San Antonio College Library

Eighteen stories representing the range of the crime story from the fifteenth century to the present and dramatizing the moral, psychological, and sociological aspects of criminal behavior.

This anthology, which may be used for a college class on detective and mystery fiction, includes short stories, selected passages from novels, two poems, and a final section of essays by writers in the genre. Each selection is followed by analytical questions. Includes an appendix: Topics for writing and research; and a bibliography: Suggestions for further reading.

Giving an overview of trends in American crime fiction, this book focuses on the work of popular and award-winning authors since 1985. Attention is given to writers who have re-worked established conventions and explored new directions.

"The nineteenth century was haunted by crime, by its signs, stories and the shapes of institutions designed for its regulation. That haunting persists today in a popular fear of crime that shapes political agendas, and through images presented in the media. This book analyses the legal and aesthetic discourses that combine to shape the image of the criminal, and that image's contemporary endurance." "Peter Hutchings examines a variety of texts, from...

Nadya Aisenberg discusses the potentialities of the crime novel, its implications, principles, and scope, and its analogy ot myth and the fairy tale. She proposes that the detective story and the thriller have made an unacknowledged contribution to "serious" literature. Her discussion of Dickens, Conrad, and Green indicate that each borrowed many important ingredients from the formulaic novel.

Donald Goines was a pimp, a truck driver, a heroin addict, a factory worker, and a career criminal. He was also one of world's most popular Black contemporary writers. Having published 16 novels, including Whoreson, Dopefiend, and Daddy Cool, Goines's unique brand of "street narrative" and "ghetto realism" mark him as the original street writer. Now, in the first in-depth biography of Goines's life, author Eddie B. Allen explores exactly how one man...