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20 years ago, Anthony Galton vanished, along with his bride and several thousand dollars of the Galton fortune. Now his dying mother wants him found, and Lew Archer is on the case. But what Archer finds - a headless skeleton, a clever con and a terrified blonde - reveals a game whose stakes are so high that someone is willing to kill.
This book focuses on the distinctive role that artists have played in detective fiction--as detectives, as villains and victims, and as bystanders. With a few significant exceptions, literary detectives have always identified themselves as essentially the deconstructors of the artful crimes of others. They may use various methods--ratiocinative, scientific, or hard-boiled--but they always unravel the threads that the villains have woven into deceptive covers for their crimes. The detective does, in the end, produce a work of art: a narrative that explains everything that needs explanation. But the detective's moral work is often juxtaposed to the aesthetic work of the painters, poets, and writers that the detective encounters during an investigation. The author surveys this juxtaposition in works by important authors from the early development of the genre (Poe, Conan Doyle), the golden age (Bentley, Christie, Sayers, James, et al.), and the hard-boiled era (Hammett, Chandler, Macdonald, Spicer et al.).
This analysis of the genre shows that the fictional world portrayed by the mystery writer parallels the actual world of the reader. Because daily life is so implausible, readers willingly suspend disbelief as they are absorbed by the pages of detective fiction. This apparent unity of the fictional thriller and veritable circumstance produces a code of modernity that is the essence of the genre. In the light of this concept of modernity Mystery Fiction and Modern Life examines works by Arthur Conan Doyle, Edgar Allan Poe, John Buchan, Eric Ambler, Dashiell Hammett, Ross Macdonald, Tony Hillerman, Agatha Christie, Helen MacInnes, Patricia Cornwell, Marcia Muller, Sara Paretsky, Anthony Price, and others.
A study of the character of Lew Archer and the novels that he appears in.
Despite its cozy image, the bungalow in literature and film is haunted by violence even while fostering possibilities for personal transformation, utopian social vision and even comedy. Originating in Bengal and adapted as housing for colonialist ventures worldwide, the homes were sold in mail-order kits during the "bungalow mania" of the early 20th century and enjoyed a revival at century's end. The bungalow as fictional setting stages ongoing contradictions of modernity--home and homelessness, property and dispossession, self and other--prompting a rethinking of our images of house and home. Drawing on the work of writers, architects and film directors, including Katherine Mansfield, E. M. Forster, Amitav Ghosh, Frank Lloyd Wright, Willa Cather, Buster Keaton and Walter Mosley, this study offers new readings of the transcultural bungalow.
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.
Twenty years ago, Anthony Galton vanished, along with his streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of the Galton fortune. Now his dying mother wants him found, and Lew Archer is on the case: is Anthony hiding somewhere, happy and eager not to be discovered? But what Archer finds - a headless skeleton, a clever con and a terrified blonde - reveals a game whose stakes are so high that someone is willing to kill. The Galton Case is a wonderfully devious and poetic look at poverty, greed, murder and identity. Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer mysteries rewrote the conventions of the detective novel with their credible, humane hero, and with Macdonald's insight and moral complexity won new literary respectability for the hardboiled genre previously pioneered by Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler. They have also received praise from such celebrated writers as William Goldman, Jonathan Kellerman, Eudora Welty and Elmore Leonard.
This book is intended for scholars and students of geography, geology, environmental science, civil engineering, urban planning biology, and social sciences.
A study of the relation of metaphysics to grammar, placing the central topics of philosophy in an entirely new light.
This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 4th International Conference on GeoSpatial Semantics, GeoS 2011, held in Brest, France, in May 2011. The 13 papers presented together with 1 invited talk were carefully reviewed and selected from 23 submissions. The papers focus on formal and semantic approaches, time and activity-based patterns, ontologies, as well as quality, conflicts and semantic integration. They are organized in topical sections on ontologies and gazetteers, activity-based and temporal issues, models, quality and semantic similarities, and retrieval and discovery methods.