- *Searching for the Holy Grail: The Quest for the Authentic in the Detective Novel* (1994)
- *Victorian Detective Fiction: The Cultural Context* (1996)
- *The Mercurial Detective: Ambiguous and Ironic Figures from Sherlock Holmes to Jack Frost* (2009)
- *Introduction to the Literature of Crime* (Routledge; 2009)
- *The Penguin Book of Gaslight Gothic: Classic Gothic Stories* (2011)
- *The Classic Mystery: A Critical Study of the British Tradition* (2016)
- *Death and the City: The Urban Gothic in 19th-Century Fiction* (2017)
Articles and book chapters
- ""This Woman's Work": Representing the Work of Women in Victorian Crime Fiction" (1994)
- "Criminal Delights: Sensation Fiction" (1995)
- "Sherlock Holmes: The Origins and Evolution of the Master Detective" (1996)
- "The New Historicism and Detective Fiction" (2000)
- "The Woman Detective in Contemporary Fiction" (2000)
- "Reading the Detective: The Reception of British Detective Fiction in Australia and New Zealand" (2002)
- "The Detective in the City" (2003)
- "The Politics of Crime Fiction: Detection, Ideology, and Power" (2005)
- "The New Gothic: Horror in the 21st Century" (2007)
- "The Enduring Appeal of the Detective Novel" (2008)
- "The Return of the Gothic" (2011)
- "The Gothic and Victorian Literature" (2015)
- "The City of Crime: Exploring the Urban Gothic" (2017)
- "The Gothic and the Detective Novel" (2019)