In his most recent book, Race, Gender, and Empire in American Detective Fiction, John Cullen Gruesser, Professor of English at Kean University and Past President of the Poe Studies Association, traces the evolution of detective fiction in the United States by examining the origins of the genre in the analytical tales of Edgar Allan Poe and by following the various permutations of the genre in the hard-boiled fiction of the 1920s. Gruesser’s aim is not to present a comprehensive study of detective fiction in American literature from its introduction to the present day but rather to explore in some depth the uses to which the genre has been appropriated, adapted, parodied, and transformed by various writers, male and female, white and black, since the 1840s.
Gruesser’s examination of the form—as well as the strategies for reading the works that participate in the form—supports Raymond Chandler’s claim that detective fiction...
