The Steel Registry. Characters of Crime Fiction is a celebration of the genre of detective fiction and detective fiction characters. Beginning with the earliest eighteenth and nineteenth century crime fiction and concluding with leading contemporary exponents of the genre, the history and development of detective fiction is traced through vignettes of seventy-five crime and detective fiction characters derived from the famous novels of the genre. Famous detective fiction characters and the authors who created them are celebrated through brief descriptive and exploratory synopses – including luminaries such as Conan-Doyle, Christie, Sayers, Chandler, Hammett, Marsh, Fleming, Stark, Le Carre, Dexter, Follett, Ludlum, Paretsky, Rankin, Burke, Ellroy, Dibdin, Grisham, Temple, Childe, Reichs, Hayder, James, Larsson, Galbraith, Hurwitz, and many more. This book explores the many reasons for reading crime fiction, not the least of them being the vast variety of literature that the genre embraces. The book also celebrates the heroes and heroines of detective fiction, describing in brief the nuances of their characters. Through the pleasures of reading about the challenges these heroes and heroines face, their attempts to stay human in a world which often lacks humanity, the genre of crime fiction also contributes to good literature, the stuff of lit crit or literary criticism, and so it can also be read with considerations of the development of style and genre. The Steel Registry explores this purer motive as well as the perhaps more usual escapism or sheer enjoyment, being beguiled, being captivated, being grabbed by the throat with a page-turning intensity, that is characteristic of the stimulating novels of the detective fiction genre and the characters of crime fiction created by their inspired authors.