Call for Papers - Silent Echoes: Golden Age Crime Fiction and Trauma

 

Silent Echoes: Golden Age Crime Fiction and Trauma

FSU (Florida State University) London Study Centre, 

12–13 September 2025

The Golden Age of crime fiction, roughly associated with the interwar and immediate post-war period, has been commonly defined as a therapeutic and comforting form of literature. As Alison Light famously puts it, after the First World War, especially in Britain, detective writing became a ‘literature of convalescence’ (Forever England, 1991, 69). The conventions of Golden Age detective fiction – fair play, a closed circle of upper-class characters, isolated settings, ‘sacrificial’ bodies (Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 2000), and the final restoration of social and moral order – have been interpreted as mechanisms for containing, exorcising, and defusing the cultural anxieties emerging in the wake of war. 

However, the extent to which Golden Age crime fiction reflects, articulates, and reshapes the trauma shaping its consumption remains underexplored. While such a form of literature typically concludes with the apprehension of the criminal, the underlying trauma of profound cultural and individual disruption remains pervasive. War experience, as Wyatt Bonikowski writes, has a traumatic aspect: ‘there is something in the nature of modern war experience, both physical and psychical, that resists representation; it overwhelms the senses, disturbs memory, and leaves traces in the form of disruptive symptoms that persist years after the events have passed’ (Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination, 2013, 3). Additionally, other traumas in the twentieth century – international, national, domestic, and personal – are inextricable from the pages of Golden Age crime novels, thematically, as backdrop, and ‘behind the scenes’ in writing and reception.

For this conference, we thus invite papers examining how, to what extent, and with what implications – textual, literary, sociocultural, political, medical, legal, and historical – the concept of trauma shaped crime writing between the 1910s and the 1950s. It aims to explore the influence of trauma on a variety of aspects (daily life, mental health, gender roles and relations, the environment, levels of violence, cultural memory, national identity, medical theory, and legal practice), examining how Golden Age crime fiction articulates the spatial, temporal, and psychic echoes of trauma.

Potential topics include but are certainly not limited to:

• Mental health
• Remembrance and convalescence
• Space and trauma
• Narrative structure and trauma
• Veterans and the military sphere
• Violence 
• Place and Setting
• Time and history
• Identity, the self, and community
• Gender roles, identities, and constructions
• Disability
• Ideas of ‘echoes’, ‘mirroring’ and ghostly presence as trauma 
• Language and articulation
• Crime, detection, and cultural memory
• Spiritualism and death
• Questions of genre
• Crime, detection, and national identity
• Colonialism and racism
• Crime and emotions
• Crime and insanity
• Psychoanalysis and the unconscious mind
• Medicine and detective narrative

Please submit a short abstract (up to 300 words) and brief biographical note for a 20-minute conference presentation to Directors of Golden Age Mysteries Ltd, Dr J C Bernthal (University of Suffolk), Dr Sarah Martin (Manchester Metropolitan University), Dr Stefano Serafini (Georgetown University, University of Padua) and Dr Mia Dormer: info@goldenagemysteries.co.uk no later than 5th May 2025. You may direct queries to the same address. Tickets to this event are non-refundable. 

The conference is generously sponsored by FSU (Florida State University) and takes place at its London Study Centre on 12 and 13 September 2025. This project has also received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie (MSCA) grant agreement no. 101105463.