The world of the defective detective was a strange one. Continuing the motif of the mythological hero, this unique detective type emerged in the 1930s in a very imperfect and threatened society. The stories reprinted in this volume reveal just how widely the genre ranged during the Depression.

This second collection of defective detective stories features some of the best of the period, including Russell Gray’s gimpy hero Ben Bryn, Edith and Ejler Jacobson’s hemophiliac gum-shoe Nat Perry, John Kobler’s glaucomatous troubleshooter Peter Quest, and Leon Byrne’s deaf detective Dan Holden.

In this book, Shell, himself a victim of polio, offers an inspired analysis of the disease. Part memoir, part cultural criticism and history, part meditation on the meaning of disease, Shell's work combines the understanding of a medical researcher with the sensitivity of a literary critic. He deftly draws a detailed yet broad picture of the lived experience of a crippling disease as it makes it way into every facet of human existence.

In 1969, the BBC aired the first episode of a new comedy series titled Monty Python's Flying Circus, and the rest, as they say, is history. An instant success, the show ran until 1974, producing a total of 45 episodes. Despite the show's very English humor and allusions to many things British, the series developed a cult following outside the U.K., particularly in the United States. Known for its outrageous humor, occasionally controversial content, and often silly spirit, Monty Python's Flying Circus poked fun at nearly all institutions—domestic or foreign, grand or intimate, sacred or not. Indeed, many of the allusions and references in the program were uniquely British and routinely obscure, and therefore, not always understood or even noticed outside the British Isles. This exhaustive reference identifies and explains the plethora of cultural, historical, and topical allusions of this landmark series. In this resource, virtually every allusion and reference that appeared in an episode—whether stated by a character, depicted in the mise-en-scene, or mentioned in the printed scripts—is identified and explained. Organized chronologically by episode, each entry is listed alphabetically, indicates what sketch it appeared in, and is cross-referenced between episodes. Entries cover literary and metaphoric allusions, symbolisms, names, peoples, and places; as well as the myriad social, cultural, and historical elements (photos, songs, slogans, caricatures) that populate and inform these episodes. Entries Include: ·"Arabella Plunkett" ·Group of famous characters from famous paintings ·Hell's Grannies ·HRH The Dummy Princess Margaret ·"Kandinsky" ·"On the Dad's Liver Bachelors at Large" ·Raymond Baxter type ·Scun ·"Spanish Inquisition" ·"Third Parachute Brigade Amateur Dramatic Society" ·"total cashectomy" ·"Two-Sheds" ·"Umbonga's hostile opening" ·Vicar sitting thin and unhappy in a pot ·"What's all this then?"

Working across time periods and critical contexts, this volume provides the most comprehensive overview of literary representations of disability.

The first book of its kind, The Disabled Detective explores representations of disability in crime fiction, from the earliest days of the genre to contemporary television drama. Susannah B. Mintz examines detective heroes with such conditions as blindness, deafness, paralysis, Asperger's, obsessive compulsive disorder, addiction, war trauma and many other impairments. Examining a wide range of texts, from Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes stories and the works of Agatha Christie to contemporary crime writers such as Jeffrey Deaver and Michael Collins and television dramas such as Monk, this book highlights how often characters with disabilities have been the heroes of crime fiction and how rarely this has been discussed in contemporary criticism.

The shudder pulps published some of the grisliest, goriest, most outrageous mystery-terror fiction ever sold on the American newsstand, during the golden age of the pulp magazines. This volumes chronicles the authors, artists, and publishers of those classic thrill-fests!

William J. Burns (1880-1930) was the immediate succor of J. Edgar Hoover at the Federal Bureau of Investigation. He had taken the director's job when Warren Harding was elected and appointed Burns' friend, Harry Daugherty, as Attorney General. Both Daugherty and Burns misused their offices and were forced to resign.

Examining the intersection of disability and genre in popular works of horror, crime, science fiction, fantasy, and romance published since the late 1960s, Disability, Literature, Genre is a major contribution to both cultural disability studies and genre fiction studies. Drawing on recent work on affect and emotion, the book explores how disability makes us feel, and how those feelings shape interpersonal and fictional encounters. Written in a clear and accessible style, Disability, Literature, Genre offers a timely reflection on the rapidly growing body of scholarship on disability representation, as well as an innovative new theorisation of genre. By reconceptualising genre reading as an affective process, Ria Cheyne establishes genre fiction as a key site of investigation for disability studies. She argues that genre fiction's unique combination of affectivity and reflexivity makes it ideally suited to the production of reflexive representations of disability: representations which encourage the reader to reflect upon what they understand about disability, and potentially to rethink it. Examining the affective--and effective--power of disability representations in a wide range of popular genre fiction, this book will be essential reading for academics in disability studies, literary studies, popular culture studies, and the medical humanities.

This book, which was inspired by a conference on plural conjugations of Frenchness (La France au pluriel) held in 2007 at the Universities of Technology, Sydney and Newcastle, focuses on the concept of national belonging as it pertains to detective fiction, with particular emphasis on French and Australian detective fictions and the encounter and crossing over between them. The objective is not only to use the concepts of 'French' and 'Australian' detective fiction productively, via the analysis of French and Australian detective-fiction novels, but also to challenge and undermine the very notion of national detective fictions, which are so often assumed to be transparently meaningful. The contributors to this volume focus variously on the following areas: comparative analysis of the genesis of French and Australian detective fiction; translation of Australian (and other) novels into French; translation as a genre; Frenchness as a stereotype, its role in individual novels and its spectre in all detective fiction; and readings of individual French and Australian detective novels. Overall, this book aims to challenge assumptions about French detective fiction, its influence on other national fictions and its explicit and implicit presence in all detective fiction.