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An insight into a popular yet complex genre that has developed over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The volume explores the contemporary anxieties to which crime fiction responds, along with society's changing conceptions of crime and criminality. The book covers texts, contexts and criticism in an accessible and user-friendly format.

HEATHER WORTHINGTON lectures in the School of English, Philosophy and Communication at Cardiff University, UK, and is the author of The Rise of the Detective in Early Nineteenth-Century Popular Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2005).