There is a new category of authors blurring the line between fiction and nonfiction: women who work or have worked in criminal justice--lawyers, police officers and forensic investigators--who publish crime fiction with characters that resemble real-life counterparts. Drawing on their professional experience, these writers present compelling portrayals of inequality and dysfunction in criminal justice systems from a feminist viewpoint. This book presents the first examination of the true-crime-infused fiction of authors like Dorothy Uhnak, Kathy Reichs and Linda Fairstein.

Australian crime fiction has grown from the country's origins as an 18th-century English prison colony. Early stories focused on escaped convicts becoming heroic bush rangers, or how the system mistreated those who were wrongfully convicted. Later came thrillers about wealthy free settlers and lawless gold-seekers, and urban crime fiction, including Fergus Hume's 1887 international best-seller The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, set in Melbourne. The 1980s saw a surge of private-eye thrillers, popular in a society skeptical of police. Twenty-first century authors have focused on policemen--and increasingly policewomen--and finally indigenous crime narratives. The author explores in detail this rich but little known national subgenre.

Provides a lively introduction to what is both a wide-ranging and hugely popular literary genre. Accessible and clear, this comprehensive overview is the essential guide for all those studying crime fiction.

Narrative plays a central role for individual and collective lives - this insight has arguably only grown at a time of multiple social and cultural challenges in the 21st century. The present volume aims to actualize and further substantiate the case for literature and narrative, taking inspiration from Vera Nünning's eminent scholarship over the past decades. Engaging with her formative interdisciplinary work, the volume seeks to explore potentials of change through the transformative power of literature and narrative - to be harnessed by individuals and groups as agents of positive change in today's world. The book is located at the intersection of cognitive and cultural narratology and is concerned with the way literature affects individuals, how it works at an intersubjective level, enabling communication and community, and how it furthers social and cultural change.

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.

This book explores the three aspects of deviance that contemporary crime fiction manipulates: linguistic, social, and generic. Gregoriou conducts case studies into crime series by James Patterson, Michael Connelly and Patricia Cornwell, and investigates the way in which these novelists correspondingly challenge those aforementioned conventions.

Private detectives and detective agencies played a major role in American history from 1870 to 1940. Pinkerton, Burns, Thiels, and the smaller independents were a multi-million dollar industry, hired out by many if not most American corporations, who needed services of surveillance, strike breaking, and labor espionage. Not only is John Walton's account the first sustained history of this industry, it is also the first book to trace the ways in which the private detective came to occupy a cherished place in popular imagination. Walton paints lively portraits of these mythical figures from Sherlock Holmes, the brilliant eccentric, to Sam Spade, the hard-boiled hero of Dashiell Hammett's best-selling tales. There's a great question lurking in here: how did pulp magazine editors shape the image of the hard-boiled private eye, and what sorts of interplay obtained between the actual records (agency files, memoirs) of these motley individuals in real life and the legend of the private detective in mass-market fiction? This history of the private eyes and this account of how the detective industry and the culture industry played off of each other is a first. Walton show us, in clean clear outline, the figure of the classical private eye, and he shows us further how the memory of this iconic figure was sustained in fiction, radio, film, literary societies, product promotions, adolescent entertainments, and a subculture of detective enthusiasts.

Professional psychic Abby Cooper has invested in a fixer-upper, hoping to make a killing in the real estate market. But a killing of another kind puts her plans awry, as the ghost of a murdered woman and some troublesome poltergeists lead her into a mystery that stretches all the way back to World War II.

Abby Cooper, Psychic Eye, is having a hard time getting over a gunshot wound from her last case-especially because she didn't see the shots coming. Out of work and second-guessing her abilities, she tries to get back in the saddle by helping her boyfriend Dutch with some of his FBI cases. And soon enough, her intuition returns-with a vengeance.

The Crime Fiction Handbook presents a comprehensive introduction to the origins, development, and cultural significance of the crime fiction genre, focusing mainly on American British, and Scandinavian texts. Provides an accessible and well-written introduction to the genre of crime fiction Moves with ease between a general overview of the genre and useful theoretical approaches Includes a close analysis of the key texts in the crime fiction tradition Identifies what makes crime fiction of such cultural importance and illuminates the social and political anxieties at its heart. Shows the similarities and differences between British, American, and Scandinavian crime fiction traditions