The first anthology of its kind, A Crime Fiction Reader: Craft and Criticism brings together classic and contemporary writings on a genre that is more popular now than it has ever been. It is comprehensive in multiple ways: historically, theoretically, and in terms of its coverage of key authors and traditions within the genre. The first section, "Defining the Genre," brings together critical statements about the genre of crime fiction from some of its central practitioners as well some of the most famous early attempts to regulate, critique, or defend the genre. The essays in this section are designed to give students the ability to reconstruct both the history of early debates about the value of crime fiction and the formal and thematic characteristics of the genre that constituted the focus of such debates. The second and third sections, "Key Authors" and "Traditions in Crime Fiction," collect a sample of the most influential critical work about some of the leading writers, traditions and subgenres of crime fiction. Crime fiction has long been known for attracting critical attention from writers with an enormously wide range of theoretical concerns and affiliations. The fourth and final section, "Theoretical Approaches," reflects that history and diversity by including samples of critical work from multiple viewpoints, including feminist, Marxist, formalist, post-colonial, and psychoanalytic. This section renders A Crime Fiction Reader suitable not only for classes in crime fiction per se, but also for classes on critical and literary theory that use crime fiction texts to introduce students to a wide range of theoretical issues and positions.

Table of Contents:
INTRODUCTION David Schmid, Criticizing Crime Fiction I. DEFINING THE GENRE David Schmid, Section Introduction Edgar Allan Poe, 1846 letter to Philip P. Cooke G.K. Chesterton, A Defence of Detective Stories (1901) Dashiell Hammett, From the Memoirs of a Private Detective (1923) Dorothy L. Sayers, The Omnibus of Crime (1928) Ronald A. Knox, A Detective Story Decalogue (1929) S.S. Van Dine, Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories (1929) Raymond Chandler, The Simple Art of Murder: An Essay (1944) Edmund Wilson, Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd? (1945) W.H. Auden, The Guilty Vicarage (1948) Elmore Leonard, 10 Rules for Good Writing (2001) P.D. James, Telling the Story: Setting, Viewpoint (2011) II. KEY AUTHORS David Schmid, Section Introduction Edgar Allan Poe Dana Brand, "From the flaneur to the detective: Interpreting the city of Poe" (from The Spectator and the City in Nineteenth-Century American Literature (1991)) Amy Gilman Srebnick, "Poe Detects Marie: Poe, Mary Rogers, and the Birth of Detective Fiction" (from The Mysterious Death of Mary Rogers: Sex and Culture in Nineteenth-Century New York (1995) Sir Arthur Conan Doyle Catherine Belsey, "Deconstructing the Text: Sherlock Holmes" (from Critical Practice (1980)) Jinny Huh, "Whispers of Norbury: Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and the Modernist Crisis of Racial (Un)detection" from Modern Fiction Studies (2003)) Agatha Christie Stephen Knight, "'...done from within'--Agatha Christie's World" (from Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction (1980)) Gill Plain, "Sacrifical Bodies: The Corporeal Anxieties of Agatha Christie" (from Twentieth-century crime fiction: gender, sexuality and the body (2001)) Raymond Chandler Fredric Jameson, "The Synoptic Chandler" (from Shades of Noir (1993)) Sean McCann. "The Pulp Writer as Vanishing American: Raymond Chandler's Decentralist Imagination" (from Gumshoe America: Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction and the Rise and Fall of New Deal Liberalism (2000)) Dashiell Hammett Sinda Gregory, "Ambiguity in The Maltese Falcon" (from Private Investigations: The Novels of Dashiell Hammett (1985)) Mark McGurlm "Making 'Literature' of It: Hammett and High Culture" (from American Literary History (1997)) Patricia Highsmith David Cochran, "'Some Torture That Perversely Eased': Patricia Highsmith and the Everyday Schizophrenia of American Life" (from America Noir: Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era (2000)) Michael Trask, "Patricia Highsmith's Method" (from American Literary History (2010)) Chester Himes Michael