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Accessible exploration of Sherlock Holmes and his relationship to late-Victorian culture as well as his ongoing significance and popularity.
The author examines Ian Rankin's use of the gothic convention of the ghost in Black and Blue, Dead Souls, Set in Darkness, and "The Very Last Drop." In these works, ghosts and skeletons are used as metaphors for Detective Inspector John Rebus's guilt over past mistakes and for the dark past of his home city, Edinburgh. This article originally appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Volume 30, Issue 2.
The clue-puzzle, legal thriller, and classic whodunit are just a few of the subgenres within the widely popular crime fiction genre. However, despite its popularity among readers, the crime short story genre has yet to be fully explored by scholars. This book offers a deep-dive into crime short stories written by a wide range of authors, tracing the history and evolution of the crime short story. The book offers an accessible and original examination of crime short stories, focusing on compelling themes such as miscarriage of justice, feminism, environmental crime and toxic masculinity.
In 1859 the popular novelist Wilkie Collins wrote of a ghostly woman, dressed from head to toe in white garments, laying her cold, thin hand on the shoulder of a young man as he walked home late one evening. His novel The Woman in White became hugely successful and popularised a style of writing that came to be known as sensation fiction. This Companion highlights the energy, the impact and the inventiveness of the novels that were written in 'sensational' style, including the work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Mrs Henry Wood and Florence Marryat. It contains fifteen specially-commissioned essays and includes a chronology and a guide to further reading. Accessible yet rigorous, this Companion questions what influenced the shape and texture of the sensation novel, and what its repercussions were both in the nineteenth century and up to the present day.
A revelatory history of the women who brought Victorian criminals to account—and how they became a cultural sensation From Wilkie Collins to the adventures of Sherlock Holmes, the traditional image of the Victorian detective is male. Few people realise that women detectives successfully investigated Victorian Britain, working both with the police and for private agencies, which they sometimes managed themselves. Sara Lodge recovers these forgotten women’s lives. She also reveals the sensational role played by the fantasy female detective in Victorian melodrama and popular fiction, enthralling a public who relished the spectacle of a cross-dressing, fist-swinging heroine who got the better of love rats, burglars, and murderers alike. How did the morally ambiguous work of real women detectives, sometimes paid to betray their fellow women, compare with the exploits of their fictional counterparts, who always save the day? Lodge’s book takes us into the murky underworld of Victorian society on both sides of the Atlantic, revealing the female detective as both an unacknowledged labourer and a feminist icon.
For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.
In this article, the author explores the relationship between science and truth in forensic crime fiction by analysis of narrative and media-specific constituents of CSI: Crime Scene Investigation (2000-) and Patricia Cornwell's The Scarpetta Factor (2009). Despite the different media, both are found to establish a strong bond between science and truth, and readers/viewers are encouraged to assume that this also is the case in the external world. This article originally appeared in Clues: A Journal of Detection, Volume 30, Issue 1.
For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.
For over two decades, Clues has included the best scholarship on mystery and detective fiction. With a combination of academic essays and nonfiction book reviews, it covers all aspects of mystery and detective fiction material in print, television and movies. As the only American scholarly journal on mystery fiction, Clues is essential reading for literature and film students and researchers; popular culture aficionados; librarians; and mystery authors, fans and critics around the globe.