The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century

The English Crime Play in the Twentieth Century is the first comprehensive study of the English crime play, its history and its conventions. It presents an analysis of some 250 plays performed in the London West End between 1900 and 2000. The first part is historically orientated and sketches the emergence and development of the genre. The second part attempts to establish a poetics of the crime play with respect to typical settings, plot structures, character configurations and subgenres. Although the crime play and detective fiction developed simultaneously, their respective conventions differ substantially. The third part of this book is therefore devoted to the analysis of some 20 crime plays adapted from detective novels in order to establish which types of plot are more suitable for the page and which for the stage.

Beatrix Hesse is Professor of English/ Cultural and Media Studies, University of Passau, Germany. She is the author of Shakespeare's Comedies From a Pragmatic Communication Theory Approach (1998).