The Cambridge Companion to American Crime Fiction

by Catherine Ross Nickerson (Editor)

From the execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programs like The Wire and The Sopranos, crime writing has played an important role in American culture. Its ability to register fear, desire and anxiety has made it a popular genre with a wide audience. These new essays, written for students as well as readers of crime fiction, demonstrate the very best in contemporary scholarship and challenge long-established notions of the development of the detective novel. Each chapter covers a sub-genre, from ‘true crime' to hard-boiled novels, illustrating the ways in which ‘popular' and ‘high' literary genres influence and shape each other. With a chronology and guide to further reading, the Companion is a helpful guide for students of American literature and readers of crime fiction.

Genres: Mystery

208 pages, Paperback

First published July 8, 2010

Reviews

[AC · Rating 3 out of 5]

Fairly mediocre — as is to be expected. The chapter on the hard-boiled detective is certainly the best

[Maggie]

"The hard-boiled novel" Sean McCann P. 47: "The detective, who speaks in the vernacular of the working-class city, is also its champion. Navigating the furthest corners of the metropolis, he ranges across its social and geographic terrain, tying the disparate features of the urban landscape into a legible map. But, less obviously, he also does battle on behalf of the hard-working people of the metropolis, and he struggles to defend their interests against the illegitimate wealth, criminal violence and official indifference that otherwise seems to dominate their world."

Race and American crime fiction. Maureen T. Reddy P. 144 "Critic Cynthia S. Hamilton argues that the traditional positioning of the detective as an "outsider witness whose marginality reveals the compromised honor of those in power, socially, politically, and/or economically," makes crime fiction especially attractive to black writers, to whom it presents a "ready made opportunity to explore the dynamics of racism and double consciousness."
Source: Cynthia S. Hamilton "The signifying monkey and the colloquial detective; reading African American detective fiction"

[Marissa A. Zerangue · Rating 5 out of 5]

Read these: Introduction: The satisfactions of murder by Catherine Ross Nickerson
Early American crime writing by Sara Crosby
Poe and the origins of detective fiction by Stephen Rachman
Women writers before 1960 by Catherine Ross Nickerson
The hard-boiled novel by Sean McCann
True Crime by Laura Browder
Race and American crime fiction by Maureen T. Reddy
Feminist crime fiction by Margaret Kinsman
Crime in Postmodernist Fiction by Susan Elizabeth Sweeney