Jolly Good Detecting

Jolly Good Detecting
Author: Bruce Shaw
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 325
Release: 2013-12-31
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786478861

This book is an appreciation of selected authors who make extensive use of humor in English detective/crime fiction. Works using humor as an amelioration of the serious have their heyday in the Golden Age of crime writing but they belong also to a long tradition. There is an identifiable lineage of humorous writing in crime fiction that ranges from mild wit to outright farce, burlesque, even slapstick. A mix of entertainment with instruction is a tradition in English letters. English crime fiction writers of the era circa 1913 to 1940 were raised in the mainstream literary tradition but turned their skills to detective fiction. And they are the humorists of the genre. This book is not an exhaustive study but an introduction into the best produced by the most capable and enjoyable authors. What the humorists seek is to surprise the reader by overturning their expectations using a repertoire of stylistic conceits and motifs (recurring incidents, devices, references). Humor has a liberating effect but is concerned too with "comic contrast" through ugliness and caricature. In crime fiction one effect is intellectual pleasure at solving (or attempting to solve) a puzzle. Another is entertainment but with serious undertones.

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Fall 2021)

Clues: A Journal of Detection, Vol. 39, No. 2 (Fall 2021)
Author: Elizabeth Foxwell
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 170
Release: 2021-11-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 147664487X

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.

Murder in the Closet

Murder in the Closet
Author: Curtis Evans
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2017-01-11
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1476626332

Before the 1969 Stonewall Riots, LGBTQ life was dominated by the negative image of "the closet"--the metaphorical space where that which was deemed "queer" was hidden from a hostile public view. Literary studies of queer themes and characters in crime fiction have tended to focus on the more positive and explicit representations since the riots, while pre-Stonewall works are thought to reference queer only negatively or obliquely. This collection of new essays questions that view with an investigation of queer aspects in crime fiction published over eight decades, from the corseted Victorian era to the unbuttoned 1960s.

Spanish and Latin American Women’s Crime Fiction in the New Millennium

Spanish and Latin American Women’s Crime Fiction in the New Millennium
Author: Nancy Vosburg
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 179
Release: 2017-11-06
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1527505200

Crime fiction written by women in Spain and Latin America since the late 1980s has been successful in shifting attention to crimes often overlooked by their male counterparts, such as rape and sexual battery, domestic violence, child pornography, pederasty, and incest. In the twenty-first century, social, economic, and political issues, including institutional corruption, class inequality, criminalized oppression of immigrant women, crass capitalist market forces, and mediatized political and religious bodies, have at their core a gendered dimension. The conventions of the original noir, or novela negra, genre have evolved, such that some women authors challenge the noir formulas by foregrounding gender concerns while others imagine new models of crime fiction that depart drastically from the old paradigms. This volume, highlighting such evolution in the crime fiction genre, will be of interest to students, teachers, and scholars of crime fiction in Latin America and Spain, to those interested in crime fiction by women, and to readers familiar with the sub-genres of crime fiction, which include noir, the thriller, the police procedural, and the “cozy” novel.

The Idea of Education in Golden Age Detective Fiction

The Idea of Education in Golden Age Detective Fiction
Author: Roger Dalrymple
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 171
Release: 2024-07-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1040089593

This book presents an exploration of how Golden Age detective fiction encounters educational ideas, particularly those forged by the transformative educational policymaking of the interwar period. Charting the educational policy and provision of the era, and referring to works by Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Edmund Crispin and others, this book explores the educational capacity and agency of literary detectives, the learning spaces of the genre and the kinds of knowledge that are made available to inquirers both inside and outside the text. It is argued that the genre explores a range of contemporaneous propositions on the balance between academic curriculum and practicum, length of school life and the value of lifelong learning. This book’s closing chapter considers the continuing pedagogic value for contemporary classrooms of engaging with the genre as a rich discursive and imaginative space for exploring educational ideas. Framing Golden Age detective fiction as a genre profoundly concerned with learning, this book will be highly relevant reading for academics, postgraduate students and scholars involved in the fields of English language arts, twentieth-century literature and the theories of learning more broadly. Those interested in detective fiction and interdisciplinary literary studies will also find the volume of interest.

Detection Unlimited

Detection Unlimited
Author: Georgette Heyer
Publisher: Sourcebooks, Inc.
Total Pages: 385
Release: 2010-09-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1402254644

They all wanted him dead...but which one turned hatred into murder? Slumped on a seat under an oak tree is local solicitor Sampson Warrenby, stone cold dead, with a bullet in his brain. And everybody in the village seems ready to tell Chief Inspector Hemingway who murdered him. Could the killer have been the dead man's niece, who found him in the first place? The couple at the farm had a guilty secret—what was it? And why is it someone else actually wants to be the prime suspect? Detection is unlimited when everyone in the tiny village has a theory about who murdered the socially pushy newcomer. With no shortage of motives and means, it's up to Chief Inspector Hemingway to uncover which of the villagers is guilt of the crime. A classic country house mystery, perfect for readers of Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers!

The Further Adventures of Smoky

The Further Adventures of Smoky
Author: Nicholas Nurston
Publisher: Xlibris Corporation
Total Pages: 40
Release: 2014-04-02
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1493142186

This book is set in the picturesque Vale of Glamorgan and Smoky, the hero of this book, is a real cat, very inquisitive and particularly independent. Although enjoying a mostly outdoor existence, he adopted the author and his wife and will visit them indoors for one purpose only.......scrumptious food. He is sometimes away for three or four days, only returning after he has completed his adventure or the thought of food compels his return.