Crime Fiction Reader

David Schmid is Associate Professor of English at the University at Buffalo, USA. He is the author of Natural Born Celebrities: Serial Killers in American Culture (2005), and the editor of Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (co-edited with Andrew Pepper, 2015) and Violence in American Popular Culture (2016). He is the founder and director of the American Literature Association's Crime Fiction Group and an editorial board member for Celebrity Studies.

• INTRODUCTION David Schmid, Criticizing Crime Fiction I. DEFINING THE GENRE David Schmid, Section Introduction Edgar Allan Poe, 1846 letter to Philip P. Cooke G.K. Chesterton, A Defence of Detective Stories (1901) Dashiell Hammett, From the Memoirs of a Private Detective (1923) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Omnibus of Crime (1928) Ronald A. Knox, A Detective Story Decalogue (1929) S.S. Van Dine, Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories (1929) Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay (1944) Edmund Wilson, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (1945) W.H. Auden, The Guilty Vicarage (1948) Elmore Leonard, 10 Rules for Good Writing (2001) P.D. James, Telling the Story: Setting, Viewpoint (2011) II. KEY AUTHORS David Schmid, Section Introduction Edgar Allan Poe Dana Brand, "From the flaneur to the detective: Interpreting the city of Poe" (from The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1991)) Amy Gilman Srebnick, "Poe Detects Marie: Poe, Mary Rogers, and the Birth of Detective Fiction" (from The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (1995) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Catherine Belsey, "Deconstructing the Text: Sherlock Holmes" (from Critical Practice (1980)) Jinny Huh, "Whispers of Norbury: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modernist Crisis of Racial (Un)detection" from Modern Fiction Studies (2003)) Agatha Christie Stephen Knight, "'...done from within'--Agatha Christie's World" (from Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (1980)) Gill Plain, "Sacrifical Bodies: The Corporeal Anxieties of Agatha Christie" (from Twentieth-century crime fiction: gender, sexuality and the body (2001)) Raymond Chandler Fredric Jameson, "The Synoptic Chandler" (from Shades of Noir (1993)) Sean McCann. "The Pulp Writer as Vanishing American: Raymond Chandler's Decentralist Imagination" (from Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000)) Dashiell Hammett Sinda Gregory, "Ambiguity in The Maltese Falcon" (from Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett (1985)) Mark McGurlm "Making 'Literature' of It: Hammett and High Culture" (from American Literary History (1997)) Patricia Highsmith David Cochran, "'Some Torture That Perversely Eased': Patricia Highsmith and the Everyday Schizophrenia of American Life" (from America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (2000)) Michael Trask, "Patricia Highsmith's Method" (from American Literary History (2010)) Chester Himes Michael Denning, "Topographies of Violence: Chester Himes' Harlem Domestic Novels" (from Critical Texts (1988)) Lisa Fluet, "On Chester Himes and Success" (from African American Review (2009)) Jim Thompson Greg Forter. "The Killer In Me is the Killer in You: Violent Voice in Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280" (from Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel (2000)) Robert Polito, "Prologue: Art Savage and His Savage Art" (from Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1996)) III. TRADITIONS IN CRIME FICTION David Schmid, Section Introduction Classical Crime Fiction John T. Irwin, "Detective Fiction as High Art" (from The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (1994)) Franco Moretti, "Clues" (from Signs Taken For Wonders (1988)) Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian, "On Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction" (from ParaDoxa (1995)) Richard Slotkin, "Mythologies of Resistance: Outlaws, Detectives, and Dime-Novel Populism" (from Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992)) Gay and Lesbian Crime Fiction Sally R. Munt, "The Inverstigators: Lesbian crime fiction" (from Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel (1994) Faye Stewart, "Of Herrings Red and Lavender: Reading Crime and Identity in Queer Detective Fiction" (from Clues (2009)) Ethnic Crime Fiction Stephen F. Soitos, "The Tropes of Black Detection" (from The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (1996)) Ralph Rodriguez, "Alienated Eye/I: The Emergence of the Chicana/o Detective Novel" (from Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity (2005)) Experimental Crime Fiction Michael Holquist, "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction" (from New Literary History (1971-2)) Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, "On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story" (from Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1998)) International Crime Fiction Persephone Braham, "Epilogue: Globalization and Detective Literature in Spanish" (from Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons: Detective Fiction in Cuba and Mexico (2004)) Andrew Nestingen, "Unnecessary Officers: Realism, Melodrama and Scandinavian Crime Fiction in Transition" (from Scandinavian Crime Fiction (2011)) Film Adaptations John Paul Athanasourelis, "Film Adaptation and the Censors: 1940s Hollywood and Raymond Chandler" (from Studies in the Novel (2003)) Mary Kay Mahoney, "A Train Running on Two Sets of Tracks: Highsmith's and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train" (from It's a Print: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen (1994)) IV. THEORETICAL APPROACHES David Schmid, Section Introduction Why Theory? David Trotter, "Theory and detective fiction" (from Critical Quarterly (1991)) Feminism Frances Arndt, "A Suitable Job for a Woman" Armchair Detective (1991)) Kathleen Gregory Klein, "Habeus Corpus: Feminism and Detective Fiction" (from Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction (1995)) Formalism Tzvetan Todorov, "The Typology of Detective Fiction" (from The Poetics of Prose (1977)) Globalization Claire F. Fox, "Left sensationalists at the transnational crime scene: recent detective fiction from the U.S.-Mexico border region" (from World Bank Literature (2003)) Andrew Pepper, "Policing the Globe: State Sovereignty and the International in the Post-9/11 Crime Novel" (from Modern Fiction Studies (2011)) Marxism Philip Howell, "Crime and the City Solution: Crime Fiction, Urban Knowledge, and Radical Geography" (from Antipode (1998)) Ernest Mandel, "The ideology of the detective story" (from Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (1984) Post-Colonialism Christopher Keep & Don Randal,. "Addiction, Empire, and Narrative in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four" (from Novel (1999)) Caroline Reitz, "Bad Cop/Good Cop: Godwin, Mill and the Imperial Origins of the English Detective" (from Novel (2000)) Psychoanalysis Carlo Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: clues and scientific method" (from Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading (1990)) Slavoj Zizek, "The Detective and the Analyst" (from Literature and Psychology (1990)) V. CONCLUSION Further Reading Index