The underworld of Chicago's West Side in the late 1940s is portrayed through Frankie Machine--a poker dealer with a "golden…
arm" and morphine-addicted hustler with a bad conscience. Complete text followed by critical essays. Some strong language. National Book Award. 1949The great legend
By Rex Stout. 1997
Ancient Troy. Young warrior Idaeus, his brother killed in battle, becomes a kesten (scribe) for the king. Palace life ensnares…
him in the daily doings of royalty, secret missions, and political intrigue--while he falls in love with a slave. First serialized in All-Story Weekly. 1916The secret within
By Theresa Martin Golding, Theresa Golding. 2002
Thirteen-year-old Carly lives at the New Jersey shore where she dodges her abusive father by sneaking out at night to…
roam the boardwalk. When a stranger seeks to question her about mysterious packages she delivers for her father, Carly's neighbors suspect him of criminal activities and rally around to help her. For grades 6-9. 2002Sherlock Holmes and the Red Demon (Sherlock Holmes)
By Larry Millett. 2001
When a cunning villain sets out to destroy the Great Northern railway in America, Holmes comes face-to-face with all manner…
of frontier characters. He also becomes attentive to one woman's (and suspect's) charms. But charm gives way to terror when Holmes goes up against an arsonist called the Red DemonAn enigmatic policeman - currently the subject of an internal investigation - is found burned to death in his car…
on the Southend sea front. A vulnerable young woman, fresh out of the care system, is trying to discover the truth behind the sudden death of her best friend.As DS Frank Pearson and DC Catherine Russell from the Essex Police Major Investigation Team are brought in to solve the mystery that surrounds their colleague's death, they're under intense pressure to crack the case without damaging the force's reputation. When a dramatic turn of events casts a whole new light on both cases, the way forward is far from clear. Were the victims connected in some way? And just how much should Pearson and Russell reveal to their bosses as they begin to unearth some dark secrets that the force would rather keep buried?Mark Hardie's stylish and gripping debut introduces a brilliant new detective duo to the world of crime fiction, weaving together two suspenseful stories that end in a breath-taking finale.Talking about detective fiction
By P. D. James. 2009
British author of The Private Patient (DB 67910) and other mysteries examines the genre of detective fiction. Discusses the style,…
plotting techniques, protagonists, and talent of past and current authors, including Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dorothy Sayers, Dashiell Hammett, and Josephine Tey. Also describes her own methods. 2009Sherlock Holmes: the unauthorized biography
By Nick Rennison, Nicholas Rennison. 2007
Biography of the fictional Victorian-era sleuth compiles and expands on events in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's novels and short stories,…
from Holmes's birth in 1854 to his death in 1929. Focuses on his years as a consulting detective and his friendship with Dr. John Watson. 2005