From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell: British Women Writers in Detective and Crime Fiction (Crime Files) [Paperback]

'Traditionally crime fiction ends with identifying the criminal and thus re-establishing the social and moral order. However Susan demonstrates that the six writers are concerned with replotting the process of crime novels in ways which affect the reading process.' - Christopher Dean, The Dorothy L. Sayers Society Newsletter --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

This work considers, seriously, the hugely popular and influential works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of 42 key novels, it introduces these authors for students and the general reader within the contexts of their lives, and critical debates on gender, colonialism, psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and feminism. It includes interviews with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.

SUSAN ROWLAND is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Greenwich. She is also author of C.G.Jing and Literary Theory: The Challenge from Fiction (1999). She has published upon the work of Mich?le Roberts, Doris Lessing and Margaret Attwood, among others.