The golden age of crime fiction is usually taken as the period between the two world wars, though some start it earlier, with the publication of E. C. Bentley's Trent's Last Case in 1913, and the first critic to use the term dated it from 1918 to 1930, followed by 'the Moderns'; major texts in 'golden age' style were also produced after 1940, both by new writers and by figures from the earlier period. The term 'golden age' has been criticised as being unduly homogenous and seen as inappropriately 'replete with romantic associations': in fact the types of crime fiction produced in this period were far from uniform - the psychothriller and the procedural began, there was a wide range of practice in the mystery and the stories do regularly represent types of social and personal unease which would contradict a notion of an idyllic 'golden' period.

However, while recognising variety in the period, as well as the relative uncertainty of its borders, it is still possible to identify a coherent set of practices which were shared, to a greater or lesser extent, by most of the writers then at work. Elements that were randomly present in earlier crime fiction suddenly become a norm, like multiple suspects, and some earlier tendencies largely disappear, notably the use of coincidence and historical explanations. A genre of crime fiction, best named for its central mechanism as the clue-puzzle and epitomised by Agatha Christie and ‘S. S. Van Dine’, clearly forms a recognisable entity by the mid-1920s.

The Newgate novel and the sensation novel were sub-genres of the literature of crime, which enjoyed a relatively brief but quite extraordinary popular success in the 1830s and 1840s and the 1860s respectively. The Newgate novel was associated exclusively with male authors. The sensation novelists, on the other hand, included a number of best-selling female authors, and this fact made for important differences of emphasis in the two sub-genres, and also for significant differences in the critical response to them. Both generated debates whose terms extended beyond the literary, and which overlapped in interesting ways. Thus, as well as being entertaining and often absorbing narratives in their own right, these novels and the controversies they engendered tell us a great deal about cultural anxieties and social and literary change at two key points in the Victorian period. Newgate novels enjoyed enormous popularity and some notoriety in the early 1830s, and generated great debate and controversy in the late 1830s and the 1840s.

Given that it contains a potent and provocative pun, 'private eye' is as good a title as any for a chapter on the emergence of a home-grown, American sub-genre of crime fiction. The obvious alternative, 'hardboiled', is appropriately folksy in its reference to a tough-minded behavioural code but covers more territory and is less resonant. In association with 'private', the eye/I(nvestigator) in question already conjures up some of the defining characteristics of what was to become a popular heroic type in the American grain. A private eye suggests among other things: a solitary eye, and the (forbidden) pleasures associated with Freud's scopic drive; a non-organisation man's eye, like the frontier scout's or the cowboy's; an eye that trusts no other; an eye that's licensed to look; and even, by extrapolation, an eye for hire. To propose further that private eye also connotes those specifically American concepts of 'orneriness' and 'libertarianism' is a stretch, but to anyone familiar with the fictional type, the connection is soon apparent.

When the thriller writer Robert Ludlum died in March 2001, several of his obituarists tellingly recalled the reaction of a Washington Post reviewer to one of the author's many, phenomenally popular novels: 'It's a lousy book. So I stayed up until 3am to finish it.' This anecdotal, tongue-in-cheek confession neatly captures the ambivalence associated with a hugely successful mode of crime writing, a guilty sense that its lack of literary merit has always somehow been inseparable from the compulsiveness with which its narrative pleasures are greedily gobbled up, relegating the thriller to the most undeserving of genres. To describe a thriller as 'deeply satisfying and sophisticated' (to pluck a blurb at random from the bookshelves) is already to beg the insidious question: how satisfying and sophisticated can it be?

Until quite recently, the words 'Cambridge Companion' and 'Crime Fiction' would have seemed mutually exclusive. Crime fiction was certainly written about, but on the assumption that readers and author were already dedicated fans, happy to ponder together the exact chronology of Sherlock Holmes's life-story or the mystery of Dr Watson's Christian name. Where the authors claimed some academic credentials, their love for the genre was owned up to as a guilty pleasure - W. H. Auden called it 'an addiction like tobacco or alcohol' - or juxtaposed to the world of 'proper' culture with tongue a fair way into cheek, as in Dorothy L. Sayers's demonstration that when writing the Poetics, what Aristotle desired 'in his heart of hearts . . . was a good detective story'.

