A virtual cornucopia of whodunits from the true masters of the craft, including Edgar Alan Poe, Mary Roberts Rinehart, Craig Rice, Ellery Queen, and Raymond Chandler, this anthology contains some genuine rarities.

Featuring distinctly American language and locales, the stories in this collection range from those with a strongly regional flavor to hard-boiled fiction. "Twelve American Crime Stories" includes the best of the genre and is a delightful guide to who did what to whom, and how.

Whether a housekeeper, secretary, lodger, or pawn-broker in a seedy area of Victorian London, the woman detective's powers of observation and deduction are most effective in uncovering and resolving crimes. These 12 engaging mysteries gives us a glimpse of some of the most memorable characters ever created--such as Miss Marple, Carlotta Carlyle, Sharon McCone and other beloved heroines of the detective novel--by both men and women writers.

A History of American Crime Fiction places crime fiction within a context of aesthetic practices and experiments, intellectual concerns, and historical debates generally reserved for canonical literary history. Toward that end, the book is divided into sections that reflect the periods that commonly organize American literary history, with chapters highlighting crime fiction's reciprocal relationships with early American literature, romanticism, realism, modernism and postmodernism. It surveys everything from 17th-century execution sermons, the detective fiction of Harriet Spofford and T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, to the films of David Lynch, HBO's The Sopranos, and the podcast Serial, while engaging a wide variety of critical methods. As a result, this book expands crime fiction's significance beyond the boundaries of popular genres and explores the symbiosis between crime fiction and canonical literature that sustains and energizes both.

These twelve stories provide an entertaining exploration of this extensive and fascinating corner of English popular fiction, celebrating the detective's intellectual and intuitive powers when confronted with murder, theft, and other mysteries. The main focus of this collection is from the 1890s to the 1920s, the period when the classic English detective story was at its confident and original best, but it also offers examples from earlier and later periods. Presenting a balance of classic and more unusual stories, and featuring works by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, G. K. Chesterton, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Michael Innes, this anthology will appeal to both the newcomer and aficionado of the genre.

Presents a collection of mystery stories selected from magazines in the United States and Canada.