Description: An examination of how crime and criminality representations within adapted UK detective dramas impact contemporary definitions of 'Englishness.'
Brief description: Neil McCaw is Senior Lecturer in English and Creative Writing at the University of Winchester, UK.
Review Quotes: "Adapting Detective Fiction is an insightful and illuminating analysis of the various television adaptations of British detective fiction. It investigates the links between literary texts, television adaptations, and the socio-economic framework connecting and informing both, and in so doing it does for British detective fiction what Sean McCann's Gumshoe America did for American crime fiction. Neil McCaw produces fascinating readings of key texts and their television adaptations, but also reveals the complex web of social, cultural, economic, and political forces that lie behind the adaptations. As an investigation of the mediation between past and present that these adaptations represent, the book identifies what they say about national identity, nostalgia, and cultural values." --John Scaggs, Associate Professor of English, Southwestern College, USA