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Detective fiction is a subgenre of crime fiction and mystery fiction in which an investigator or a detective—either professional, amateur or retired—investigates a crime, often murder. The detective genre began around the same time as speculative fiction and other genre fiction in the mid-nineteenth century and has remained extremely popular, particularly in novels. Some of the most famous heroes of detective fiction include C. Auguste Dupin, Sherlock Holmes, and Hercule Poirot. Juvenile stories featuring The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, and The Boxcar Children have also remained in print for several decades.
Mary Elizabeth Braddon was an English popular novelist of the Victorian era. She is best known for her 1862 sensation novel Lady Audley's Secret, which has also been dramatised and filmed several times.
Phyllis Dorothy James, Baroness James of Holland Park,, known professionally as P. D. James, was an English crime writer. She rose to fame for her series of detective novels starring police commander and poet Adam Dalgliesh.
The English novel is an important part of English literature. This article mainly concerns novels, written in English, by novelists who were born or have spent a significant part of their lives in England, or Scotland, or Wales, or Northern Ireland. However, given the nature of the subject, this guideline has been applied with common sense, and reference is made to novels in other languages or novelists who are not primarily British where appropriate.
Genre fiction, also known as popular fiction, is a term used in the book-trade for fictional works written with the intent of fitting into a specific literary genre, in order to appeal to readers and fans already familiar with that genre.
Charles Richard Johnson is an African-American scholar and the author of novels, short stories, screen-and-teleplays, and essays, most often with a philosophical orientation. Johnson has directly addressed the issues of black life in America in novels such as Dreamer and Middle Passage. Johnson was born in 1948 in Evanston, Illinois, and spent most of his career at the University of Washington in Seattle.
Walter Ellis Mosley is an American novelist, most widely recognized for his crime fiction. He has written a series of best-selling historical mysteries featuring the hard-boiled detective Easy Rawlins, a black private investigator and living in the Watts neighborhood of Los Angeles, California; they are perhaps his most popular works.
Hardboiled fiction is a literary genre that shares some of its characters and settings with crime fiction. The genre's typical protagonist is a detective who battles the violence of organized crime that flourished during Prohibition (1920–1933) and its aftermath, while dealing with a legal system that has become as corrupt as the organized crime itself. Rendered cynical by this cycle of violence, the detectives of hardboiled fiction are often antiheroes. Notable hardboiled detectives include Philip Marlowe, Mike Hammer, Sam Spade, Lew Archer, and The Continental Op.
Amy Judith Levy was a British essayist, poet, and novelist best remembered for her literary gifts; her experience as the first Jewish woman at Cambridge University and as a pioneering woman student at Newnham College, Cambridge; her feminist positions; her friendships with others living what came later to be called a "New Woman" life, some of whom were lesbians; and her relationships with both women and men in literary and politically activist circles in London during the 1880s.
Literary realism is part of the realist art movement beginning with mid-nineteenth-century French literature (Stendhal), and Russian literature and extending to the late nineteenth and early twentieth century. Literary realism attempts to represent familiar things as they are. Realist authors chose to depict everyday and banal activities and experiences, instead of using a romanticized or similarly stylized presentation.
Lesbian literature is a subgenre of literature addressing lesbian themes. It includes poetry, plays, fiction addressing lesbian characters, and non-fiction about lesbian-interest topics.
Carole Marsh is a children's author and the founder of Gallopade International, a children's book publishing company headquartered in Peachtree City, GA. Marsh writes mystery fiction in addition to works of non-fiction for children. Initially she self-published under the imprint Gallopade Publishing Group, which she founded in 1979; today Gallopade International is a major small publisher based in Peachtree City, Georgia.
Omoseye Bolaji is a Nigerian writer who has contributed to the growth of African literature in South Africa, especially in the Free State. Bolaji has been editor of South African publications including Free State News, Kopanang magazine, E and E magazine, and CHOICE magazine.
Gurgen Mahari was an Armenian writer and poet. His most significant works include the semi-autobiographical novella Barbed Wires in Blossom (1968) and the novel Burning Orchards (1966), which is set in the writer's hometown of Van on the eve of the Armenian Genocide.
