What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? In considering such questions, this study ranges over hundreds of novels, analyzing the politics and poetics of noir from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler, and Cain to the exciting diversity of nineties thrillers, with sections on the tough investigators, gangsters, and victims of the Depression years: the first-person killers, femmes fatales, and black protagonists of mid-century; the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of contemporary thrillers and future noir.

As a result of its imperial role, Britain was closely involved with such romantic and disruptive myths of power such as the imperial adventure hero and the self-deified charismatic leader. Lee Horsley explores fictional representations of political power during this period, surveying a wide range of texts from the adventure story, romance, thriller and science fiction to the novels of Conrad, Huxley, Orwell and Greene.

This exciting new series provides students of twentieth-century literature with some of the most advanced scholarly and critical work in the field in a lucid and accessible form. Volumes may focus on an individual author or literary movement or address critical and cultural themes or historical moments and movements. The series assumes no particular critical line or theoretical tendency but aims to present the best writing on twentieth-century literature and culture by new and established critics in a way which reveals the remarkable diversity of modern critical approaches.

What is literary noir? How do British and American noir thrillers relate to their historical contexts? In considering such questions, this study ranges over hundreds of novels, analysing the politics and poetics of noir from the hard-boiled fiction of Hammett, Chandler and Cain to the exciting diversity of nineties thrillers, with sections on the tough investigators, gangsters and victims of the Depression years: the first-person killers, femmes fatales and black protagonists of mid-century; the game-players, voyeurs and consumers of contemporary thrillers and future noir.

Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction aims to enhance understanding of one of the most popular forms of genre fiction by examining a wide variety of the detective and crime fiction produced in Britain and America during the twentieth century. It will be of interest to anyone who enjoys reading crime fiction but is specifically designed with the needs of students in mind. It introduces different theoretical approaches to crime fiction (e.g., formalist, historicist, psychoanalytic, postcolonial, feminist) and will be a useful supplement to a range of crime fiction courses, whether they focus on historical contexts, ideological shifts, the emergence of sub-genres, or the application of critical theories. Forty-seven widely available stories and novels are chosen for detailed discussion.
In seeking to illuminate the relationship between different phases of generic development Lee Horsley employs an overlapping historical framework, with sections doubling back chronologically in order to explore the extent to which successive transformations have their roots within the earlier phases of crime writing, as well as responding in complex ways to the preoccupations and anxieties of their own eras. The first part of the study considers the nature and evolution of the main sub-genres of crime fiction: the classic and hard-boiled strands of detective fiction, the non-investigative crime novel (centered on transgressors or victims), and the "mixed" form of the police procedural.
The second half of the study examines the ways in which writers have used crime fiction as a vehicle for socio-political critique. These chapters consider the evolution of committed, oppositional strategies, tracing thedevelopment of politicized detective and crime fiction, from Depression-era protests against economic injustice to more recent decades which have seen writers launching protests against ecological crimes, rampant consumerism, Reaganomics, racism, and sexism.

This study gives insights into the process of "imagining history" and argues the case for a humanistic approach. It shows how writers have brought alive in their work an individual struggle to comprehend some of the most important political phenomena to the 2Oth century.