Crime Fiction

de Martin Priestman, Isobel Armstrong

LITERATURE: HISTORY & CRITICISM. This book gives a historical and critical introduction to the genre of crime fiction, from Edgar Allan Poe's first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, in 1841 to the present day. It concentrates chiefly on three branches of Crime Fiction: the classic detective whodunit, the thriller in which the protagonist is opposed either to a powerful conspiracy or to society at large, and the hardboiled private-eye story, or detective thriller, which mixes aspects of the other two.