Susan Sellers is a British author, translator, editor and novelist. She is Professor of English and Related Literature at the University of St Andrews, and co-General Editor of the Cambridge University Press edition of the writings of Virginia Woolf. Sellers' first novel, Vanessa and Virginia, is a fictionalised account of the life of Vanessa Bell and of her complex relationship with her sister. It has also been translated into sixteen languages, including Chinese(Nanjing University Press, 2012), Spanish(emece, 2011), Turkish(Sel, 2011), French(editions autrement, 2011), Swedish(Ordfront, 2010) and Dutch, and was adapted for the stage by Elizabeth Wright and directed by Gersch in 2009. The play premiered in Aix-en-Provence on 17 September 2010, and toured in the UK, France, Germany and Poland, which culminated in a 3-week run at Riverside Studios, London. Her second novel, Given the Choice, is set in the contemporary art and music worlds, focusses on a strong and contentious central character, Marion, and gives the reader a choice of three possible endings. As the cover explains, "Given the Choice is a novel about growing older and growing up, about making choices and learning to live with them."
This article is focused on English-language literature rather than the literature of England, so that it includes writers from Scotland, Wales, the Crown dependencies, and the whole of Ireland, as well as literature in English from countries of the former British Empire, including the United States. However, until the early 19th century, it only deals with the literature of the United Kingdom, the Crown dependencies and Ireland. It does not include literature written in the other languages of Britain.
A novel is a relatively long work of narrative fiction, normally written in prose form, and which is typically published as a book. The present English word for a long work of prose fiction derives from the Italian novella for "new", "news", or "short story of something new", itself from the Latin novella, a singular noun use of the neuter plural of novellus, diminutive of novus, meaning "new". Walter Scott made a distinction between the novel, in which "events are accommodated to the ordinary train of human events and the modern state of society" and the romance, which he defined as "a fictitious narrative in prose or verse; the interest of which turns upon marvellous and uncommon incidents". However, many such romances, including the historical romances of Scott, Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Herman Melville's Moby-Dick, are also frequently called novels, and Scott describes romance as a "kindred term". This sort of romance is in turn different from the genre fiction love romance or romance novel. Other European languages do not distinguish between romance and novel: "a novel is le roman, der Roman, il romanzo, en roman." Most European languages use the word "romance" for extended narratives.
Eleanor Taylor Bland was an African-American writer of crime fiction. She was the creator of Lincoln Prairie, Illinois police detective Marti McAllister.
Urban Gothic is a subgenre of Gothic fiction, film horror and television dealing with industrial and post-industrial urban society. It was pioneered in the mid-19th century in Britain, Ireland and the United States and developed in British novels such as Robert Louis Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), and Irish novels such as Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897). In the twentieth century, urban Gothic influenced the creation of the subgenres of Southern Gothic and suburban Gothic. From the 1980s, interest in the urban Gothic revived with books like Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles and a number of graphic novels that drew on dark city landscapes, leading to adaptations in film including Batman (1989), The Crow (1994) and From Hell (2001), as well as influencing films like Seven (1995).
Bob Biderman (1940–2018) was a British-American novelist and publisher known for his coming-of-age novels, Red Dreams – an obverse view of 50s America – and Letters to Nanette, about a young man drafted into the army at the start of the Vietnam War. Biderman is considered one of the wave of literary oppositionists who were active in May 68 and attempted to redefine popular genres, exemplified in his Joseph Radkin Investigation series which combined social and political history in a mystery format. He also was the founding editor and publisher of several magazines – Café Magazine, where he wrote extensively on the social history of coffee and Visions of the City Magazine, an offshoot of The Visions of the City Project which looked at alternative constructs of the urban metropolis. Biderman was one of the founders of Black Apollo Press and edited its popular Rediscovered Victorians series.
References
- ↑ Under Three Flags: An Interview with Bob Biderman, Managing Editor of Black Apollo, Finley’s Book Reviews, September 2010
- ↑ Publishing Phenomenon – Gourgen Mahari in English, Armenian News Network / Groong, May 10, 2007 [ permanent dead link ]
- ↑ Revising the Late Victorian and Early Modernist Canon , Modern Language Review, Vol. 36, No. 2, Victorian Literature (2006), pp. 264-268
- ↑ Black Apollo Press - Catalogue
- ↑ The Varied (and Endless) Wars At Pacifica Foundation/KPFA - Review of Arts, Literature, Philosophy,
- ↑ The Mystery Novel as Social History, Ozymandias Magazine [ permanent dead link ]