Essays on Detective Fiction PDF
Preview Essays on Detective Fiction
ESSAYS ON DETECTIVE FICTION By the same author WHO'S HE WHEN HE'S AT HOME: A James Joyce Dir (co-author) THE SEVENTH OF JOYCE: Panel Papers from the 1979 ; Symposium (editor) POMES FOR JAMES JOYCE (editor) JOYCE-AGAIN'S WAKE: An Analysis of Finnegans Wak PAYCOCKS AND OTHERS: Sean O'Casey's World JAMES JOYCE: The Undiscover'd Country ESSAYS ON DETECTIVE FICTION Edz"ted by Bernard Benstock M © Bernard Beru;tock 1983 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-32195-9 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or traru;mitted, in any form or by any mearu;, without permission First published 1983 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Companies and representatives throughout the world ISBN 978-1-349-17315-0 ISBN 978-1-349-17313-6 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17313-6 Contents Notes on the Contrz"butors vn Introductz"on by Bernard Benstock x 1 Death Deferred: The Long Life, Splendid Afterlife and 1 Mysterious Workings of Agatha Christie David I. Grossvogel 2 Dorothy L. Sayers: Mystery and Demystification 18 Bruce Merry 3 Rereading Ngaio Marsh 33 Allan]. Dooley and Lz"nda]. Dooley 4 Dashiell Hammett and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled 49 Detection James Naremore 5 A Knock at the Backdoor of Art: The Entrance of 73 Raymond Chandler Leon Arden 6 Ross Macdonald and the Past of a Formula 97 Erz"c Mottram 7 P.O. James 119 Bruce Harkness 8 How Unlike the Home Life of Our Own Dear Queen: 142 The Detective Fiction of Peter Lovesey James Hurt v vi Contents 9 The Vander Valk Novels of Nicolas Freeling: Going by 159 the Book Carol Shloss 10 Simenon and 'Le Commissaire' 174 Pz'erre Weisz 11 The Education of Martin Beck 190 Bernard Benstock Index 211 Notes on the Contributors Leon Arden was born in New York City and attended Columbia University before becoming a freelance photographer. His novels include The Savage Place, Seesaw Sunday, The Twilight's Last Gleaming and One Fine Day. An early play of his has seen three summer-stock productions, and his new comedy, Hi-Fidelity, has been optioned for production in the West End. Mr Arden is married and has a four-year-old daughter. He and his family divide their time between London and Connecticut. Bernard Benstock is Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Tulsa. He has published several books on James Joyce and Sean O'Casey, and spent 1982 at the Camargo Found ation in Cassis on a grant from the Center for Advanced Study of the University of Illinois to work on a book, Private Faces z"n Public Places: The Writer and Polz"tz"cal Commitment in the 1930s. Allan J. Dooley is Associate Professor of English at Kent State University. Educated at Wabash College and Northwestern Uni versity, he is a specialist in Victorian literature. He is a member of the editorial board of the authoritative Complete Works of Robert Browning, for which he is editing Men and Women and other works, and is the author of articles on Browning, Arnold and other nineteenth-century writers. Linda J. Dooley is Associate Professor of English and Assistant Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University. She was educated at Ohio Wesleyan University, the University of Aberdeen, and Northwestern University and is a specialist in medieval English literature and linguistics. She is currently completing a book in the latter field. vii Vlll Notes on the Contributors David I. Grossvogel is the Goldwin Smith Professor of Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Cornell University. Among his books are The Self-conscious Stage, Four Playwnghts and a Postscript, Limits of the Novel, Divided We Stand and Mystery and its Fictions. He has written articles on literary criticism, dramatic theory, motion picture semiotics, and detective fiction. He is the founder of the review of contemporary criticism, Diacrz"tics. Bruce Harkness has taught English at the Universities of Illinois and Southern Illinois. He was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University until he resigned to work as general editor of the Cambridge edition of Joseph Conrad. James Hurt is Professor of English at the University of Illinois and has written on a variety of subjects, including Old English literature, modern drama, and the literature of the American Midwest. He has also had several plays produced. Bruce Merry is the author of books on the Italian poet Montale, and of Anatomy of the Spy Thn"ller. Eric Mottram is Reader in American Literature at King's College, London. He is the author of Towards Design in Poetry as well as books on William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Paul Bowles, William Faulkner and Kenneth Rexroth and (with Malcolm Bradbury) of a Companion to American Literature. He has published twelve books of poetry including most recently Predpice of Fishes, 1980 Mediate, Elegies and A Book of Herne. James N aremore is Professor of English and former Director of Film Studies at Indiana University. His writings include The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel and The Magz"c World of Orson Welles, as well as monographs on Alfred Hitchcock's Psycho and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. He is currently writing a book about performance in the cinema and is a visiting professor of literature and film at the University of Hamburg in Germany. Carol Shloss teaches English and American Studies at Wesleyan University and is an editor of Canto: Review of the Arts. Her Notes on the Contributors lX writings include essays on Nabokov, Crane, Joyce and Beckett and a book on Flannery O'Connor. She is currently at work on a second book, The Prz"vz"lege of Perception: Photography and the American Writer: 1840-1970. Pierre Weisz is Associate Professor of French at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He was educated at the Sorbonne where he wrote his dissertations on Hemingway and James Thurber. He is the author of Incarnations du Roman and has published articles on Jacques Prevert, Benjamin Constant, and Jean-Paul Sartre.
The list of books you might like
