Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man of letters demonstrates Wilson's supreme skills as both literary and cultural critic.

Christianity and the Detective Story is the first book to gather together academic criticism on this particular connection between religion and popular culture. The articles cover the origin of this relationship in the works of G. K. Chesterton, examine its development through the “Golden Age” of mystery writers such as Dorothy L. Sayers, and include discussions of recent and contemporary television crime dramas. The volume makes a strong case for viewing mystery writing as a valid means of providing both entertainment and religious insight.

'Loathsomeness waits and dreams in the deep, and decay spreads over the tottering cities of men. A time will come - but I must not and cannot think!' H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) was a reclusive scribbler of horror stories for the American pulp magazines that specialized in Gothic and science fiction in the interwar years. He often published in Weird Tales and has since become the key figure in the slippery genre of 'weird fiction'. Lovecraft developed an extraordinary vision of feeble men driven to the edge of sanity by glimpses of malign beings that have survived from human prehistory or by malevolent extra-terrestrial visitations. The ornate language of his stories builds towards grotesque moments of revelation, quite unlike any other writer. This new selection brings together nine of his classic tales, focusing on the 'Cthulhu Mythos', a cycle of stories that develops the mythology of the Old Ones, the monstrous creatures who predate human life on earth. It includes the Introduction from Lovecraft's critical essay, 'Supernatural Horror in Literature', in which he gave his own important definition of 'weird fiction'. In a fascinating contextual introduction, Roger Luckhurst gives Lovecraft the attention he deserves as a writer who used pulp fiction to explore a remarkable philosophy that shockingly dethrones the mastery of man.

Sherlock Holmes: The Hero With a Thousand Faces ambitiously takes on the task of explaining the continued popularity of Arthur Conan Doyle's famous detective over the course of three centuries. In plays, films, TV shows, and other media, one generation after another has reimagined Holmes as a romantic hero, action hero, gentleman hero, recovering drug addict, weeping social crusader, high-functioning sociopath, and so on. In essence, Sherlock Holmes has become the blank slate upon which we write the heroic formula that best suits our time and place. Volume One looks at the social and cultural environment in which Sherlock Holmes came to fame. Victorian novelists like Anthony Trollope and William Thackeray had pointedly written "novels without a hero," because in their minds any well-ordered and well-mannered society would have no need for heroes or heroic behavior. Unfortunately, this was at odds with a reality in which criminals like Jack the Ripper stalked the streets and people didn't trust the police, who were generally regarded as corrupt and incompetent. Into this gap stepped the world's first consulting detective, an amateur reasoner of some repute by the name of Sherlock Holmes, who shot to fame in the pages of The Strand Magazine in 1891. When Conan Doyle proceeded to kill Holmes off in 1893, it was American playwright, director, and actor William Gillette who brought the character back to life in his 1899 play Sherlock Holmes, creating a sensation on both sides of the Atlantic with his romantic version of Holmes, and cementing his place as the definitive Sherlock Holmes until the late 1930s. By that point, Sherlock Holmes had developed a cult following who facetiously maintained that Holmes was a real person, formed clubs like The Baker Street Irregulars, and introduced the idea of cosplay to the embryonic world of fandom. These well-educated fanboys subsequently became the self-assigned protectors of Sherlock Holmes, anxious that their version of the character not be besmirched or defamed in any way. In spite of this, there was considerable besmirching and defaming to be seen in the early silent films featuring Sherlock Holmes, which effectively turned him into an action hero due to the lack of sound. When sound films took the industry by storm in the late 1920s, there were a numbers of pretenders who reached for the Sherlock Holmes crown, including Clive Brook, Reginald Owen, and Raymond Massey, but it took more than a decade before a new definitive Sherlock Holmes would be crowned in 1939 in the person of Basil Rathbone.

This study examines masculinity and individualism in four American novels of the 1920s and 1930s usually regarded as belonging to the genre of hard-boiled fiction. The novels under study are Red Harvest by Dashiell Hammett, The Postman Always Rings Twice by James M. Cain, They Shoot Horses, Don't They? by Horace McCoy, and To Have and Have Not by Ernest Hemingway. In this first full-length study of gender in hard-boiled fiction the genre is discussed as a representation of the ideologies of masculinity and individualism. Hard-boiled fiction is located in its historical and cultural context and it is argued that the genre, with its explicit emphasis on masculinity and masculine virtues, attempts to reaffirm a masculine order. The study argues that this emphasis is a counter-reaction to more general changes in the gender relations of the period. Indeed, hard-boiled fiction is argued to be an attempt to reconstruct a masculine identity based on anti-modern values generally accepted in the cultural context of the genre.

With their intimate settings, subdued action and likeable characters, cozy mysteries are rarely seen as anything more than light entertainment. The cozy, a subgenre of crime fiction, has been historically misunderstood and often overlooked as the subject of serious study. This anthology brings together a groundbreaking collection of essays that examine the cozy mystery from a range of critical viewpoints. The authors engage with the standard classification of a cozy, the characters who appear in its pages, the environment where the crime occurs and how these elements reveal the cozy story's complexity in surprising ways. Essays analyze cozy mysteries to argue that Agatha Christie is actually not a cozy writer; that Columbo fits the mold of the cozy detective; and that the stories' portrayals of settings like the quaint English village reveal a more complicated society than meets the eye.