The author has chosen seventeen of the most important or representative British spy novelists to write about. He presents some basic literary analysis and criticism, trying both to place them in historical perspective and to describe and analyze the content and form of their fiction.

This is a highly anticipated examination of the popular film and fiction consumed by Britons in the 1920s and 1930s. Departing from a prevailing emphasis on popular culture as escapist, Christine Grandy offers a fresh perspective by noting the enduring importance of class and gender divisions in the narratives read and watched by the working and middle classes between the wars. This compelling study ties contemporary concerns about ex-soldiers, profiteers, and working and voting women to the heroes, villains and love-interests that dominated a range of films and novels. Heroes and happy endings further considers the state’s role in shaping the content of popular narratives through censorship. An important and highly readable work for scholars and students interested in cultural and social history, as well as media and film studies, this book is sure to shift our understanding of the role of mass culture in the 1920s and 1930s.

This is the first book to focus on James Bond’s relationship to the playboy ideal through the sixties and beyond. Examining aspects of the Bond phenomenon and the playboy lifestyle, it considers how ideas of gender and consumption were manipulated to construct and reflect a powerful male fantasy in the post-war era. This analysis of the close association and relations between the emerging cultural icons of James Bond and the playboy is particularly concerned with Sean Connery’s definitive Bond as he was promoted and used by the media. By exploring the connections that developed between Bond and Playboy magazine within a historical framework, the book offers new insights into these related phenomena and their enduring legacy in popular culture.

"This evocative study brings us back to the world of Buchan, 'Sapper' and Dornford Yates: the world of the British Empire, in which leisured London clubmen waged a peacetime Great Game of war against cads, crooks and beastly foreigners. The rules of the game were those of the public school, the stakes usually high--often Civilization itself. In these pages we can follow Hannay from Portland Place to Galloway and to the Black Sea, Bulldog Drummond from Mayfair to his last round, in the airship, with Carl Peterson, and Berry & Co from White Ladies in Hampshire to the Pyrenees and beyond. When it was first published, Clubland Heroes was recognized as a classic of its kind. This reissue--freshly revised and corrected in 1983--gives a new generation of readers the chance to meet the stift-upper-lip officer-class heroes of a bygone world."--Back cover.

The author of more than 50 books--125 million copies in print--Clive Cussler is the current grandmaster of adventure literature. Dirk Pitt, the sea-loving protagonist of 22 of Cussler's novels, remains among the most popular and influential adventure series heroes of the past half-century. This first critical review of Cussler's work features an overview of Pitt and the supporting characters and other heroes, an examination of Cussler's themes and influences, a review of his most important adventures, such as Raise the Titanic! and Iceberg, and a look at adaptations of his work in other media. Cussler joins the pantheon of such as Rudyard Kipling, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Ian Fleming, and this overdue volume demonstrates that beneath Cussler's immense popularity lies a literary depth that well merits scholarly attention.

This title was first published in 1999 & examines the range of detective literature produced between 1901 and 1915 in Britain, during the reign of Edward VII and the early reign of George V. The book assesses the literature as cultural history, with a focus on issues such as legal reform, marital reform, surveillance, Germanophobia, masculinity/femininity, the "best-seller", the arms race, international diplomacy and the concept of "popular" literature. The work also addresses specific issues related to the relationship of law to literature, such as: the law in literature; the law as literature, the role of literature in surveillance and policing; the interpretation of legal issues by literature; the degree to which literature describes and interprets law; the description of legal processes in detective literature; and the connections between detective literature and cultural practices and transitions.

With a keen eye for the juicy anecdote, Thévoz tells the fascinating and entertaining story of the rise, decline and resurgence of London's private members' clubs, from the late-eighteenth century to the present day. In doing so he looks at cultural and political developments beyond the clubs, revealing how while the clubs may have been products of their city and country, they also exerted significant influence on London, Britain and places far beyond. This is a chronicle, as informative as it is entertaining, of the ups and downs of London clubland, and how it had an impact on parts of the world far from London. It is packed with amusing anecdotes and illustrative examples of the growth of this quirky, unique institution, which grew to spread around the world. London, though, with its four hundred clubs, was always at its heart. Thévoz reveals how everything we might have thought we knew about these clubs is wrong. They may have started out as white, male, aristocratic watering holes - but that's only part of the story. All sections of society built their own clubs and lived their lives there: highbrow and lowbrow; women and men; working-class, middle-class and upper-class; international and British. The club has been central to a distinctively British form of leisure over more than three centuries. Behind Closed Doors is a distillation of a decade of research and writing on London clubs, based on exclusive behind-the-scenes access to archives and proceedings, as well as a love of gossip and scandal.