This volume of essays explores some of the best crime fiction, science fiction and writing for children, in the last 40 years, including work by Reginald Hill, Thomas Harris, Dorothy L. Sayers, Nora Roberts, J. D. Robb, J. R. R. Tolkien, Ursula Le Guin, Anne McCaffrey, Ian McDonald, Octavia E. Butler, and Tamora Pierce. A companion volume entitled Of Sex and Faerie; Further Essays on Genre Fiction is also available from Lulu. John Lennard took his B.A. and D.Phil. at Oxford University, and his M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught for the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame, and for the Open University, and was Professor of British & American Literature at the University of the West Indies-Mona, 2004-09. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (1996; 2/e, OUP, 2005), and with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002).