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This is the only book by a criminologist to look at the full range of crime involving works of art: forgery, fraud, theft, smuggling, and vandalism. It is up to date, drawing on much material from the "boom years" of the art market in the 1980s and continuing up through the 1990s, and assimilating ...

This is the only book by a criminologist to look at the full range of crime involving works of art: forgery, fraud, theft, smuggling, and vandalism. It is up to date, drawing on much material from the "boom years" of the art market in the 1980s and continuing up through the 1990s, and assimilating information from a variety of sources: art magazines, newspaper accounts, and the relatively small amount of scholarship on art crime by art historians and criminologists. In addition to considering the motives of thieves, the book looks at the way art theft is socially organized: the types of thefts that are committed, the ways thieves locate art to steal and how they gain access to it, their use of insiders and fronts, and the way they launder stolen art. The relationship between art theft and organized crime, especially drug traffickers, is investigated. After looking at explanations of art vandalism and the way vandals explain their behavior, the book concludes with a consideration of policies tocurb art crime. The entire book is written in a highly entertaining way, packed with case studies of numerous crimes and stories of smuggling, grave-robbing, and skullduggery, that will appeal to a general audience as well as professionals and academics in criminology, sociology, and art history.

Owners of mystery bookshops will tell you that there are several sorts of buyers: those who purchase on impulse or whim; genre addicts who buy paperbacks by the week and by the armful; and those who have caught up on canonical texts and regularly buy new novels by select authors in hardcover ...

Owners of mystery bookshops will tell you that there are several sorts of buyers: those who purchase on impulse or whim; genre addicts who buy paperbacks by the week and by the armful; and those who have caught up on canonical texts and regularly buy new novels by select authors in hardcover. Richard B. Schwartz belongs in the last group, with his own list of approximately seventy favorite writers.

Nice and Noir: Contemporary American Crime Fiction explores the work of these writers, building upon a reading of almost seven hundred novels from the 1980s and 1990s. By looking at recurring themes in these mysteries, Schwartz offers readers new ways to approach the works in relation to contemporary cultural concerns.

With sensitivity to a culture consisting of frontiers and borders, Schwartz examines the position of the vigilante in art and society, racial bridges and divides, the absence of divine presence and compensating narrative strategies, the unresolved nature of the crime plot and its roots in chivalric romance. The special importance of setting, and the growing importance of grotesque humor in the fiction studied here are addressed by the author, as is the journalistic/ instructional dimension of the field and the importance of crossover narratives.

This book is not only a study and appreciation of an important subgenre and its contemporary practitioners, it also utilizes both literary history and theoretical material. Information has been drawn from fanzines, from discussions with writers, booksellers, agents, and editors, and from the author's own extensive knowledge of literature and American culture.

Nice and Noir is wide-ranging but neither ponderous nor lugubrious.Its language is accessible but not simplistic. The book will have a broad appeal -- both to academics and to general readers with some interest in American studies and popular culture.

With a recent upsurge in the scope, sophistication and co-operation among groups, this book is an essential tool for understanding one of the greatest challenges to security, peace and democracy in the Americas. Exposing the main characteristics and effects of criminal enterprises in the Americas ...

With a recent upsurge in the scope, sophistication and co-operation among groups, this book is an essential tool for understanding one of the greatest challenges to security, peace and democracy in the Americas. Exposing the main characteristics and effects of criminal enterprises in the Americas, this book then considers realistic strategies for combating them.