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.

SUSAN ROWLAND is a Senior Lecturer in English at the University of Greenwich. She is also author of C.G.Jung and Literary Theory: The Challenge from Fiction (1999). She has published upon the work of Michèle Roberts, Doris Lessing and Margaret Attwood, among others.

Dedication Preface Lives of Crime Gendering the Genre Social Negotiations: Class, Crime and Power Lands of Hope and Glory?: Englishness, Race and Colonialism Detecting Psychoanalysis: Readers, Criminals and Narrative Crimes: A Literature of Terror and Horror The Spirits of Detection Feminism is Criminal Appendices Notes Selected Bibliography on Crime Fiction Index