Machine generated contents note: Introduction Chris Raczkowski; Part I. Early American Era: 1. From sermon to story: early American crime literature Jodi Schorb and Daniel E. Williams; 2. The theft of authorship: crime narrative in post-revolutionary early American literature Jodi Schorb and Daniel E. Williams; Part II. Romantic Era: 3. Crime journalism and the urban Gothic novel Matthew Warner Osborn; 4. Crime and American romanticism Timothy Helwig; 5. The Dark transactions of a Black? Slave narratives in the crime literature tradition Jeannine Marie DeLombard; 6. Edgar Allan Poe and the emergence of the literary detective Paul Grimstad; Part III. Realist Era: 7. The rise of the professional detective and the dime detective Pamela Bedore; 8. Home and away: reinvestigating domestic detective fiction Jon Blandford; 9. The rise of the American woman detective: gender and the detective genre in Green, Doyle, and Rinehart Ellen Burton Harrington; 10. Crime, science, realism John Dudley; Part IV. Modernist Era: 11. Criminal modernism Chris Raczkowski; 12. American golden age crime fiction Malcah Effron; 13. Red Harvest: hard-boiled crime fiction and the fate of left populism Justus Nieland; 14. Stateless mothers/motherless states: the femme fatale on the threshold of American citizenship Paula Rabinowitz; 15. One of us: the emergence of the psychopathological protagonist Frederick Whiting; Part V. Postmodernist Era: 16. Unusual suspects: American crimes, metaphysical detectives, postmodernist genres Susan Elizabeth Sweeney; 17. Identity politics and crime fiction Michael Millner; 18. American detective fiction and settler colonialism James H. Cox; 19. African American crime and detective fiction Justin Gifford; 20. Criminal family drama before and after The Sopranos Dean DeFino; 21. Making murderers: the evolution of true crime Jean Murley; 22. Spy narratives in post 9/11 American culture Andrew Pepper; 23. Film noir and neo-noir Will Scheibel; 24. Crime fiction television David Bianculli; 25. Dead reckonings: theoretical and critical approaches to detective fiction Christopher Breu.