Criminal Convictions

In these witty, elegant, original essays, Freeling, famous English writer of detective novels, first examines crime themes in major 19th-century writers: Dickens, for whom crime is symptomatic of the Victorian bourgeois world's complacency, corruption and squeezing of the poor; Stendhal, who saw the state as itself criminal; Joseph Conrad, whose crime plots pivot on moral cowardice and guilt. Freeling also investigates Kipling's neglected crime stories, and he blasts Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes as an embodiment of British imperialist arrogance. Turning to our century, Freeling explores Raymond Chandler's reinvention of the tale of sudden violence, Georges Simenon's urgent questioning of the meaning of suffering and redemption, Dorothy Sayers's portrayal of women defending themselves against the encroachments of a sexist society. Freeling's continually surprising essays eloquently support his view that crime is metaphysically bound up with the destruction of the mind, the pathology of the human spirit. (June)