Twentieth-Century Suspense: The Thriller Comes of Age

Front Matter....Pages i-xi
The Immorally Rich and the Richly Immoral: Raffles and the Plutocracy....Pages 1-21
West is East: Nayland Smith’s Sinophobia and Sax Rohmer’s Bank Balance....Pages 22-36
Fear’s Keen Knife: Suspense and the Female Detective, 1890–1920....Pages 37-50
A Society of Murderers Run on Sound Conservative Lines: The Life and Times of Sapper’s Bulldog Drummond....Pages 51-68
The Novels of Leslie Charteris....Pages 69-79
Ordeal by Analysis: Agatha Christie’s The Thirteen Problems....Pages 80-96
Dorothy Sayers: The Masks of Lord Peter....Pages 97-113
Elizabeth Bowen’s Stories of Suspense....Pages 114-129
But One Isn’t Murdered: Elizabeth Bowen’s The Little Girls....Pages 130-142
Fifty Million Copies: The Fiction of Dennis Wheatley....Pages 143-160
Margery Allingham and Reader Response....Pages 161-173
The View from the Rear Window: The Fiction of Cornell Woolrich....Pages 174-188
Hitchcock and the Mechanics of Cinematic Suspense....Pages 189-202
Grace under Pressure: Reading Alistair MacLean....Pages 203-224
Elizabeth Jenkins: Perhaps the History Woman....Pages 225-236
Feminist Detective Fiction....Pages 237-254
The Gentleman’s Excuse-me: The Male Apologist and the Experience of Realism in James Herbert’s The Magic Cottage....Pages 255-270
Back Matter....Pages 271-273