In addition to covering the "detective" fiction of writers like Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie and Raymond Chandler, this collection of British and American crime fiction considers other kinds of fiction where crime plays a substantial part, such as the thriller and spy fiction. Ranging over the last three centuries, it includes chapters on the analysis of crime in eighteenth-century literature; French and Victorian fiction; women and black detectives; crime on film and TV; and police fiction and postmodernist uses of the detective form.