Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors Introduction; M.Swales Poe and the Beautiful Segar Girl; J.Skvorecky Body Language: A Study of Death and Gender in Crime Fiction; S.Dunant Fascination and Nausea: Finding Our the Hard-Boiled Way; D.Trotter The Writers who Knew Too Much: Populism and Paradox in Detective Fiction's Golden Age; D.Glover 'Sherlock's Children: The Birth of the Series; M.Priestman Making the Dead Speak: Spiritualism and Detective Fiction; C.Willis The Locus of Disruption: Serial Murder and Generic Conventions in Detective Fiction; D.Schmid The Detective as Clown: A Taxonomy; A.Laski Mean Streets and English Gardens; W.Chernaik Authority, Social Anxiety and the Body in Crime Fiction: Patricia Corwell's Unnatural Exposure; P.Messent Desires and Devices: On Women Detectives in Fiction; B.Berglund A Band of Sisters; M.Kinsman An Urban Myth: Fantômas and the Surrealists; R.Vilain Bleeding the Thriller: Alain Robbe-Grillet's Intertextual Crimes; J.C.Brown Railway Novel: Railway Spine; L.Marcus Open Letter to Detectives and Psychoanalysts: Analysis and Reading; P.Ffrench Index