From Agatha Christie to Ruth Rendell is the first book to consider seriously the hugely popular and influential works of Agatha Christie, Dorothy L.Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine. Providing studies of forty-two key novels, this volume introduces these authors for students and the general reader in the context of their lives, and of critical debates on gender, colonialism, psychoanalysis, the Gothic, and feminism. It includes interviews with P.D. James and Ruth Rendell/Barbara Vine.
'Traditionally crime fiction ends with identifying the criminal and thus re-establishing the social and moral order. However Susan demonstrates that the six writers are concerned with replotting the process of crime novels in ways which affect the reading process.' - Christopher Dean, The Dorothy L. Sayers Society Newsletter