Crime & Detective Fiction

A selective list of online literary criticism on crime fiction and detective fiction, favoring signed articles, peer-reviewed sources, and web sites that adhere to the MLA Guidelines for Web Sites.

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Literary Criticism

Berger, Roger A. '"The Black Dick': race, sexuality, and discourse in the L.A. novels of Walter Mosley" [African American detective novels] African American Review, Summer 1997

Brauer, Stephen. "Moving Beyond the Genre: The Critical Reception of Detective Fiction of the 1930s." Working Papers on the Web 6 (2003)

Breu, Christopher. A review of Hard-Boiled Masculinities (Univ. of Minnesota Press, 2005). Reviewed by Justin Cober-Lake in Pop Matters. Publisher's blub for Hard-Boiled Masculinities

Catano, James V. "Detecting change: Gender and ethnicity in the detective novel." Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Summer 2000

Cawelti, John. Publisher's blurb for Adventure, Mystery, and Romance: Formula Stories as Art and Popular Culture (U of Chicago 1976)

Demko, George. "Landscapes of Crime." An attractive web site on the geographical settings of mysteries, includes studies of international settings, from Professor Demko

Entin, Joseph. "A new deal for thirties literature." Three recent studies of 1930s writing are reviewed, in Novel: A Forum on Fiction, Fall 2000

Forter, Gregory. Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime - pleasures of reading detective stories. "I liked somebody being dead." Style, Fall, 1995

Gray, Russel W. "Hard-boiled black easy: genre conventions in A Red Death." [on Walter Mosley] African American Review, Fall, 2004

Hopler, Jay. "Watching the detectives: reading dime novels and hard-boiled detective stories in context." Journal of Social History, Winter, 2002

Horsley, Lee. Extract from The Noir Thriller (Palgrave, 2001)

Horsley, Lee and Katharine. "Crime Culture," an academic web site on crime fiction, crime film, and true crime. Includes original articles, syllabi, recommended secondary bibliography for teaching crime fiction

Lehman, David. "The Mysterious Romance of Murder: The enduring highbrow fascination with detective stories." Boston Review, Feb/March 2000

Leitch, Thomas. "Twelve fallacies in contemporary adaptation theory." Criticism, Spring 2003

Paradis, Kenneth. "Warshawski's Situation: Beauvoirean Feminism and the Hard-Boiled Detective." First page of essay only. South Central Review, 18

Porter, Dennis. Review of The Pursuit of Crime: Art and Ideology in Detective Fiction. (Yale UP 1981). Reviewed by H.M. Klein in Journal of European Studies, 12

Priestman, Martin, ed. Publisher's blurb for The Cambridge Companion to Crime Fiction

Pronzini, Bill and Jack Adrian, eds. A short review of Hard-Boiled: An Anthology of American Crime Stories (Oxford UP). Studies in Short Fiction, Fall 1997, reviewed by Douglas Levin

Smith, Johanna M. "Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction: Gendering the Canon," first page of essay only. Pacific Coast Philology 26 (July 1991)

Willett, Ralph. "Hard-Boiled Detective Fiction," covers major authors, detectives, and settings including Harlem, Los Angeles, Miami, urban and desert landscapes. From the British Assoc. of American Studies, BAAS Pamphlet No. 23 (1992)

Introduction to Ross MacDonald from Books and Writers, Kuusankoski Public Library, Finland

Web Sites

Horsley, Lee and Katharine. "Crime Culture," an academic web site on crime fiction, crime film, and true crime. Includes original articles, syllabi, and recommended secondary bibliography for teaching crime fiction

Black Mask Magazine "the classic hard-boiled pulp crime mag." Slickly produced and informative, includes pages on the history of the genre and some early tales from Black Mask

Removed Articles

Breen, Jon L. "The Ellery Queen mystery: why is the corpus no longer alive?" Weekly Standard, Oct 10, 2005 (removed)

Chandler, Raymond. http://facstaffwebs.umes.edu/drcooledge/engl324/images/Simple%20Art%20of%20Murder.pdf "The Simple Act of Murder." The Atlantic Monthly, Nov. 1945 (removed)

Marling, William. http://www.case.edu/artsci/engl/marling/hardboiled "Hard-boiled detective fiction," contains essays by Professor Marling on early writers of hard-boiled fiction, classic writers, and later writers in this style, and an extensive secondary bibliography (removed)

Silver, Alain. http://members.aol.com/alainsil/noirkmd/noirkmd1.htm "Kiss Me Deadly: Evidence of a Style," [Mickey Spillane film adaptation] from Film Noir Reader (1996) (removed)

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