Stephen Knight. Crime Fiction since 1800: Detection, Death, Diversity. Second Edition. New York: Palgrave, 2010. ISBN: 978-0-230-58074-9. Price: US$85.00/£50.00 Emelyne Godfrey. Masculinity, Crime and Self-Defence in Victorian Literature. New York: Palgrave, 2011. ISBN: 978-0-230-27345-0. Price: US$80/£50.00

These two recent books from Palgrave could be jointly titled “All Crime Big and Small.” Reading them as a pair risks a bit of critical vertigo as one moves from Stephen Knight’s jam-packed, comprehensive survey of crime fiction written in English since 1800 (this updated second edition covers material through 2007) to Emelyne Godfrey’s much more local look at how attitudes towards self-defense shaped the male city-goer in mid- to late-nineteenth century London. Together, these quite different books show how big the fields of crime writing and criticism about crime and culture have become. Knight sets his sights on the enormous range of production whereas Godfrey uses three very specific areas (responses to garroting fears, two Anthony Trollope novels and the Sherlock Holmes canon) as a lens through which to examine changing ideas about crime and masculinity. Knight’s second edition is necessary, he explains in the Preface, as “the writing, buying and reading of crime fiction has accelerated” (xi). The analyzing has also increased as 70 of the critical studies he mentions are from the past six years. While one is staggered by the amount of reading Knight had to do to write this book, the argument of the book itself is not earthshattering. Unlike his still quite useful 1980 work, Form and Ideology in Crime Fiction, this volume aims for comprehensiveness rather than detailed analysis. It is really like a narrative encyclopedia. Given that there is a glossary, a chronology, as well as an extensive reference section of both primary and secondary works in the back of the book, it is a useful text for both the scholar beginning or enlarging his/her work in the field. That is not to say that there is not an argument. There is and it is revealed in the subtitle “Detection, Death, Diversity.” Over the past two centuries, crime fiction has moved from uncertainty over how to represent crime for a rapidly urbanizing reading public, to belief in the authority represented by detectives and other agents of the criminal justice system, to a new period of uncertainty represented by innovations in the genre (formal innovation as well as the influx of writers with a varied range of racial, gender, national, and sexual perspectives). But the bulk of the book is a rapid-fire account of names, characters, locations, and plots. Knight’s aim is to connect the dots: and there are a lot of dots. Knight traces the development of several sub-genres, most notably: the clue-puzzle, a form associated with the so-called Golden Age of detective fiction where the reader is given enough information to attempt to solve the mystery without too much other information in the way of plot or style; the private eye, a form associated with the American private detective; and the police procedural, in which the emphasis is on the police officer who manages to work within the system while taking the reader realistically through the minutiae of crime-solving. All the usual suspects are here in Knight’s examination of the first century of the genre, beginning with its eighteenth-century stirrings in The Newgate Calendar and the Fielding brothers and continuing through William Godwin’s Caleb Williams (1794); Eugène François Vidocq (a real criminal who rose to the head of the French Sûreté in the early nineteenth century); Edgar Allan Poe’s Dupin; Wilkie Collins’s The Moonstone (1868); the stories of Émile Gaboriau in the middle decades of the century; and Arthur Conan Doyle’s “detective apotheosis” Sherlock Holmes (55). Knight, however, surrounds these famous names with several lesser-known practitioners–a dizzying if satisfying context for a genre that all-too-often becomes a …