Author: P. D. James
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307743136
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
P. D. James, the undisputed queen of mystery, gives us an intriguing, inspiring and idiosyncratic look at the genre she has spent her life perfecting. Examining mystery from top to bottom, beginning with such classics as Charles Dickens's Bleak House and Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White, and then looking at such contemporary masters as Colin Dexter and Henning Mankell, P. D. James goes right to the heart of the genre. Along the way she traces the lives and writing styles of Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, and many more. Here is P.D. James discussing detective fiction as social history, explaining its stylistic components, revealing her own writing process, and commenting on the recent resurgence of detective fiction in modern culture. It is a must have for the mystery connoisseur and casual fan alike.

Author: Dr Marc Singer
Publisher: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd.
ISBN: 1409475514
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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Book Description
Taking up a neglected area in the study of the crime novel, this collection investigates the growing number of writers who adapt conventions of detective fiction to expose problems of law, ethics, and truth that arise in postcolonial and transnational communities. While detective fiction has been linked to imperialism and constructions of race from its earliest origins, recent developments signal the evolution of the genre into a potent framework for narrating the complexities of identity, citizenship, and justice in a postcolonial world. Among the authors considered are Vikram Chandra, Gabriel García Márquez, Michael Ondaatje, Patrick Chamoiseau, Mario Vargas Llosa, Suki Kim, and Walter Mosley. The essays explore detective stories set in Latin America, the Caribbean, India, and North America, including novels that view the American metropolis from the point of view of Asian American, African American, or Latino characters. Offering ten new and original essays by scholars in the field, this volume highlights the diverse employment of detective fictions internationally, and uncovers important political and historical subtexts of popular crime novels.

Author: Neil McCaw
Publisher: A&C Black
ISBN: 1847063071
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 210

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Book Description
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Author: Jerome H. Delamater
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313370311
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 221

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Book Description
Combining theoretical and practical approaches, this collection of essays explores classic detective fiction from a variety of contemporary viewpoints. Among the diverse perspectives are those which interrogate the way the genre reflects important social and cultural attitudes, contributes to a reader's ability to adapt to the challenges of daily life, and provides alternate takes on the role of the detective as an investigator and arbiter of truth. Part I looks at the nature of and the audience for detective fiction, as well as at the genre as a literary form. This section includes an inquiry into the role of the detective; an application of object-relations psychology to the genre; and analyses of recent literary criticism positing that traditional detective fiction contained the seeds of its own subversion. Part II applies a variety of theoretical positions to Agatha Christie and her heirs in the British ratiocinative tradition. A concluding essay positions the genre within the middle-class traditions of the novel since its inception in the eighteenth century. Of interest to all scholars and students of detective fiction and British popular culture.

Author: Neil McCaw
Publisher: Continuum
ISBN: 9781441186171
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Adapting Detective Fiction is a study of specific instances of adaptation, with close readings of both the originating sources and adapted texts. But it is also more than this. It is a study of the politics of representation in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the role television detective fiction plays in this. It is about the mutually-informing interrelation of cultural texts and political rhetoric, about the connection between the popular-cultural depiction of crime and criminality and how we come to understand human behaviour and culpability; most of all, it is a detailed consideration of what the process of adaptation reveals about the shifting nature of the world in which we live. With specific reference to television series such as The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Cadfael, and Midsomer Murders, Adapting Detective Fiction uses adaptation as the basis for an exercise in later twentieth-century cultural history, illustrating the fundamental role detective fictions play in popular beliefs about the nature of crime and Englishness.

Author: Colin Dexter
Publisher: Pan Macmillan
ISBN: 0330504169
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 305

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Book Description
The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn is the third novel in Colin Dexter's Oxford-set detective series. Morse had never ceased to wonder why, with the staggering advances in medical science, all pronouncements concerning times of death seemed so disconcertingly vague. When the newly-appointed and gifted member of the Oxford Examinations Syndicate is murdered in his north Oxford home, so starts a formidably complicated homicide case for Chief Inspector Morse. For tracking down the killer will involve navigating the insular and labyrinthine world of Oxford colleges . . . The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn is followed by the fourth Inspector Morse book, Service of All the Dead.

