In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world's most popular form of fiction.

"Leonard Vole stands in the dock, accused of murder. His wife can prove his innocence but when she takes the stand she denies his alibi. Can he escape the hangman's noose?"--Amazon.com.

Exploring the creative process of an American original, the Louis L'Amour's Lost Treasures series will uncover the hidden history behind the author's best known novels . . . and his most mysterious and ambitious unfinished works. In this second volume, Beau L'Amour examines how his father made the transition from struggling pulp writer to successful novelist and uses his father's notes, journal entries, and correspondence to continue the process...

An adventurous collection of Sherlock Holmes mysteries and essays, including "Channeling Holmes," "On the Significance of Boswells," and "Was Sherlock Holmes The Shadow?" that delve deeper into the daring world of Sherlock Holmes and the imaginative mind of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Award winning author Loren D. Estleman's Sherlock Holmes stories and essays collected in one volume, including "The Serpent's Egg," the opening chapter of a planned pastiche...

Drawing on the fields of psychology, neuroscience and anthropology, a New York Times best-selling author unlocks the secrets of mystery's allure, shedding new light on everything from the formulas of our favorite detective shows to the calculated risks of the stock market.

Presents a selection of Poe's tales and poems with in-depth marginal notes elucidating his sources, obscure words and passages, and literary, biographical, and historical allusions.

For close to fifty years, three masters of the hard-boiled detective novel dispatched intrepid gumshoes into upper-crust homes and seedy back alleys, peeling back and exposing all the pretexts of polite society. Or did they? Were there even closer, darker secrets they never quite copped to? In Hard-Boiled Anxiety, Karen Huston Karydes offers a new and unsettling reading of the classic pairings: Dashiell Hammett and his successive shamuses, the...