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Includes Part 1, Number 2: Books and Pamphlets, Including Serials and Contributions to Periodicals July - December)
This book is a no-apologies introduction to Detective Fiction. It's written in an aggressive, modern English well-suited to a genre which has traditionally broken ground in terms of aggressive writing, contemporary scenarios, and tough dialogue.
Raymond Chandler's eminence as a mystery writer is unchallenged. Somerset Maugham and George Grella both rate him above Dashiell Hammett; Eric Partridge deems him "a serious artist and a very considerable novelist," while praising him as "one of the finest novelists of his time." Peter Wolfe examines the many sides of Chandler and his work--his apparent will to self-destruct, his obsession with beautiful women, and his apparent brush with homosexuality--and casts much new and needed light on this major American author.
The argument of Noir Fiction and Film is curiously counterintuitive: that in a century of hard-boiled fiction and detective films, characteristics that at first seemed trivial swelled in importance, flourishing into crucial aspects of the genre. Among these are aimless descriptions of people and places irrelevant to plot, along with detectives consisting of little more than sparkling dialogue and flippant attitudes. What weaves together such features, however, seems to be a paradox: that a genre rooted in solving a mystery, structured around the gathering of clues, must do so by misdirecting our attention, even withholding information we think we need to generate the suspense we also desire....
Designed for mystery lovers as well as professors and students in college courses devoted to detective fiction, this anthology features classic texts, pivotal works by lesser-known authors, and unknown gems by major writers not typically associated with the genre. Providing a chronological and thematic survey of the first 100 years of detection, this volume includes stories by Edgar Allan Poe, Wilkie Collins, Mark Twain, Arthur Conan Doyle, Bret Harte, G.K. Chesterton, Mary Wilkins Freeman, Anna Katharine Green, Baroness Orzcy, Susan Glaspell, Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett, Cornell Woolrich, Pauline Hopkins, Chester Himes and Ralph Ellison. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.
This critical study of American detective fiction examines the history and development of the detective genre through the lens of psychoanalysis. Applying the ideas of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, the author identifies and categorizes popular works according to the fictional protagonist's hysteria, obsessive neurosis, perversion or psychosis. The first chapter identifies several instances of hysteria within the fiction of two of the genre's pioneers, Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle. Chapter Two traces the development of the hard-boiled detective's code of honor through the works of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, identifying the often-paradoxical nature of this code and its origins in obsessive neurosis. Chapter Three analyzes the anti-detective fiction of Philip K. Dick in terms of paranoid psychosis, and the final chapter returns to the question of hysteria, taking up the female hard-boiled detectives of author Marcia Muller.
This is the first collection of short stories by W.T. Ballard. This volume is just a sampling of Ballard's most famous character Bill Lennox, a selection for both the connoisseur of crime and the lover of good, fast-moving crime/adventure stories.
This book highlights detection's malleability by analyzing the works of particular groups of authors from specific time periods written in response to other texts. It traces the roles that gender, race and empire have played in American detective fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's works through the myriad variations upon them published before 1920 to hard-boiled fiction (the origins of which derive in part from turn-of-the-20th-century notions about gender, race and nationality), and it concludes with a discussion of contemporary mystery series with inner-city settings that address black male and female heroism.
A major three-volume bibliography, including an additional supplement, of an annotated listing of American Studies monographs published between 1900 and 1988.
This is the most thorough gathering of newspaper and magazine reviews of Henry James's writing ever assembled.