Beryl Bainbridge, Clive Barker, Terence Davies, and J. G. Farrell represent only a handful of the fascinating and provocative writers who have emerged from the Liverpool literary scene in the past seventy-five years. Published in commemoration of Liverpool’s 800th birthday in 2007 and in celebration of its status as a European City of Culture in 2008, Writing Liverpool presents a selection of essays and interviews with the filmmakers, journalists, cultural critics, and novelists who have called the city home—asking if there is a distinctive Liverpool voice, and if so, how we identify it.

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In this collection of essays, a number of critics offer commentary on the crime fiction genre, exploring the kinds of pleasure it offers. Looking under the attractive surface of these books, the contributors discover a number of complex issues.

Ken Worpole analyses the appeal of 'hardboiled' US crime novels of the 1930s to an industrial working class that failed to identify with the tamed domesticity of the home counties.

A concise, lively account of Marxist thought and American culture

Since the late 1970s, a subgenre of crime fiction, written by women and featuring a professional woman investigator, has exploded on the popular fiction market. Priscilla L. Walton and Manina Jones focus on this recent proliferation of women writers of detective fiction, providing the first book-length study of the historical and societal changes that fueled this popularity, along with insightful and entertaining readings of the texts themselves. Walton and Jones place the genre within its aesthetic, social, and economic contexts, reading it as an index of cultural beliefs. Addressing the ways that Sara Paretsky, Sue Grafton, Marcia Muller, and others work through the conventions of the "hard-boiled" genre made popular by writers such as Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and Mickey Spillane, the authors show how the male hard-boiled tradition has been challenged and transformed. Issues of child, spousal, and sexual abuse are more likely to surface in women's detective novels, the authors show, and female sleuths face many of the same dilemmas as those who read about them—everyday problems with relationships, parenting, and money. Detective Agency also integrates interviews with authors and publishers, reader surveys, publication data, and analysis of internet discussion groups to present a fascinating picture of the "industry" of women's detective fiction. Authors of these works are powerful players in the publishing system as well as agents of cultural intervention, Walton and Jones claim. They conclude by examining the rise of female detectives in television and film.

This book examines Cuban society through a study of its detective fiction and more particularly contemporary Cuban society through the novels of the author and critic, Leonardo Padura Fuentes. The author traces the development of Cuban detective writing in the light of the work of twentieth century Western European literary critics and philosophers including Raymond Williams, Antonio Gramsci, Terry Eagleton, Roland Barthes, Jean Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jean François Lyotard and Jean Baudrillard in order to gain a better understanding of the social and historical context in which this genre emerged. The analysis includes discussion of the broader philosophical, political and historical issues raised by the Cuban revolution. The book concludes that the study of this popular genre in Cuba is of crucial importance to the scholar who wishes to reach as full an understanding of the social dynamics within that society as possible.

The crime fiction world of the late 1970s, with its increasingly diverse landscape, is a natural beginning for this collection of critical studies focusing on the intersections of class, culture and crime--each nuanced with shades of gender, ethnicity, race and politics. The ten new essays herein raise broad and complicated questions about the role of class and culture in transatlantic crime fiction beyond the Golden Age: How is "class" understood in detective fiction, other than as a socioeconomic marker? Can we distinguish between major British and American class concerns as they relate to crime? How politically informed is popular detective fiction in responding to economic crises in Scotland, Ireland, England and the United States? When issues of race and gender intersect with concerns of class and culture, does the crime writer privilege one or another factor? Do values and preoccupations of a primarily middle-class readership get reflected in popular detective fiction?

Offering a radical reassessment of 1930s British literature, this volume questions the temporal limits of the literary decade, and broadens the scope of queer literary studies to consider literary-historical responses to a variety of behaviours encompassed by the term ‘queer’ in its many senses. Whilst it is informed by the history of sexuality in twentieth-century Europe, it is also profoundly concerned with what Christopher Isherwood termed ‘the market value of the Odd.’ Drawing, for its methodology, on the work of Raymond Williams, it traces the impact of the Great War on the development of language, examining the use of ten ‘keywords’ in the prose of Christopher Isherwood, Evelyn Waugh and Patrick Hamilton, and that of their respective literary milieux, in order to establish how queer lives and modern sub-cultural identities were forged collaboratively within the fictional realm. By utilizing contemporary perspectives on performativity in conjunction with detailed close readings it repositions these authors as self-conscious agents actively producing their own queer masculinities through calculated acts of linguistic transgression.