This book explores the vast array of animals that populate detective fiction. If the genre begins, as is widely supposed, with Edgar Allan Poe¿s ¿Murders in the Rue Morgue¿ (1841), then detective fiction¿s 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.

Origins and Evolutions: The Brutal History of Detective Fiction.- Ontologies.- Tigers, Criminals, Rogues: Animality in Dickens' Detective Fiction.- Quantum Entanglements in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles.- Wolverines, Werewolves and Demon Dogs: Animality, Criminality and Classification in James Ellroy's L.A. Quartet.- Ethics.- The Psittacine Witness: Parrot Talk and Animal Ethics in Earl Derr Biggers' The Chinese Parrot and Earl Stanley Gardner's The Case of the Perjured Parrot.- Ecology, Capability and Companion Species: Conflicting Ethics in Nevada Barr's Blood Lure.- Laboratory Tech-Noir: Genre, Narrative Form, and the Literary Model Organism in Jay Hosking's Three Years with the Rat.- Reptiles, Buddhism, and Detection in John Burdett's Bangkok 8.- Politics.- Animals, Biopolitics, and Sensation Fiction: M. E. Braddon's Lady Audley's 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 Alexie's Indian Killer and Adrian C. Louis's Skins.- Forms.- Aping the Classics: Terry Pratchett's 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.