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In Chemical Crimes: Science and Poison in Victorian Crime Fiction, Cheryl Blake Price delves into the dark world of Victorian criminality to examine how poison allowed authors to disrupt gender boundaries, genre, and the professionalization of science. Tracing the role of the chemical crime through the works of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, Ellen Wood, Edward Bulwer Lytton, L. T. Meade, Charles Warren Adams, and Wilkie Collins, Price argues that poison this intervention not only provided a useful tool for authors to challenge the growing power of science but also that its fluid nature and ability to mix, mingle, and transcend boundaries made it ideal for generic experimentation. From the Newgate and Silver Fork novels of the 1830s to the emergent genres of science and detective fiction of the 1890s, Price advocates for the classification of a new type of poisoner, one who combined crime with methodical scientific know-how: the chemical criminal. Chemical Crimes shows how authors used the subversiveness of chemical crimes to challenge the supposed disciplinary force of forensic detection and suggests that generic developments were inspired as much by criminal scientific innovation as they were by the rise of the detective–scientist. By focusing on chemical crime's appearance at significant moments, this book traces how reactions to Victorian science inspired change in nineteenth-century crime fiction.

Beginning with Victoria's enthronement and an exploration of sensationalist accounts of attacks on the Queen, and ending with the notorious case of a fin-de-siècle killer, Victorian Crime, Madness and Sensation throws new light on nineteenth-century attitudes toward crime and'deviance'. The essays, which draw on both canonical and liminal texts, examine the Victorian fascination with criminal psychology and pathology, engaging with real life cases alongside fictional accounts by writers as diverse as Ainsworth, Stevenson, and Stoker. Among the topics are shifting definitions of criminality and the ways in which discourses surrounding crime changed during the nineteenth century, the literal and social criminalization of particular sex acts, and the gendering of degeneration and insanity. As fascinated as they were with criminality, the Victorians were equally concerned with solving crime, and this collection also focuses on the forces of law enforcement and nineteenth-century attempts to'read'the criminal body as revealed in Victorian crime fiction and reportage. Contributors engage with the detective figure and his growing professionalization, while examining the role of science and technology - both at home and in the Empire - in solving cases.

Criminals as Animals from Shakespeare to Lombroso demonstrates how animal metaphors have been used to denigrate persons identified as criminal in literature, law, and science. Its three-part history traces the popularization of the'criminal beast'metaphor in late sixteenth-century England, the troubling of the trope during the long eighteenth century, and the late nineteenth-century discovery of criminal atavism. With chapters on rogue pamphlets, Shakespeare, Webster, Jonson, Defoe and Swift, Godwin, Dickens, and Lombroso, the book illustrates how ideologically inscribed metaphors foster transfers between law, penal practices, and literature. Criminals as Animals concludes that criminal-animal metaphors continue to negatively influence the treatment of prisoners, suspected terrorists, and the poor even today.

Although rarely distinguished from the detective story, the crime novel offers readers a quite different experience. In the detective novel, a sympathetic detective figure uses reason and intuition to solve the puzzle, restore order, and reassure readers that'right'will always prevail. In the crime novel, by contrast, the'hero'is either the killer, the victim, a guilty bystander, or someone falsely accused, and the crime may never be satisfactorily solved. These and other fundamental differences are set out by Tony Hilfer in The Crime Novel, the first book that completely defines and explores this popular genre. Hilfer offers convincing evidence that the crime novel should be regarded as a genre distinct from the detective novel, whose conventions it subverts to develop conventions of its own. Hilfer provides in-depth analyses of novels by Georges Simenon, Margaret Millar, Patricia Highsmith, and Jim Thompson. He also treats such British novelists as Patrick Hamilton, Shelley Smith, and Marie Belloc Lowndes, as well as the American novelists Cornell Woolrich, John Franklin Bardin, James M. Cain, and Fredric Brown. In addition, he defines the distinctions between the American crime novel and the British, showing how their differences correspond to differences in American and British detective fiction. This well-written study will appeal to a general audience, as well as teachers and students of detective and mystery fiction. For anyone interested in the genre, it offers valuable suggestions of'what to read next.'