the essay isn't tricky, i love the essay. i may be a freak. the creative could go either way, our trial one was gross, but i've seen others that are okay.
for crime fiction, it's worthwhile looking at the whole thing as one big long contimuum, and then you can make links between texts, contexts and other texts and their contexts to show how things have developed and changed in response to a change audience, that sort of thing. and with conventions, be prepared to be flexible. just know that crime doesn't begin and end with agatha christie and sherlock holmes (which you know from your texts), and so go on about why it doesn't, how the conventions change and so on.
also, techniques help, as in advanced, so make sure that you have a few. i'm sure you know this, but for the big sleep you'd talking about film noir stuff - shadows, settings, etc; the dialogue of hard-boiled detectives; characterisation, all that sort of thing. trih you'd go for the parody, irony, melodrama, exaggeration. that's a short one, so read it again if you've got time and see what you can find. sfoc i don't like so much, but it has stuff in it too. just your standard novel techniques. of course, the important thing is their significance to crime, and how they develop all the stuff that you'll be talking about - conventions, other concerns, all that sort of thing.
