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This study of the technique of Agatha Christie’s detective fiction—sixty-seven novels and over one hundred short stories—is the first extensive analysis of her accomplishment as a writer. Earl F. Bargannier demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her ...

This study of the technique of Agatha Christie’s detective fiction—sixty-seven novels and over one hundred short stories—is the first extensive analysis of her accomplishment as a writer. Earl F. Bargannier demonstrates that Christie thoroughly understood the conventions of her genre and, with seemingly inexhaustible ingenuity, was able to develop for more than fifty years surprising variations within those conventions.

The Web of Iniquity is a study of detective fiction written by American women between the Civil War & World War II. Refuting the idea that no American detective fiction of substance was produced between the times of Edgar Allan Poe & Dashiell Hammett, Catherine Ross Nickerson shows how these women ...

The Web of Iniquity is a study of detective fiction written by American women between the Civil War & World War II. Refuting the idea that no American detective fiction of substance was produced between the times of Edgar Allan Poe & Dashiell Hammett, Catherine Ross Nickerson shows how these women writers blended Gothic elements into domestic fiction to create a unique & all-but-ignored subgenre that she labels "domestic detective fiction." This subgenre allowed women writers to participate in postbellum culture & to critique other aspects of a rapidly changing society. Domestic detective fiction combined elements of sensationalist papers, popular nonfiction crime stories, & the domestic novel. Nickerson shows how it also incorporated the gothic tropes found in the work of Harriet Beecher Stowe, Louisa May Alcott, & Charlotte Bronte & influenced the work of Pauline Hopkins. Mid-nineteenth-century writer Metta Fuller Victor, who represented such important areas of cultural conflict as the role of professions in the formation of class identity & the possibility of women's independence & self-determination, paved the way for the appearance of women detectives in the late-nineteenth-century fiction of Anna Katharine Green. Nickerson credits Mary Roberts Rinehart, in particular, for bringing sophistication to the subgenre by amplifying the humorous, terrifying, & feminist elements inherent in earlier detective novels by women. Throughout the volume, Nickerson focuses on the narrative qualities of the domestic novel tradition & the ways in which it reflected ideologies of domesticity & gender. Also included are a discussion of various rewritings of the Lizzie Borden scandal in this tradition & an afterword on the relation of domestic detective fiction to the hard-boiled style. The Web of Iniquity places the detective fiction written by women between 1850 & 1940 into ongoing discussions regarding women, culture, & literature & will appeal to scholars & students of women's studies, American studies, & literary history.