This volume contains seventeen critical essays on a selection of the most influential and the most interesting suspense writers of the twentieth century. From the glittering world of Raffles to the domestic terror of The Magic Cottage, and from the heroics of Bulldog Drummond to the dogged pursuits of Miss Marple, this volume traces a variety of suspense writers: those well known, such as Agatha Christie, Dennis Wheatley or Dorothy L. Sayers, and those less well known: Elizabeth Bowen, Elizabeth Jenkins and the ‘new wave’ feminist thriller writers of today and the half forgotten women detective writers of the early part of this century. Also included is Alfred Hitchcock, British suspense in a Hollywood setting and the work of Cornell Woolrich, gothic writing in an American setting.

This volume is the companion of Nineteenth-Century Suspense: From Poe to Conan-Doyle, American Crime Fiction: Studies in the Genre, American Horror Fiction: From Brockden Brown to Stephen King, Literature and Imperialism and the forthcoming Spy Thrillers. As such it forms part of a unique critical collection dedicated to the study of a popular and non-canonical literature. Elsewhere amongst these books the reader can find studies of such names as Stephen King, Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, Robert Bloch, Arthur Conan-Doyle, Rudyard Kipling, Ian Fleming, John Buchan and dozens more. The Insights series is dedicated to the study of neglected aspects of modern culture and the critically neglected literature of the popular imagination.

This comprehensive critical anthology about suspense writing in the twentieth-century covers all the most important genres, from detective fiction to adventure mystery, and includes among the authors studied Agatha Christie and Dorothy L.Sayers, Alistair Maclean and Leslie Charteris as well as a host of other less well known or half-forgotten men and women.