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Crime Fiction From Poe to the Present: A Historical and Critical Introduction to Crime Fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's First Detective Story to the Present Day (Writers and their Work)
Crime Fiction From Poe to the Present A Historical and Critical Introduction to Crime Fiction from Edgar Allan Poe's First Detective Story to the Present Day - Writers and their Work Author:Martin Priestman This book gives a historical and critical introduction to the genre of crime fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe's first detective story The Murders in the Rue Morgue in 1841 to the present day. It concentrates chiefly on three branches of Crime Fiction: the classic detective whodunit, the thriller in which the protagonist is opposed either to a power... more »ful conspiracy or to society at large, and the hardboiled private-eye story, or detective thriller, which mixes aspects of the other two. In all three cases some earlier 'antecedents' are considered to establish partial links with other literary genres, and the three branches' continued co-existence up to the present is exemplified by a consideration of such contemporary writers as Elizabeth George, Elmore Leonard and Walter Mosley. As well as works by such classic writers as Poe, Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Patricia Highsmith and John le Carre, the book also explores some quirkier uses of the genre, from the postmodern experimentation of Paul Auster to the feminist private-eye mode of Sara Paretsky and Sue Grafton.« less