Adapting detective fiction

By Neil McCaw

Subjects: English Detective and mystery stories, English National characteristics, Television adaptations, Detective and mystery television programs, History and criticism, English literature, history and criticism, History, National characteristics, english, Detective and mystery stories

Description: >*Adapting Detective Fiction* is in one sense a study of specific instances of adaptation, with close readings of both the originating sources and adapted texts themselves. But it is also more than this. It is a study of the politics of representation in the last decades of the twentieth century, and the role television detective fiction plays in this. It is about the mutually-informing interrelation of cultural texts and political rhetoric and ideas, about the connections between ideas of crime and criminality (and criminology more generally) and popular cultural understandings of human behaviour and culpability; most of all, it is about the relationship between culture and social change, and how a detailed consideration of the processes of adaptation reveals much about the shifting nature of the world in which we live. With specific reference to television series such as *The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Miss Marple, Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Cadfael*, and *Midsomer Murders*, *Adapting Detective Fiction* uses adaptation as the basis for an exercise in cultural history, an examination of the character and nature of the last decades of the twentieth century, and an illustration of the fundamental role detective fictions play in our popular beliefs about the nature of crime and Englishness.