Since the 1960s, however, the presumed barriers between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literature have been progressively dismantled. If only – at first – as indicators of a great many readers’ needs and anxieties, crime texts were increasingly seen as worthy of close analysis, and by now there are thousands of carefully argued, well-researched, elegantly written studies of the crime genre available and awaiting further comment. Like any new development this emergence has a specific history, any given intersection of which is likely to reveal different terminologies as well as different critical preoccupations. Up to the early 1980s, study of the form was still focused mainly on ‘detective’ or ‘mystery’ fiction, and nodded back to the half-serious ‘rules’ which had been drawn up for the genre in the inter-war period and stressed the figure of the detective and the author’s fair handling of clues. This tradition is well discussed in Stephen Knight’s chapter on ‘the Golden Age’ in the present book.

Until quite recently, the story of the development of crime fiction was most commonly told as a movement from man to man, beginning with Edgar Allan Poe, then Arthur Conan Doyle, followed by Dashiell Hammett and so on. Fittingly enough, critics of the genre most concerned with mysteries, secrets, and deceit thus misrepresented its true story by writing women, both writers and detectives, out of its history until they appeared, seemingly from nowhere, first in the Golden Age and then again with the rise of feminist crime fiction in the 1980s. That distorted and partial history began to undergo revision in the late 1980s, as feminist critics discovered lost women writers such as Seeley Register and Anna Katherine Green and also began to look at gothic and sensation fiction for the roots of the genre. It is now widely acknowledged that the woman writer and the woman detective have as long a history in crime fiction as do their male counterparts.

When Julian Symons published his classic study Bloody Murder in 1972, his forecast of a 'declining market' for straightforward detective fiction seemed reasonable. The once pre-eminent formula of crime, false trails and triumphant solution by a brilliant detective either looked very old-fashioned or had started to be replaced by other sources of interest, such as espionage or psychological suspense. At the time of writing, 2002, things look different. Detection is once more flourishing and, without sacrificing its traditional complement of early-discovered corpses, red herrings and surprise solutions, now enjoys a critical esteem in the 'respectable' marketplace that would have been unthinkable a few decades ago. Books have also at least doubled in length: from the 200-odd pages which remained statutory up to the 1970s, many detective novels now weigh in at around 500.

The literature of the eighteenth century is suffused with crime, but handles it in a wholly different way from that of the nineteenth and twentieth. Looking back across those centuries, it is easy to trace this difference to the penal realities of the time: the absence of any reliable system of policing, or of the detection of criminals on any routine basis. Furthermore, there seems to have been little ideological belief that this could or indeed needed to be done effectively. What system there was was largely privatised: the 'prosecution' of theft was the responsibility of the injured party, who might offer a reward for information or hire an agent. This situation fed straight into the hands of gangsters such as the notorious Jonathan Wild, who arranged in turn for the robberies, the receipt of the reward for returning the goods and, when it suited him, the arrest of the supposed thieves - usually members of his own gang - in his self-proclaimed role of 'Thieftaker General'. Alternatively, the authorities relied on members of the public to detect crime as it happened and summon the watch - parochially-based and with few autonomous powers beyond responding to calls for arrest.

It is not for nothing that Moriarty was otherwise known as the Napoleon of crime, that Poe's Chevalier Dupin invented ratiocination from a comfortable armchair in a darkened room in Paris, or, for that matter, that Sherlock Holmes takes such pains to scoff at the French police, notably a certain detective named Lecoq, who, he claims, 'was a miserable bungler'. French contributions to the development of crime fiction, in particular the detective story, are significant in the sense that one cannot conceive of the developments in nineteenth-century English detective fiction without them. Holmes's arrogance towards the continental police, notably the French, nevertheless bespeaks a certain amount of insecurity with regard to the fearsome reputation of the French police established during Fouchè's reign of terror under Napoleon, a reputation further consolidated throughout the nineteenth century.

