Salem Press

Critical Survey of Mystery & Detective Fiction
Publisher's Note

Continuing the Salem Press tradition of Critical Survey series, Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction, Revised Edition provides detailed analyses of the lives and writings of major contributors to the fascinating literary subgenre of mystery and detective fiction. This greatly expanded five-volume set is the first full revision of a work that originally appeared in 1988. Published in four smaller volumes, the original Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction contained 250 articles about individual authors of mystery and detective fiction and a glossary of terminology. This new edition updates or replaces all the original articles and adds entirely new articles on 118 more authors, raising the total to 368 articles, an increase of 47 percent. It also adds 38 entirely new overview essays and 4 new appendixes.

To such well-known mystery writers as Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Arthur Conan Doyle, Erle Stanley Gardner, Dashiell Hammett, Edgar Allan Poe, and Dorothy Sayers, this revised edition adds such venerable writers' names as Louisa May Alcott, Edward Stratemeyer, and Margaret Truman. Most of the new author articles, however, are on popular contemporary writers, such as Mary Higgins Clark, Patricia Cornwell, John Dunning, John Grisham, Thomas Harris, Rolando Hinojosa, Scott Turow, and Stuart Woods. A particularly noteworthy addition is J. K. Rowling, the author of the sensationally popular Harry Potter series, whose seventh and final volume recently appeared.

Mystery and detective fiction is essentially a British and American creation that has long been dominated by British, European, and American writers. One of the most exciting developments in the field has been the growing number of new writers from minority communities and other parts of the world. In selecting authors to add to Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction, a particular effort was made to achieve greater ethnic and international diversity. Among the added authors are the African American writers Eleanor Taylor Bland, Walter Mosley, and Barbara Neely and the Chicano writer Rolando Hinojosa. Authors added from other Western Hemispheric countries include the Mexican writer Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Brazilian Luiz Alfredo Garcia-Roza, and three Canadians: William Deverell, David Morell, and Peter Robinson. New Asian authors include China's Xiaolong Qiu and five writers from Japan: Natsuo Kirino, Seicho Matsumoto, Shizuko Natsuki, Akimitsu Takagi, and Miyuki Miyabe. Africa is represented by the South African author Gillian Slovo; Zimbabwe-born Alexander McCall Smith, who writes about a woman detective in Botswana; and Elspeth Huxley, who set a number of murder mysteries in fictional East African countries.

With the addition of more than three dozen overview essays and new appendixes, Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction now joins Salem family of fully revised and expanded Critical Surveys of poetry, drama, short fiction, and long fiction. Some authors covered here are also covered in one or more of the other Critical Surveys, but the articles in each set are unique. For example, the article on Mark Twain in Critical Survey of Long Fiction focuses on his novels, that in Critical Survey of Short Fiction focuses on his short stories and sketches, and the one in the present set focuses on his mystery and detective writings. Readers will find little overlap in the text of those three articles.

The need for a new edition of Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction is evident in the growing recognition of the genre's importance in modern literature and in the increased attention the genre is receiving in classrooms. The gap between what is perceived as mainstream fiction and mystery genre fiction has narrowed, and mystery fiction is now seen as something far more than mere entertainment, as it often offers special insights into human nature and institutions. Indeed, the syllabus of one college course states that mystery fiction "explores how human consciousness makes sense out of what might otherwise be viewed as random experience and meaningless violence."

Another aspect of mystery fiction receiving increased recognition is what it reveals about different social classes, societies, cultures, and, indeed, entire nations. Mystery fiction probes deeply into the inner workings of every level of society and exposes the strengths and weaknesses of economic, political, and legal institutions. During the days of South Africa's racially oppressive apartheid system, it was often said that one of the best ways to understand the complex problems of that country was to read the mysteries of James McClure, a South African writer whose novels probed deeply into both black and white communities and vividly revealed human dimensions of the day-to-day effects of racial segregation. Similar observations might be made about the mystery and detective fiction of other countries, such as Japan, which is richly represented in Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction.

