Golden Age Detection Goes to War
Dr J.C. Bernthal (Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Suffolk)
Dr Rebecca Mills (Senior Lecturer in Communication and English, Bournemouth University)
Please send your proposals to goldenagedetectiongoestowar@gmail.com by March 31st 2024.
Chapter proposals are invited for an edited collection exploring and evaluating the representation and navigation of war in writing set in, looking back to, and negotiating the parameters of, the Golden Age of detective fiction.
The Golden Age of detective fiction is often held to be a) English-centric, b) situated between the First and Second World Wars and c) focused on puzzles and clues rather than social and cultural reflection and context. Nevertheless, a number of well-known and recently rediscovered authors not only focus on murder and mystery in wartime, but reflect on the presence of war and resulting upheaval in society, culture, understandings of morality, and collective and individual psychology. These concerns and settings can be explicit and central, as in ECR Lorac’s Blitz-set Murder By Matchlight (1945), or in the margins, as in Dorothy L. Sayers’s mentions of Nazi ideology in Gaudy Night (1935). Public imagination and academic conversations have started to capture the diverse, often nuanced, and impactful significance of Golden Age detective fiction, but its engagement with war, while richly varied and textured, has not been widely studied.
The aim of this volume is to extend the study of Golden Age detective fiction, conventionally read as representing and reinforcing ideas of law, tradition, and order, into new avenues that consider its response to and roles within periods of crisis and chaos. In the last thirty years or so, particularly since Alison Light’s influential Forever England: Literature, Femininity and Conservatism Between the Wars (Routledge 1991) with its chapter on Agatha Christie’s ‘Conservative modernity’, puzzle-based detective fiction has understood as a body of literature reflecting and exploring wider anxieties within its own highly artificial parameters. Gill Plain’s Literature of the 1940s: War, Postwar and ‘Peace’ (2013) and Ariela Freedman’s work on shellshock in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey mysteries, for instance, remain valuable touchstones here. The editors of Golden Age Detection Goes to War, then,envisage a collection of essays that builds on this work, challenging traditional readings of isolation, escapism, or simple visions of national identity and purpose, and interrogating the role of these popular texts in the study not only of war fronts and battlefields, but also of complex moralities, social and cultural upheaval, trauma, displacement, and individual, national and internationally negotiated identities.
Our first co-edited collection explored the structuring principle of war in the work of the ‘Queen of the Golden Age’ Agatha Christie, demonstrating a recurring anxiety regarding war and its aftermath that permeates the idiom and structure of Christie’s work as well as plotting and characterisation; here we intend to follow up this investigation by extending our scope to both the Golden Age and later authors such as Robin Stevens and Catriona McPherson, who explicitly hark back to its conventions but develop more modern thematic approaches, foregrounding themes, issues and anxieties that would then have been subtextual. This will also afford readings of recently rediscovered and republished crime and mystery fiction from the early and mid-twentieth centuries by, for example, Dean Street Press and British Library Classics.
Engaging with the immediacy and legacy of war in detective fiction, then, continues our project of turning away from a solely narratologically-oriented approach to this mode of detective fiction and towards a multiplicity of feminist, spatial, queer, post-colonial, and sociological readings that contextualise Anglo-centric English Golden Age work within its contemporary literary, political, and social environments; we encourage interdisciplinary approaches, particularly drawing on cultural history, geography, trauma and memory studies, and the medical humanities. Our chronological span for the Golden Age here is Agatha Christie’s lifetime (1890 to 1976) in order to include work leading up to the First World War and post-Second World War work that deals with its aftermath and the early Cold War.
We invite 300-500 word abstracts for contributions of 6,000-8,000 words taking a global and in-depth approach to wars and their traces in early-to-mid-century detective, crime, and mystery fiction, as well as life writing by and about authors in this field, and historical detective fiction written later. Please include a brief biographical note (up to 100 words). Please send in your abstracts by March 31st 2024.
Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:
- Detective writers and war work
- Codes and coding
- Thrillers and espionage stories with substantial detection elements
- National identities and propaganda
- Censorship and ethics
- Individual and/or collective memory and trauma
- Technologies of war
- Gender and/or sexuality and war
- Grief, loss, and bereavement
- Displacement and exile
- The Home Front
- Social and cultural change during and caused by war
- War and psychology
- Underrepresented writers and communities impacted by military conflict
- Representations of ideologies such as Communism and Nazism
- Conscientious objection
- Military heroism
- War and reshaped cartographies
- Colonial wars and Empire
- Britain and the European Continent
- Britain’s relationship with its allies
- Comparative analysis of war in the work of authors from Britain and other countries
- Foreign fields
- Representations of displaced and exiled people
- The relationship between detective fiction and other literary modes such as modernism
- The relationship between Golden Age detective fiction and other crime narrative modes such as noir and pulp fiction
- Cinema, radio, theatre, and the Golden Age in wartime
- Historical detective fiction set in/navigating war and engaging with the conventions of the Golden Age
Authors we are interested in include but are not limited to:
- Dorothy L. Sayers
- Agatha Christie (if you are planning a proposal on Agatha Christie, we encourage you to take a look at Agatha Christie Goes to War (Routledge 2019)
- Josephine Tey
- ECR Lorac
- J. Jefferson Farjeon
- Gladys Mitchell
- John Dickson Carr
- Nap Lombard
- Celia Fremlin
- Michael Gilbert
- Anthony Gilbert
- Graham Greene
- Elizabeth Bowen
- Ngaio Marsh
- Margery Allingham
- Edmund Crispin
We are also interested in detective fiction from outside England and America that can be situated in conversation with the Golden Age periodization and tropes.
JC Bernthal 