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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.

Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that ...

Detective fiction is usually thought of as genre fiction, a vast group of works bound together by their use of a common formula. But, as Peter Thoms argues in his investigation of some of the most important texts in the development of detective fiction in the nineteenth century, the very works that establish the genre's formulaic structure also subvert that structure. Detection and Its Designs reads early detective fiction as a self-conscious form that is suspicious of the detective it ostensibly celebrates, and critical of the authorial power he wields in attempting to reconstruct the past and script a narrative of the crime.

In readings of Godwin's Caleb Williams, Poe's Dupin stories, Dickens's Bleak House, Collins's The Moonstone, and Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Thorns argues that the detective's figurative writing emerges out of a desire to exert control over others and sometimes over himself.

Detection and Its Designs demonstrates that, far from being a naive form, early detective fiction grapples with the medium of storytelling itself. To pursue these inward-turning fictions is to uncover the detective's motives of controlling the representation of both himself and others, a discovery that in turn significantly undermines the authority of his solutions.

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.