There was a time when mystery and detective fiction seemed virtually synonymous with the classic "whodunits," in which murders are committed, and then both detectives and readers settle down to sort out clues until the guilty parties are identified and justice is served. The fictional investigators may range from hard-boiled police detectives and private investigators, such as Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, to brilliantly intuitive amateurs, such as Agatha Christie's Miss Jane Marple. Such stories are still written, but the modern mystery genre encompasses a vast variety of subgenres that are known by such terms as comic capers, courtroom dramas, cozies, historical mysteries, inverted mysteries (which reveal the culprits immediately), legal thrillers, police procedurals, romantic suspense stories, and thrillers of various stripes. These subgenres and others are all well represented here, and Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction casts its net even wider to take in authors of espionage and horror stories

Overviews
In addition to the large expansion of articles on individual authors, the other major change in this revised edition is the addition of 38 overview essays, many of which are as long as 6,000 words. These essays explore the history and nature of the mystery and detective genre and examine the fiction of ethnic writers and writers from other parts of the world. The overviews begin <<essay titles are not finalized>> with a broad history of the mystery and detective genres, followed by essays on the so-called Golden Age of mystery fiction, pulp magazine fiction, innovations in the field, and connections between so-called mainstream fiction and the mystery genre.

Another group of essays explore the varieties of mystery fiction, such as amateur sleuths, armchair detectives, "cozies," hard-boiled detectives, historical mysteries, juvenile and young-adult mysteries, police procedurals, traditional mysteries, and true-crime stories. The mystery literature of world regions is surveyed in essays on American mystery fiction, Africa, Asia, the British Isles, France, and Latin America. There are also essays on mysteries in exotic settings, ethnic American mystery fiction, and feminist and lesbian mystery fiction. Other essays look at such specialized subfields as academic mystery fiction, forensic mystery fiction, horror stories, literary mystery fiction, spy and espionage stories, thrillers, women detectives, parodies of mystery fiction, Sherlock Holmes pastiches, and the relationship between science fiction and the mystery genre. A final group of essays examine nonliterary adaptations and other writing genres, such as films, stage plays, radio dramas, television series, and graphic mystery novels.

Appendixes and Indexes
To the comprehensive glossary of mystery and detective fiction terminology, Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction, Revised Edition adds 4 new appendixes. These include an annotated bibliography of general works, a guide to Web resources, lists of major writing awards, and a detailed time line of highlights in the history of mystery and detective fiction. Indexes include chronological, geographical, and category lists of writers covered in author articles and a general subject index.

Organization and Format
As with Salem's other Critical Survey sets, Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction is designed to meet the needs of secondary school and college undergraduate students. Articles on authors are arranged alphabetically, by the names or pen names under which the authors publish their mystery fiction. In some cases, these names differ from those by which the authors are best known. An example is "Edgar Box," the pen name that Gore Vidal used to write several mystery novels.

Each author article is formatted identically, opening with ready-reference data on the author's name, pseudonyms, birth and death dates and places, and types of plots. Because of the large numbers of books that many mystery writers publish, Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction differs slightly from other Critical Survey sets in listing each author's principal works at the bottom of the article, instead of at the top. Articles on authors of series fiction—such as Christie's Hercule Poirot stories and John Ball's Virgil Tibbs series—complete the top matter by listing the authors' principal series and offer brief descriptions of the principal series characters.

The main text of all author articles begins with a paragraph or two headed "Contribution" that sums up the author's place in the mystery and detective fiction genre and discusses what sets the author apart from others in the field. This section is followed by one headed "Biography," which provides a brief summary of the author's life, paying particular attention to events relating to the author's mystery and detective fiction.

The heart of every author article is the long "Analysis" section. It begins with an overview of the author's writing that discusses aspects of the author's themes, motifs, and writing style. This section is further broken down into subheaded sections on individual works—usually novels—or groups of works. With an average of more than four subsections per article, Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction contains focused discussions on more than 1,500 individual works.

Immediately following the byline of each article's contributor are lists of the author's principal works, arranged by genres, beginning with principal works of mystery and detective fiction. Individual titles are arranged chronologically and subdivided by series, as appropriate.

Finally, each article ends with an annotated bibliography listing works on the author and on the subgenres in which the author writes. The contents of these bibliographies reflect the dearth of good published materials on mystery writers and stand as a testimony to the need for reference works such as Critical Survey of Mystery and Detective Fiction.