This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poes Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), then detective fictions very first culprit is an animal. Animals, moreover, consistently appear as victims, clues, and companions, while the abstract conception of animality is closely tied to the idea of criminality. Although it is often described as an essentially conservative form, detective fiction can unsettle the binary of human and animal to intersect with developing concerns in animal studies: animal agency, the ethical complexities of human/animal interaction, the politics and literary aesthetics of violence, and animal metaphor. Gathering its 14 essays into sections on ontologies, ethics, politics, and forms, Animals in Detective Fiction provides a compelling and nuanced analysis of the central role creatures play in this enduringly popular and continually morphing literary form.

Ruth Hawthorn is Senior Lecturer in American Literature at the University of Lincoln. She is currently completing a monograph on American detective fiction for the BAAS Paperbacks series with Edinburgh University Press. Her research interests include crime fiction, the literature of LA, and ecocriticism. 

John Miller is Senior Lecturer in Nineteenth-Century Literature at the University of Sheffield, President of ASLE-UKI (Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment, UK and Ireland), and co-editor of Palgrave Studies in Animals in Literature. His books include Empire and the Animal Body (Anthem, 2014) and The Heart of the Forest (British Library Publishing, 2022). 

Origins and Evolutions: The Brutal History of Detective Fiction.- Ontologies.- Tigers, Criminals, Rogues: Animality in Dickens Detective Fiction.- Quantum Entanglements in Arthur Conan DoylesThe Hound of the Baskervilles.-Wolverines, Werewolves and Demon Dogs: Animality, Criminality and Classification in James EllroysL.A. Quartet.- Ethics.- The Psittacine Witness: Parrot Talk and Animal Ethics in Earl Derr BiggersThe Chinese Parrotand Earl Stanley GardnersThe Case of the Perjured Parrot.-Ecology, Capability and Companion Species: Conflicting Ethics in Nevada BarrsBlood Lure.- Laboratory Tech-Noir: Genre, Narrative Form, and the Literary Model Organism in Jay HoskingsThree Years with the Rat.-Reptiles, Buddhism, and Detection in John BurdettsBangkok 8.- Politics.- Animals, Biopolitics, and Sensation Fiction: M. E. BraddonsLady Audleys Secret.-The Motto of the Mollusc: Patricia Highsmith and the Semiotics ofSnails.- Before the white man came, when animals still talked: Colonial Creatures in Sherman AlexiesIndian Killerand Adrian C. LouissSkins.- Forms.- Aping the Classics: Terry Pratchetts Satirical Animals and Detective Fiction.- Animal Image and Human Logos in Graphic Detective Fiction.- As easy to spot as a kangaroo in a dinner jacket: Animetaphor in Raymond Chandler and Jonathan Lethem.