J. Kenneth Van Dover

"The Detective and the Artist: Painters, Poets and Writers in Crime Fiction, 1840s-1970s focuses upon the distinctive role that artists have played in detective fiction--as detectives, as villains, and victims, and as bystanders. Detectives may use various methods--ratiocinative, scientific, or hard-boiled--but they always unravel the threads that the villains have woven into deceptive covers for their crimes"--