The spy story is a close but distinct variation on the tale of detection with the difference that there is no discrete crime involved but rather a covert action which, as John Cawelti and Bruce Rosenberg argue, transgresses conventional, moral, or legal boundaries. The action is self-evidently political since it involves national rivalries and constantly veers towards a paranoid vision of 'violation by outside agencies' and 'violation of individual autonomy by internal agencies'. A further distinction from the detection genre is that the investigator is often himself an agent and therefore, unlike Todorov's ideally detached detective, is implicated in the very processes he is investigating. And since the genre is defined by its international subject, the novels can only be partly explained through formalist analyses like that of Bruce Merry. Espionage fiction became popular in two periods - the turn of the century and the 1960s - when popular anxieties were growing over the credibility of government processes. Its narratives therefore manifest what Michael Denning calls ‘cover stories’ where the surface action screens a complex play of ideology. Initially spying contrasted unfavourably with an ethic of open courage. Reviewing Somerset Maugham’s Ashenden in 1928, D. H. Lawrence declared: ‘Spying is a dirty business, and Secret Service altogether is a world of under-dogs, a world in which the meanest passions are given play’. However, by 1966 this distaste had become replaced by a perception of centrality. A character in Kingsley Amis’s The Anti-Death League (1966) can plausibly claim that the spy is a ‘uniquely characteristic and significant figure of our time’. The history of spy fiction is one of a gradual shift from the margins to the sixties when espionage novels flooded the market and serious critical attention began to be paid to the genre. Even Jacques Barzun, in the course of a lofty and largely negative meditation on spy fiction, admits that ‘the soul of the spy is somehow the model of our own; his actions and his trappings fulfil our unsatisfied desires’.

To write about black crime fiction, as opposed to white or any other kind of crime fiction, is to write about a body of writing that does not exist, or rather does not exist in isolation from, and has not developed outside or beyond the parameters of, these other kinds of crime fiction. Crime fiction, like all cultural practice, informs and is informed by its cultural and political contexts; so that just as the idea that 'blackness' or 'whiteness' ever described natural essences or biologically pure categories has been well and truly dismissed, the idea that the term 'black' (or indeed 'white') crime fiction refers, or has ever referred, to a rigidly defined and uniform practice, needs to be resisted. But this is a chapter on black crime fiction, nonetheless, and its very existence in a book of this nature testifies to the continuing significance of race as a trope of difference both in Britain and the United States. After all, who could argue with any conviction that categories like 'black' or 'white' in the US and Europe are suddenly of no consequence, when much of the anecdotal evidence points to the contrary?

Detective fiction has played and continues to play a complex and curious role in relation to the broader field of literature. On the one hand, detective fiction, like other genre fictions, is seen as a popular and lesser subset of high or 'proper' literature. On the other, the literature of detection, with its complex double narrative in which an absent story, that of a crime, is gradually reconstructed in the second story (the investigation), its uses of suspense, and its power to give aesthetic shape to the most brute of matter, has been seen as paradigmatic of literary narrative itself. Tzvetan Todorov's 'The Typology of Detective Fiction', which remains one of the most significant contributions to the field, sought to uphold the distinction between 'genre fiction' and 'literature' (as a question of structure rather than of value). However, his identification of the two orders of story, inquest and crime, as equivalents to the Russian formalist distinction between sjuzet and fabula (often translated as 'discourse' and 'story' respectively), makes the detective story, as Peter Brooks writes, 'the narrative of narratives', its classical structure a laying-bare of the structure of all narrative in that it dramatises the role of sjuzet and fabula and the nature of their relation.

