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 (U of Minnesota P 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 [first page only, nearly unreadable].

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.

Forter, Gregory. "Criminal pleasures, pleasurable crime." On the pleasures of reading detective stories: notes the author, "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).

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." On the problems of adapting a novel to a film. Criticism, Spring 2003.

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

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." Pacific Coast Philology 26 (July 1991) [first page of essay only].

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).

(removed) Chandler, Raymond. "The Simple Act of Murder." The Atlantic Monthly Nov. 1945.

web sites

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.

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.

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