Crime Fiction ― A Critical Casebook

In the second decade of the twenty-first century, crime fiction remains one of the most popular genres among both readers and writers. This compilation of essays attempts to trace the reasons behind this ongoing popularity as well as to offer a closer reading of a number of crime fiction texts from English, American, Swedish, Italian, Japanese and other national literatures. It contains twenty-one original essays written by scholars and practitioners of crime fiction which discuss key concepts in the field of crime fiction studies: generic diversity, the evolution of characters, the growing significance of space and place and reader response.

This book includes a short story by David Malcom.

Stephen Butler is a lecturer at the University of Ulster in Coleraine, Northern Ireland. He was a Professor at the Koszalin University of Technology, Poland, and has published several articles on writers such as John Banville, J.G. Ballard and Paul Muldoon and co-authored a monograph on the poetry of Tony Harrison.

Agnieszka Sienkiewicz-Charlish completed her PhD on the subject of genre polymorphism in the fiction of Ian Rankin at the University of Gdansk, Poland, where she organises a bi-annual crime fiction conference. She is a partner in the Captivating Criminality Network – an international network of academics, researchers and practitioners of crime fiction. Her research interests include crime fiction, contemporary Scottish fiction and the Gothic.