Like the poor, in the world of crime fiction cops have always been with us. From the beginning we find Sergeant Cuff, Inspector Bucket, M. Lecoq, to say nothing of Poe's Prefect, or Doyle's Lestrade. In the Golden Age they multiply - Inspectors Alleyn, Appleby, Grant, and Parker, to name only a few. Across the Atlantic, Ellery Queen's dad was a cop, and even Dashiell Hammett portrayed police officers in a sympathetic light in his early stories. But nobody claims that the presence of a police officer makes police fiction. Indeed, in most detective fiction written before 1950, police officers play a decidedly subordinate role - as foils or representatives of the state clearing the boards at the end. Even if main characters wear badges, the fact that they are cops has no impact on their characterisation; they act like any other amateur or private detective, unfettered by bureaucracy and law.

One of the decisive steps in developing narrative cinema took place through the realisation of a dramatic crime on screen. Edwin S. Porter's commercial success with The Great Train Robbery (1903) rests on his understanding of a variety of different genres whilst bending and extending their conventions in order to produce something new and exciting. Moreover, this was a narrative experience which was very much in keeping with the headlines of the day. His film is often thought of as the beginning of the Western genre, but it is the crime that provides the narrative impetus. This chapter will look at films and television programmes which foreground crime and detection relying on mystery and adventure archetypes, but it acknowledges that during the twentieth century crime features in practically all commercial genres. Therefore, the choice of films and television programmes focuses on transitions in the representation of crime and detection on screen as a means to understand the determinants of these changes.

Just as it is possible to expand the idea of detective fiction back to episodes in the Bible, oriental tales, and folk riddles, so too the short story can be dissolved into any form of brief tale. But, as Walter Allen suggests, the emergence of the nineteenth-century short story is, precisely, a modern phenomenon. By the same token, the appearance of a new and modern kind of protagonist from the mid-nineteenth century, who has come to be called 'the detective', marks a distinction from earlier mysteries. In both cases, Edgar Allan Poe plays a crucial innovative role.

While the form initiated by Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837) and Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) flourished in America, the short story failed to make as great an impression in Britain until the end of the century, held back by the success of the three-decker or serialised novel. However, when it did take off, this was in no small part due to the success of Arthur Conan Doyle’s detective stories in George Newnes’s Strand Magazine (founded in 1891).

Paul uses a cluster of related terms to refer to his initial missionary preaching and to the proclamation at the heart of his letters. The nouns 'gospel' (euaggelion), 'word' (logos or rhema), 'preaching' (akoe), 'proclamation' (kerygma), and 'witness' (martyrion) are often used almost synonymously, as are the corresponding verbs.

The most important of these terms is undoubtedly the noun 'gospel', which is used 48 times in the undisputed letters; the verb 'to proclaim good news' is used 19 times. Paul probably inherited the distinctive early Christian use of 'gospel' from those who were followers of Jesus before his own call or conversion. Indeed the noun may well have been used by Greek-speaking Jews in Jerusalem and Antioch very soon after Easter.

The noun ‘gospel’ is rarely used in the Old Testament, and never in a religious context with reference to God’s good news. So early Christian use of this noun must be understood against the backdrop of current usage in the cities in which Christianity first took root. Literary evidence and inscriptions both confirm that the term ‘gospel’ was closely associated with the imperial cult in the cities of the eastern Mediterranean. One particular inscription provides striking evidence.

Written to a Christian community with whom Paul has had a long and happy relationship, the letter to the Philippians is characterized by joy - a remarkable fact, since it was sent from prison, where its author was held on a capital charge. The letter expresses confidence about Paul's own future since, whether he lives or dies, Christ is with him (1:19-26), and about the Philippians, whom he describes as his joy and his crown (4:1), concerning whom he will boast on the day of judgment (2:16).

CONTEXT

Paul’s authorship of this letter has rarely been doubted. It was written to Christians in Philippi, a fairly small city of about 10,000 inhabitants in eastern Macedonia. In the first century ad, Philippi was important as an agricultural centre; it was a Roman colony, which meant that its citizens enjoyed considerable legal and property rights, and the city’s administration was modelled on that of Rome. Communications were reasonably easy by the standards of that time, since the city was conveniently placed on the Via Egnatia, along which one could travel westwards to the Adriatic coast, while the port of Neapolis lay ten miles to the south.