Denning, "Topographies of Violence: Chester Himes' Harlem Domestic Novels" (from Critical Texts (1988)) Lisa Fluet, "On Chester Himes and Success" (from African American Review (2009)) Jim Thompson Greg Forter. "The Killer In Me is the Killer in You: Violent Voice in Jim Thompson's Pop. 1280" (from Murdering Masculinities: Fantasies of Gender and Violence in the American Crime Novel (2000)) Robert Polito, "Prologue: Art Savage and His Savage Art" (from Savage Art: A Biography of Jim Thompson (1996)) III. TRADITIONS IN CRIME FICTION David Schmid, Section Introduction Classical Crime Fiction John T. Irwin, "Detective Fiction as High Art" (from The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (1994)) Franco Moretti, "Clues" (from Signs Taken For Wonders (1988)) Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction Bill Pronzini and Jack Adrian, "On Hard-Boiled Crime Fiction" (from ParaDoxa (1995)) Richard Slotkin, "Mythologies of Resistance: Outlaws, Detectives, and Dime-Novel Populism" (from Gunfighter Nation: The Myth of the Frontier in Twentieth-Century America (1992)) Gay and Lesbian Crime Fiction Sally R. Munt, "The Inverstigators: Lesbian crime fiction" (from Murder by the Book?: Feminism and the Crime Novel (1994) Faye Stewart, "Of Herrings Red and Lavender: Reading Crime and Identity in Queer Detective Fiction" (from Clues (2009)) Ethnic Crime Fiction Stephen F. Soitos, "The Tropes of Black Detection" (from The Blues Detective: A Study of African American Detective Fiction (1996)) Ralph Rodriguez, "Alienated Eye/I: The Emergence of the Chicana/o Detective Novel" (from Brown Gumshoes: Detective Fiction and the Search for Chicana/o Identity (2005)) Experimental Crime Fiction Michael Holquist, "Whodunit and Other Questions: Metaphysical Detective Stories in Post-War Fiction" (from New Literary History (1971-2)) Patricia Merivale and Susan Elizabeth Sweeney, "On the Trail of the Metaphysical Detective Story" (from Detecting Texts: The Metaphysical Detective Story from Poe to Postmodernism (1998)) International Crime Fiction Persephone Braham, "Epilogue: Globalization and Detective Literature in Spanish" (from Crimes against the State, Crimes against Persons: Detective Fiction in Cuba and Mexico (2004)) Andrew Nestingen, "Unnecessary Officers: Realism, Melodrama and Scandinavian Crime Fiction in Transition" (from Scandinavian Crime Fiction (2011)) Film Adaptations John Paul Athanasourelis, "Film Adaptation and the Censors: 1940s Hollywood and Raymond Chandler" (from Studies in the Novel (2003)) Mary Kay Mahoney, "A Train Running on Two Sets of Tracks: Highsmith's and Hitchcock's Strangers on a Train" (from It's a Print: Detective Fiction from Page to Screen (1994)) IV. THEORETICAL APPROACHES David Schmid, Section Introduction Why Theory? David Trotter, "Theory and detective fiction" (from Critical Quarterly (1991)) Feminism Frances Arndt, "A Suitable Job for a Woman" Armchair Detective (1991)) Kathleen Gregory Klein, "Habeus Corpus: Feminism and Detective Fiction" (from Feminism in Women's Detective Fiction (1995)) Formalism Tzvetan Todorov, "The Typology of Detective Fiction" (from The Poetics of Prose (1977)) Globalization Claire F. Fox, "Left sensationalists at the transnational crime scene: recent detective fiction from the U.S.-Mexico border region" (from World Bank Literature (2003)) Andrew Pepper, "Policing the Globe: State Sovereignty and the International in the Post-9/11 Crime Novel" (from Modern Fiction Studies (2011)) Marxism Philip Howell, "Crime and the City Solution: Crime Fiction, Urban Knowledge, and Radical Geography" (from Antipode (1998)) Ernest Mandel, "The ideology of the detective story" (from Delightful Murder: A Social History of the Crime Story (1984) Post-Colonialism Christopher Keep & Don Randal,. "Addiction, Empire, and Narrative in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Sign of the Four" (from Novel (1999)) Caroline Reitz, "Bad Cop/Good Cop: Godwin, Mill and the Imperial Origins of the English Detective" (from Novel (2000)) Psychoanalysis Carlo Ginzburg, "Morelli, Freud and Sherlock Holmes: clues and scientific method" (from Popular Fiction: Technology, Ideology, Production, Reading (1990)) Slavoj Zizek, "The Detective and the Analyst" (from Literature and Psychology (1990)) V. CONCLUSION Further Reading Index