Brian Diemert – författare

Diemert traces Greene''s adaptation of nineteenth-century romance thrillers and classical detective stories into modern political thrillers as a means of presenting serious concerns in an engaging fashion. He argues that Greene''s popular thrillers were in part a reaction to the high modernism of writers such as James Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and Virginia Woolf, whose esoteric experiments with language were disengaged from immediate social concerns and inaccessible to a large segment of the reading public. Graham Greene''s Thrillers and the 1930s investigates some of Greene''s best-known works, such as A Gun for Sale, Brighton Rock, and The Ministry of Fear, and shows how they reflect the evolution of Greene''s sense of the importance of popular culture in the 1930s.

Best known for her Jackson Brodie series of detective novels, which were adapted into the BBC television series Case Histories, Kate Atkinson is the author of eleven novels, two plays, and a collection of short stories. Her literary awards include the 1995 Whitbread Award for a first novel and book of the year for Behind the Scenes at the Museum and the Costa Book Awards for best novel in 2013 and 2015 for Life after Life and A God in Ruins.In this first book-length study of Atkinson's literary career, Brian Diemert examines the evolution of her novels: the playful and self-conscious work of the 1990s, the detective series novels, the books that examine Britain's history and its legacy of conflict and trauma related to World War II, and the most recent return to mystery. Diemert identifies her pattern of weaving multiple narrative strands into intricate plots that create the mystery at the heart of all her tales. He traces her development of narrative technique and thematic preoccupations of women's vulnerability within patriarchy and the complications of absent or disengaged parents. While her fiction is marked by allusiveness and humor, it remains profound and often touching as it explores the myths of British history and, particularly, women's lives.