An Overview or Two (or Three)

Last week, I noted some recent and upcoming nonfiction books about niche subjects in crime fiction. This week, I thought I'd point out some new crime fiction overviews that look interesting for both casual readers and those of you who are more into the academic side of things. 

Crime Fiction From Poe to the Present: A Historical and Critical Introduction to Crime Fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's First Detective Story to the Present Day by Martin Priestman, Professor of English at Roehampton University London. This book gives a historical and critical introduction to the genre of
crime fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe's first detective story The Murders
in the Rue Morgue in 1841 to the present day. It concentrates chiefly on
three branches of crime fiction: the classic detective whodunit, the
thriller in which the protagonist is opposed either to a powerful
conspiracy or to society at large, and the hardboiled private-eye story,
or detective thriller, which mixes aspects of the other two.

The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction, edited by Catherine Ross Nickerson. From the execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programs
like The Wire and The Sopranos, crime writing has played an important
role in American culture. Its ability to register fear, desire and
anxiety has made it a popular genre with a wide audience. These new
essays, written for students as well as readers of crime fiction,
demonstrate the very best in contemporary scholarship and challenge
long-established notions of the development of the detective novel. 

The Crime Fiction Handbook (Blackwell Literature Handbooks) by Peter Messent, Emeritus Professor of Modern American Literature at the University of Nottingham. The Crime Fiction Handbook presents a comprehensive
introduction to the origins, development, and cultural significance of
the crime fiction genre, focusing mainly on its American, British, and
Scandinavian forms. The book’s first main section presents an overview
of the subject, addressing the politics of crime fiction and exploring
some of its main variants  – classical and hard-boiled detective
fiction, the private eye and the police novel, fictions of
transgression.