“Ripped from the Headlines” (Detective Fiction 1925-1930)

“When I first began studying the detective story in those innocent early 1980s, it was possible in a single summer to read every book-length work written about the genre —both the brilliant and the pedestrian — as well as most, it not all, of the journal articles. A summer will no longer suffice. And although one might, in one’s private moments, hope that some—many—of these new late-20th and early-21st-century views of detective fiction could be dismissed as tendentious excrescences of the Ph.D. industrial complex, in fact, they are not. Most continue to provide provocative new analyses of standard texts by Foe, Conan Doyle, Chesterton, Christie, Sayers, Chandler, Hammett, Himes, Macdonald and equally provocative analyses of contemporary writers whose detectives are still in mid-career. The standard of the scholarship is high”.

From the “Preface” of J. K. Van Dover: Making the Detective Story American: Biggers, Van Dine and Hammett and the Turning Point of the Genre, 1925–1930. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland & Co. 2010, S. 2.

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