The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction

Catherine Ross Nickerson is Associate Professor of American Studies at Emory University, Atlanta. She is the author of The Web of Iniquity: Early Women Writers of Detective Fiction (1998) and she has edited two volumes of reprinted novels from early detective fiction: Anna Katharine Green, Lost Man's Lane and that Affair Next Door and Metta Victor, The Dead Letter and the Figure Eight (both 2003). She has also received the 2011 George N. Dove Award for Contributions to the Study of Crime Fiction.

• Notes on contributors; 1. Introduction Catherine Ross Nickerson; 2. Early crime writing Sara Crosby; 3. Poe and the origins of detective fiction Stephen Rachman; 4. Women writers before 1960 Catherine Ross Nickerson; 5. The hard-boiled novel Sean McCann; 6. The American Roman Noir Andrew Pepper; 7. Teenage detectives and teenage delinquents Ilana Nash; 8. The American spy novel David Seed; 9. Police procedurals in literature and on television Eddy Von Mueller; 10. Mafia stories and the US gangster Fred L. Gardaphe; 11. True crime Laura Browder; 12. Race and American crime fiction Maureen T. Reddy; 13. Feminist crime fiction Margaret Kinsman; 14. Crime and post-modern fiction Susan Elizabeth Sweeney; American crime fiction: a chronology; Guide to reading; Index.

"Fourteen essays by academics include some valuable history and analysis..." -John L. Breen