Table Of ContentESSAYS ON DETECTIVE FICTION
By the same author
WHO'S HE WHEN HE'S AT HOME: A James Joyce Dir
(co-author)
THE SEVENTH OF JOYCE: Panel Papers from the 1979 ;
Symposium (editor)
POMES FOR JAMES JOYCE (editor)
JOYCE-AGAIN'S WAKE: An Analysis of Finnegans Wak
PAYCOCKS AND OTHERS: Sean O'Casey's World
JAMES JOYCE: The Undiscover'd Country
ESSAYS ON DETECTIVE
FICTION
Edz"ted by
Bernard Benstock
M
© Bernard Beru;tock 1983
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1983 978-0-333-32195-9
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be
reproduced or traru;mitted, in any form or by any mearu;,
without permission
First published 1983 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
London and Basingstoke
Companies and representatives
throughout the world
ISBN 978-1-349-17315-0 ISBN 978-1-349-17313-6 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-17313-6
Contents
Notes on the Contrz"butors vn
Introductz"on by Bernard Benstock x
1 Death Deferred: The Long Life, Splendid Afterlife and 1
Mysterious Workings of Agatha Christie
David I. Grossvogel
2 Dorothy L. Sayers: Mystery and Demystification 18
Bruce Merry
3 Rereading Ngaio Marsh 33
Allan]. Dooley and Lz"nda]. Dooley
4 Dashiell Hammett and the Poetics of Hard-Boiled 49
Detection
James Naremore
5 A Knock at the Backdoor of Art: The Entrance of 73
Raymond Chandler
Leon Arden
6 Ross Macdonald and the Past of a Formula 97
Erz"c Mottram
7 P.O. James 119
Bruce Harkness
8 How Unlike the Home Life of Our Own Dear Queen: 142
The Detective Fiction of Peter Lovesey
James Hurt
v
vi Contents
9 The Vander Valk Novels of Nicolas Freeling: Going by 159
the Book
Carol Shloss
10 Simenon and 'Le Commissaire' 174
Pz'erre Weisz
11 The Education of Martin Beck 190
Bernard Benstock
Index 211
Notes on the Contributors
Leon Arden was born in New York City and attended Columbia
University before becoming a freelance photographer. His novels
include The Savage Place, Seesaw Sunday, The Twilight's Last
Gleaming and One Fine Day. An early play of his has seen three
summer-stock productions, and his new comedy, Hi-Fidelity, has
been optioned for production in the West End. Mr Arden is
married and has a four-year-old daughter. He and his family
divide their time between London and Connecticut.
Bernard Benstock is Professor of Comparative Literature at the
University of Tulsa. He has published several books on James
Joyce and Sean O'Casey, and spent 1982 at the Camargo Found
ation in Cassis on a grant from the Center for Advanced Study of
the University of Illinois to work on a book, Private Faces z"n
Public Places: The Writer and Polz"tz"cal Commitment in the
1930s.
Allan J. Dooley is Associate Professor of English at Kent State
University. Educated at Wabash College and Northwestern Uni
versity, he is a specialist in Victorian literature. He is a member of
the editorial board of the authoritative Complete Works of
Robert Browning, for which he is editing Men and Women and
other works, and is the author of articles on Browning, Arnold
and other nineteenth-century writers.
Linda J. Dooley is Associate Professor of English and Assistant
Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences at Kent State University.
She was educated at Ohio Wesleyan University, the University of
Aberdeen, and Northwestern University and is a specialist in
medieval English literature and linguistics. She is currently
completing a book in the latter field.
vii
Vlll Notes on the Contributors
David I. Grossvogel is the Goldwin Smith Professor of
Comparative Literature and Romance Studies at Cornell
University. Among his books are The Self-conscious Stage, Four
Playwnghts and a Postscript, Limits of the Novel, Divided We
Stand and Mystery and its Fictions. He has written articles on
literary criticism, dramatic theory, motion picture semiotics, and
detective fiction. He is the founder of the review of contemporary
criticism, Diacrz"tics.
Bruce Harkness has taught English at the Universities of Illinois
and Southern Illinois. He was Dean of Arts and Sciences at Kent
State University until he resigned to work as general editor of the
Cambridge edition of Joseph Conrad.
James Hurt is Professor of English at the University of Illinois
and has written on a variety of subjects, including Old English
literature, modern drama, and the literature of the American
Midwest. He has also had several plays produced.
Bruce Merry is the author of books on the Italian poet Montale,
and of Anatomy of the Spy Thn"ller.
Eric Mottram is Reader in American Literature at King's
College, London. He is the author of Towards Design in Poetry as
well as books on William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Paul
Bowles, William Faulkner and Kenneth Rexroth and (with
Malcolm Bradbury) of a Companion to American Literature. He
has published twelve books of poetry including most recently
Predpice of Fishes, 1980 Mediate, Elegies and A Book of Herne.
James N aremore is Professor of English and former Director of
Film Studies at Indiana University. His writings include The
World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel and The
Magz"c World of Orson Welles, as well as monographs on Alfred
Hitchcock's Psycho and John Huston's The Treasure of the Sierra
Madre. He is currently writing a book about performance in the
cinema and is a visiting professor of literature and film at the
University of Hamburg in Germany.
Carol Shloss teaches English and American Studies at Wesleyan
University and is an editor of Canto: Review of the Arts. Her
Notes on the Contributors lX
writings include essays on Nabokov, Crane, Joyce and Beckett
and a book on Flannery O'Connor. She is currently at work on a
second book, The Prz"vz"lege of Perception: Photography and the
American Writer: 1840-1970.
Pierre Weisz is Associate Professor of French at the University of
Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. He was educated at the Sorbonne
where he wrote his dissertations on Hemingway and James
Thurber. He is the author of Incarnations du Roman and has
published articles on Jacques Prevert, Benjamin Constant, and
Jean-Paul Sartre.
