Lee Horsley (foreword) is a retired Reader in Literature and Culture at Lancaster University. She has written books on twentieth-century politics and literature, including Fictions of Power in English Literature 1900-1950 (1995). During the last couple of decades she has written numerous articles and books about crime and detective fiction. Her publications include
The Noir Thriller (2001; 2009), Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction (2005), and (as co-editor) The Blackwell Companion to Crime Fiction (2010; paperback reissue 2020). Her strongest interest is in the hard-boiled and noir writing which came to dominate pulp publishing in the 1920s and which has, over the whole of the last century, continued to exert a hugely important and varied influence on both film and fiction.