The University of Wisconsin Press


Popular Culture

An Introduction to the Detective Story
Leroy Lad Panek

Popular Press


This book is written in an aggressive, modern English well suited to a genre that has traditionally broken ground in aggressive writing, contemporary scenarios, and tough dialogue. It begins with an examination—and rejection—of a number of pseudo-detective stories from biblical apocrypha to accounts in Herodotus.

LeRoy Lad Panek examines seventeenth-century stories of highwaymen and Godwin's The Adventures of Caleb Williams (1794) before getting down to Poe's "Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), Wilkie Collins's Woman in White and Moonstone, and, surprisingly, many of Charles Dickens's tales. Also reviewed are Gaboriau, Arthur Conan Doyle, the turn-of-the-century writers, the Golden Age stories, the hard-boileds, and the police procedurals. Finally, Panek takes a look at works from the late twentieth-century.

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Cover of book is orange and black with a blakc and white illustration of a detective with a pistol.

Published 1987
LC: 87-070502 PN
222 pp.   6 x 9
Cloth $34.95 t
ISBN-13: 978-0-87972-377-4
Paper $16.95 t
ISBN-13: 978-0-87972-378-1




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