Author: Gene D. Phillips
Publisher: University Press of Kentucky
ISBN: 0813147905
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
More than any other writer, Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) is responsible for raising detective stories from the level of pulp fiction to literature. Chandler's hard-boiled private eye Philip Marlowe set the standard for rough, brooding heroes who managed to maintain a strong sense of moral conviction despite a cruel and indifferent world. Chandler's seven novels, including The Big Sleep (1939) and The Long Goodbye (1953), with their pessimism and grim realism, had a direct influence on the emergence of film noir. Chandler worked to give his crime novels the flavor of his adopted city, Los Angeles, which was still something of a frontier town, rife with corruption and lawlessness. In addition to novels, Chandler wrote short stories and penned the screenplays for several films, including Double Indemnity (1944) and Strangers on a Train (1951). His work with Billy Wilder and Alfred Hitchcock on these projects was fraught with the difficulties of collaboration between established directors and an author who disliked having to edit his writing on demand. Creatures of Darkness is the first major biocritical study of Chandler in twenty years. Gene Phillips explores Chandler's unpublished script for Lady in the Lake, examines the process of adaptation of the novel Strangers on a Train, discusses the merits of the unproduced screenplay for Playback, and compares Howard Hawks's director's cut of The Big Sleep with the version shown in theaters. Through interviews he conducted with Wilder, Hitchcock, Hawks, and Edward Dmytryk over the past several decades, Phillips provides deeper insight into Chandler's sometimes difficult personality. Chandler's wisecracking Marlowe has spawned a thousand imitations. Creatures of Darkness lucidly explains the author's dramatic impact on both the literary and cinematic worlds, demonstrating the immeasurable debt that both detective fiction and the neo-noir films of today owe to Chandler's stark vision.

Author: William Reynolds
Publisher: Popular Press
ISBN: 9780879726614
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
The mechanistic age of the twentieth century has required a mechanized medium for expression: the production of filmdependent from the start on machines such as cameras, projectors, lights, and now more heavily reliant on computers, sensitive films, miniaturization, and sophisticated sound recording devices - has flowered in this century not only as a means of popular entertainment, but as a critically acclaimed art form. These essays highlight true cinematic adaptations as completely different products from films based loosely on the gimmick or plot or character of a certain fiction.

Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781846777004
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 136

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Book Description
The 'first detective' of fiction steps out 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue' by Edgar Allan Poe is widely considered to be the first true detective story; also in this volume are the author's two other detective fiction classics featuring the same central character-'The Mystery of Marie Rogêt' & 'The Purloined Letter.' The French detective who features in all three is Chevalier Auguste Dupin, an amateur sleuth who puts himself in the position of the criminal and then uses logical deduction to discover how a crime was committed. This is an opportunity for lovers of classic crime and detective fiction to own and read these important and groundbreaking mysteries in a single volume, available in paperback or hardback with dust jacket for collectors.

Author: Owen Dwyer
Publisher: Liberties Press
ISBN: 1912589249
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 323

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Book Description
Richard Todd, an award-winning writer, is outwardly successful but inwardly plagued by uncertainties. Worst of all, he can't seem to write any more. When a bright young editor, Jenny Lambe, arrives on his doorstep to work with him on his latest book, about the assassination of US president James Garfield, his life is sent spinning off in a new direction. President Garfield was killed by Charles Guiteau, who was tried and hanged for the murder. But was he acting along, or was there a more sinister force at work? Richard hears Guiteau's voice in his head, and as his relationship with Jenny deepens, he is visited by other characters in the drama. Are they helping Richard solve the mystery surrounding Garfield's murder – or pushing him further towards the edge? A remarkable, disturbing portrait of a middle-aged man torn between his carefully constructed life and new adventures which may beckon, in the present and the past, from one of Ireland's most exciting emerging authors.