You are looking at 1-20 of 37 entries
Abraham Walkowitz
(1878–1965)American painter, born at Tyumen in Siberia. In 1889 his family emigrated to New York, where he studied at the National Academy of Design. He travelled in Europe in 1906–7, studying at the ...
Amateur Detective
The first detective of the mystery genre was an amateur. In Edgar Allan Poe's story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841; in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, Apr. 1841) ...
Aristocratic Characters
In crime and mystery fiction, aristocratic characters are most likely to be found in detective novels and stories that follow the Golden Age traditions, as well as in the adventure ...
corpse
A dead body is considered in the Bible to be a source of ritual contamination. Anyone who came into contact with a corpse or a grave in which a corpse lay buried became contaminated and was forbidden ...
Cozy Mystery
A term first used in a review in the Observer 25 May 1958, “cozy” refers to a subgenre of the novel of detection defined by its light tone, element of ...
detective Fiction
Crime has been a staple of storytelling since its beginnings, and misdirection of the reader, for example about facts (Tom Jones's parentage) or emotions (in Emma or Much Ado about Nothing), has ...
Detective Novel
The detective novel is that form of long fiction centered upon investigation of a criminal problem. Typically the narrative presents the focal crime as seemingly insoluble by ordinary means and ...
Deviance
Germinating in the emergent conditions of modern life, popular crime and mystery literature from the start was concerned with the disorder that resulted when the social contract was disregarded. To ...
Earl Derr Biggers
(1884–1933),born in Ohio, educated at Harvard, became a journalist in Boston and later won fame as a popular novelist and playwright. He is best known for his Seven Keys ...
Ellery Queen
Pseudonym of Frederic Dannay (1905–82) and Manfred Lee (1905–71), under which they wrote many detective novels, beginning with The Roman Hat Mystery (1929). They also collaborated on an anthology of ...
Forensic Pathologist
In the real world of homicide, it is not uncommon that the identity of the assailant quickly becomes known, the assailant having informed the police of the occurrence and details ...
Gentleman Sleuth
The term “gentleman,” when used to modify “sleuth,” may denote the character's position in the upper class or connote that the detective is a true amateur. The two attributes—being of ...
Golden Age
The term conventionally refers to the popular escapist crime fiction of the 1920s and 1930s, which avoided any attempt at social realism and offered in its place a highly stylized ...
Howdunit
A type of story in which a rational explanation is found for a seemingly impossible event, most commonly a murder committed in a locked or sealed room. Often only one ...
Impossible Crime
The first mystery story was an impossible crime; in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, Apr. 1841) two women are murdered in ...
John Dickson Carr
(1906–77),American detective novelist who lived from 1932 to 1948 in England, where the majority of his books are set. His novels, which appeared under his own name and under ...
justice
In bioethics, justice is one of the basic principles, meaning fairness, impartiality, equity. It includes the concept of distributive justice, and application of affirmative action when this is ...
Legal Procedural
A type of novel that shows lawyers engaged in the business of law. It is likely to have a lawyer as detective and at some stage may take the reader ...
literary criticism
Medieval literary criticism was not a unified practice, nor was there a single genre of critical writing. There were two broad channels of enquiry, one pedagogic (for example, the rhetorical ...
Locked Room Mystery
Stories began with Edgar Allan Poe's “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, April 1841), in which the murderer had managed to leave a victim in ...
