The Modern Detective

The Modern Detective
Author: Tyler Maroney
Publisher: National Geographic Books
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2020-09-29
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 1594632596

A fascinating examination of the world of private investigators by a 21st-century private eye. Today's world is complicated: companies are becoming more powerful than nations, the lines between public and corporate institutions grow murkier, and the internet is shredding our privacy. To combat these onslaughts, people everywhere -- rich and not so rich, in business and in their personal lives -- are turning away from traditional police, lawyers, and government regulators toward a new champion: the private investigator. As a private investigator, Tyler Maroney has traveled the globe, overseeing sensitive investigations and untying complicated cases for a wide array of clients. In his new book, he shows that it's private eyes who today are being called upon to catch corrupt politicians, track down international embezzlers, and mine reams of data to reveal which CEOs are lying. The tools Maroney and other private investigators use are a mix of the traditional and the cutting edge, from old phone records to computer forensics to solid (and often inspired) street-level investigative work. The most useful assets private investigators have, Maroney has found, are their resourcefulness and their creativity. Each of the investigations Maroney explores in this book highlights an individual case and the people involved in it, and in each account he explains how the transgressors were caught and what lessons can be learned from it. Whether the clients are a Middle Eastern billionaire whose employees stole millions from him, the director of a private equity firm wanting a background check on a potential hire (a known convicted felon), or creditors of a wealthy American investor trying to recoup their money after he fled the country to avoid bankruptcy, all of them hired private investigators to solve problems the authorities either can't or won't touch. In an era when it's both easier and more difficult than ever to disappear after a crime is committed, it's the modern detective people are turning to for help, for revenge, and for justice.

Murder Most Modern

Murder Most Modern
Author: Sari Kawana
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 285
Release:
Genre:
ISBN: 1452913730

The quintessential international genre, detective fiction often works under the guise of popular entertainment to expose its extensive readership to complex moral questions and timely ethical dilemmas. The first book-length study of Japan’s detective fiction, Murder Most Modern considers the important role of detective fiction in defining the country’s emergence as a modern nation-state. Kawana explores the interactions between the popular genre and broader discourses of modernity, nation, and ethics that circulated at this pivotal moment in Japanese history. The author contrasts Japanese works by Edogawa Ranpo, Unno Juza, Oguri Mushitaro, and others with English-language works by Edgar Allan Poe, Dashiell Hammett, and Agatha Christie to show how Japanese writers of detective fiction used the genre to disseminate their ideas on some of the most startling aspects of modern life: the growth of urbanization, the protection and violation of privacy, the criminalization of abnormal sexuality, the dehumanization of scientific research, and the horrors of total war. Kawana’s comparative approach reveals how Japanese authors of the genre emphasized the vital social issues that captured the attention of thrill-seeking readers-while eluding the eyes of government censors. Sari Kawana is assistant professor of Japanese at the University of Massachusetts, Boston.

A Modern Detective

A Modern Detective
Author: Edgar Allan Poe
Publisher: Penguin UK
Total Pages: 128
Release: 2016-03-03
Genre: True Crime
ISBN: 0241252334

He is fond of enigmas, of conundrums, hieroglyphics; exhibiting in his solutions of each a degree of acumen which appears to the ordinary apprehension praeternatural.

Detective Fiction

Detective Fiction
Author: M. Lee Alexander
Publisher:
Total Pages:
Release: 2010-07-20
Genre: Detective and mystery stories
ISBN: 9781440725470

Detective Fiction: From Victorian Sleuths to the Present

Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective

Cracking the Hard-Boiled Detective
Author: Lewis D. Moore
Publisher: McFarland
Total Pages: 307
Release: 2015-01-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0786482397

The hard-boiled private detective is among the most recognizable characters in popular fiction since the 1920s--a tough product of a violent world, in which police forces are inadequate and people with money can choose private help when facing threatening circumstances. Though a relatively recent arrival, the hard-boiled detective has undergone steady development and assumed diverse forms. This critical study analyzes the character of the hard-boiled detective, from literary antecedents through the early 21st century. It follows change in the novels through three main periods: the Early (roughly 1927-1955), during which the character was defined by such writers as Carroll John Daly, Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler; the Transitional, evident by 1964 in the works of John D. MacDonald and Michael Collins, and continuing to around 1977 via Joseph Hansen, Bill Pronzini and others; and the Modern, since the late 1970s, during which such writers as Loren D. Estleman, Liza Cody, Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton and many others have expanded the genre and the detective character. Themes such as violence, love and sexuality, friendship, space and place, and work are examined throughout the text. Instructors considering this book for use in a course may request an examination copy here.

Detective Fiction

Detective Fiction
Author: Charles J. Rzepka
Publisher: Polity
Total Pages: 298
Release: 2005-09-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780745629421

'Detective Fiction' is a clear and compelling look at some of the best known, yet least-understood characters and texts of the modern day. Undergraduate students of Detective and Crime Fiction and of genre fiction in general, will find this book essential reading.

Talking About Detective Fiction

Talking About Detective Fiction
Author: P. D. James
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 210
Release: 2011-05-03
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0307743136

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.

Mysteries and Conspiracies

Mysteries and Conspiracies
Author: Luc Boltanski
Publisher: John Wiley & Sons
Total Pages: 509
Release: 2014-10-10
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0745683444

The detective story, focused on inquiries, and in its wake the spy novel, built around conspiracies, developed as genres in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. During the same period, psychiatry was inventing paranoia, sociology was devising new forms of causality to explain the social lives of individuals and groups and political science was shifting the problematics of paranoia from the psychic to the social realm and seeking to explain historical events in terms of conspiracy theories. In each instance, social reality was cast into doubt. We owe the project of organizing and unifying this reality for a particular population and territory to the nation-state as it took shape at the end of the nineteenth century. Thus the figure of conspiracy became the focal point for suspicions concerning the exercise of power. Where does power really lie, and who actually holds it? The national authorities that are presumed to be responsible for it, or other agencies acting in the shadows - bankers, anarchists, secret societies, the ruling class? Questions of this kind provided the scaffolding for political ontologies that banked on a doubly distributed reality: an official but superficial reality and its opposite, a deeper, hidden, threatening reality that was unofficial but much more real. Crime fiction and spy fiction, paranoia and sociology - more or less concomitant inventions - had in common a new way of problematizing reality and of working through the contradictions inherit in it. The adventures of the conflict between these two realities - superficial versus real - provide the framework for this highly original book. Through an exploration of the work of the great masters of detective stories and spy novels - G.K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, John Le Carré and Graham Greene among others - Boltanski shows that these works of fiction and imagination tell us something fundamental about the nature of modern societies and the modern state.

The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories

The Oxford Book of English Detective Stories
Author: Patricia Craig
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
Total Pages: 554
Release: 1992
Genre: Detective and mystery stories, English
ISBN: 9780192829689

Essential reading for all armchair detectives, this collection of 33 classic whodunits is the cream of crime writing.