Mystery crime fiction written in the Golden Age of Murder "Not only is this a first-rate puzzler, but Crofts' outrage over the financial firm's betrayal of the public trust should resonate with today's readers." —Booklist STARRED review The Chichester is making a routine journey across the English Channel on a pleasant afternoon in June, when the steamer's crew notice something strange. A yacht, bobbing about in the water ahead of them, appears to have been abandoned, and there is a dark red stain on the deck... Two bodies later, with no sign of a gun, there certainly is a mystery in the channel. Inspector French soon discovers a world of high-powered banking, luxury yachts and international double-dealing. British and French coastal towns, harbours—and of course the Channel itself—provide an alluring backdrop to this nautical adventure, along with a cast of shady characters.

Literature and Justice in Mid Twentieth Century Britain: Crime and War Crimes examines how ideas about crime, criminality, and judicial procedure that had developed in a domestic context influenced the representation and understanding of war crimes trials, victims of war crimes, and war criminals in post-Second World War Britain. The representation of Belsen concentration camp and the subsequent British-run trial of its personnel are a particular focal point. Drawing on a range of source material including life-writing, journalism, and detective fiction, as well as criminological and sociological works from this period, this book explains why the fate of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis was sometimes brought starkly into focus and sometimes marginalised in public discourse at this period. What remain are glimpses of the events now called the Holocaust, but glimpses that can be as powerful and as meaningful as more direct or explicit representations.

Few books in the history of New Directions have received such praise as came to Edward Dahlberg’s autobiography, Because I Was Flesh, which is now on our paperback list. Alfred Kazin wrote: “A work of extraordinary honesty, eloquence and power, it redeems with one mighty creative act the suffering of a lifetime. It is one of the few important American books published in our day.” And Allen Tate spoke of “the hair-raising honesty, the profound self-knowledge, and the formal elegance of the style,...a combination that has not previously appeared in an autobiography by an American.” Sir Herbert Read called the book, “A great achievement. A masterpiece. The magnificent portrait of the author’s mother is as relentless, as detailed, as loving as a late Rembrandt.” Because I Was Flesh is the story of Edward Dahlberg’s life as a child and young man—in Kansas City, in a Cleveland orphanage, in California and New York—and of the remarkable woman, his mother Lizzie, who shaped it. Seldom has there been so ruthless, and yet so tender a dissection of the mother-son relationship. And from it Lizzie Dahlberg, the lady barber of Kansas City, emerges as one of the unforgettable characters of our literature. This is a book of many dimensions, an authentic record from the inferno of modern city life, and a testament of American experience.

This book studies C.P. Snow's eleven-volume series of novels (Strangers and Brothers) as documents detailing the social and political life of mid-twentieth-century Britain, and points out the uses for the novels in the academic study of that time period. Both Snow and his central character, Lewis S. Eliot, started from unremarkable origins in terms of their mutual background in the lower reaches of the middle class, their dreams of success in their teen years, and their early professional education in a new, struggling academic institution in the mid-1920s. Neither could really be considered typical for men of their class. Eliot's working life would include being a very minor town clerk, a barrister, an advisor to a powerful industrialist, a Cambridge don, a moderately powerful civil servant, and finally, in early retirement, a writer. Eliot would befriend members of both the traditional and Jewish upper classes, scholars and brilliant scientists, powerful behind-the-scenes civil servants, second-tier British and Nazi politicians, financiers and industrialists, Communists, and writers and artists, providing a fairly broad overview of parts of the middle class and ruling elites of the periods. Snow's sequence of novels is therefore useful to the historian of twentieth-century Britain, both in understanding the period as it recedes away from common experience and in presenting the period in the classroom. Snow was a classic twentieth-century writer who presented a more balanced account of the British «governing classes» of the middle third of the twentieth century than did the upper-class (and would-be upper-class) or working-class writers of the same period. His novels provide an insight that every student of twentieth-century Britain must have on hand.

LEAP INTO THE FUTURE, AND SHOOT BACK TO THE PAST H. G. Wells’s seminal short story “The Time Machine,” published in 1895, provided the springboard for modern science fiction’s time travel explosion. Responding to their own fascination with the subject, the greatest visionary writers of the twentieth century penned some of their finest stories. Here are eighteen of the most exciting tales ever told, including “Time’s Arrow” In Arthur C. Clarke’s classic, two brilliant physicists finally crack the mystery of time travel—with appalling consequences. “Death Ship” Richard Matheson, author of Somewhere in Time, unveils a chilling scenario concerning three astronauts who stumble upon the conundrum of past and future. “Yesterday was Monday” If all the world’s a stage, Theodore Sturgeon’s compelling tale follows the odyssey of an ordinary joe who winds up backstage. “Rainbird” R.A. Lafferty reflects on what might have been in this brainteaser about an inventor so brilliant that he invents himself right out of existence. “Timetipping” What if everyone time-traveled except you? Jack Dann provides some surprising answers in this literary gem. . . . as well as stories by Poul Anderson • L. Sprague de Camp • Joe Haldeman • John Kessel • Nancy Kress • Henry Kuttner • Ursula K. Le Guin • Larry Niven • Charles Sheffield • Robert Silverberg • Connie Willis By turns frightening, puzzling, and fantastic, these stories engage us in situations that may one day break free of the bonds of fantasy . . . to enter the realm of the future: our future. Note: "A Sound of Thunder" by Ray Bradbury and "I'm Scared" by Jack Finney are not included in this edition.

English Industrial Fiction of the Mid-Nineteenth Century discusses the valuable fiction written in mid-nineteenth-century Britain which represents the situations of the new breed of industrial workers, both the mostly male factory workers who operated in the oppressive mills of the midlands and north and, in other stories, the oppressed seamstresses who worked mostly in London in very poor and low-paid conditions. Beginning with a general introduction to workers’ fiction at the start of the period, this volume charts the rise of an identifiable genre of industrial fiction and the development of a substantial mode of seamstress fiction through the 1840s, including an analysis of novels by Benjamin Disraeli, Charles Kingsley, Elizabeth Gaskell and Charles Dickens, and more briefly Charlotte Bronte, Geraldine Jewsbury and George Eliot. This volume is essential reading for students and scholars of industrial fiction and nineteenth-century Britain, or those with an interest in the relationship between literature, society and politics.