About
“Hammett took murder out of the Venetian vase and dropped it into the alley; it doesn’t have to stay there forever, but it was a good idea to get as far as possible from Emily Post’s idea of how a well-bred debutante gnaws a chicken wing.”
—Raymond Chandler ‘The Simple Art of Murder’
This site began life as a supporting site for two books: 100 American Crime Writers and 100 British Crime Writers. These books are edited respectively by Steven Powell and Esme Miskimmin and will be published by Palgrave Macmillan in their Crime Files series. The blog is edited and maintained primarily by Steven and Chris Routledge.
Sample entries from the books are now available here:
About the Editors
Esme Miskimmin is a freelance writer, editor and academic with interests in crime and mystery writing and Renaissance drama. Her 2004 PhD dissertation was on inter-war crime fiction and she is currently writing a monograph on Dorothy L. Sayers for Liverpool University Press. Her co-edited volumeEncyclopedia of British Women’s Writing 1900-1950 was published by Palgrave in March 2006 and she has a forthcoming chapter ‘The Golden Age: A Return to Eden? Responses to World War One in the Country-House Detective Story’ in Popular Responses to the First World War ed. Stacy Gillis. She is also writing an introductory textbook to Shakespeare, Starting Shakespeare (Continuum, Autumn 2008) and is currently an editorial assistant for the RSC Complete Works of Shakespeare, preparing scene-by-scene analyses for the individual editions of the plays. She has written a 6,000 word chapter on Dorothy L. Sayers for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction, edited by Charles Rzepka and Lee Horsley.
Steven Powell is currently studying for a PhD on the fiction of James Ellroy at the University of Liverpool. He has recently finished editing Conversations with James Ellroy for University of Mississippi Press as part of their Literary Conversations Series. Conversations with James Ellroy comes out on February 1, 2012 (pre-order a copy here). It features interviews Ellroy has given over the course of his literary career and includes a series of previously unpublished interviews Steven has personally conducted with Ellroy.
Chris Routledge is a freelance writer, editor and academic whose 1998 PhD dissertation was on Raymond Chandler. In the 1990s and early 2000s he published several academic articles on crime fiction, including this one. He is also co-editor, with Adrienne Gavin, of Mystery in Children’s Literature (Palgrave, 2001).
His most recent book is a history of the Robert Cain Brewery in Liverpool entitled Cain’s: The Story of Liverpool in a Pint (Liverpool University Press, 2008). With Siobhan Chapman he is co-editor of Key Thinkers in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2005) and Key Ideas in Linguistics and the Philosophy of Language (Edinburgh University Press, 2009). He is blogging about his latest project at Letters to Elizabeth and his personal website is here.
Venetian Vase Columnists / 100 American Contributors
Delphine Cingal, PhD, is a Senior Lecturer at the University of Paris 2. She has a PhD from the Sorbonne for her research on P.D. James (Perversity and Perversion in P.D. James’s Whodunits, Presses du Septentrion, 2001.) She has been chevalier des Arts et des Lettres since 2009. She is also one of the organisers of the Week-end Noir festival in Neuilly-Plaisance, near Paris.
She is still doing research on detective fiction and has published many articles on the subject (including one on P.D. James for Clues in 2001). She is also the editor of ‘Zulma Classics’ (classics published in English for Zulma, a Paris publisher). She has organized two international conferences in 2005, one on detective fiction at the Catholic Institute (Paris) and one on Text and Image at Senate House (London). She is currently planning another one for Senate House in 2011 and creating an international detective fiction research center in France.
David Hering is writing his PhD thesis at the University of Liverpool, where he is currently researching the works of David Foster Wallace and Mark Z. Danielewski. His literary reviews have appeared in the Journal of American Studies and Movable Type. He is the editor of the essay collection Consider David Foster Wallace: Critical Essays, released August 2010.
Chris Pak is currently studying for a PhD at the University of Liverpool. He specialises in Science Fiction, with a thesis focused on the theme of terraforming, but is also interested in other Fantastic and Genre Fictions. He teaches several undergraduate modules at the University of Liverpool and is scheduled to begin teaching a new module on Noir writing in early 2011. More information, and links to other essays and reviews, can be found at www.chrispak.webs.com.
Diana Powell is studying for a PhD at the University of Liverpool on the influence of Sir Walter Scott on the Tractarian Movement, and has published several articles on this subject. She has research interests in American crime fiction authors such as Megan Abbott, Arthur B. Reeve, Lawrence Treat and John Dickson Carr.
