The Art of Detective Fiction

by Warren Chernaik (Editor), Martin Swales (Editor), Robert Vilain (Editor)

The contributors of this volume pay tribute to and seek to account for the astonishing durability of the detective story as a genre. The essays take a variety of theoretical approaches and include detective fiction in languages other than English. Particular attention is paid to the "Golden Age" of English detective story writing and to the hard-boiled American version of the genre.

255 pages, Hardcover

First published March 15, 2000

Reviews

[Cloud · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's divided into 15 essays on a number of topics such as gender in crime fiction, fascination and nausea in the hard-boiled, women detectives and women's friendship in crime fiction, the seriality, the influence of psychoanalysis on crime fiction, etc.

There are many different writing styles. Some of them are easy to understand, some of them aren't. Most of the chapters' authors talk about specific crime fiction authors or novels.