Call for Chapter Proposals: Golden Age Detection Goes to War

Editors: Dr J.C. Bernthal (Visiting Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of Suffolk) and Dr Rebecca Mills (Senior Lecturer in Communication and English, Bournemouth University).

Proposal deadline: 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. Our first co-edited collection Agatha Christie Goes to War (Routledge 2019) 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.

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. 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 editors of Golden Age Detection Goes to War, then, envisage a collection of essays in conversation with the work of scholars such as Gill Plain, Alison Light, and Phyllis Lassner, that challenge 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.

We are particularly interested in 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 also 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.

Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:

• Detective writers, life writing, 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 and/or foreign fields
• 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 
• The relationship between detective fiction and other literary modes such as modernism and the middlebrow 
• 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)
• Josephine Tey
• E.C.R 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.

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). 

We have early interest from a major academic publisher.

Please send your proposals and enquiries to goldenagedetectiongoestowar@gmail.com by March 31st 2024.

For further details, see https://jcbernthal.com/2024/01/19/call-for-proposals-golden-age-detection-goes-to-war

Call for Submissions - American "Golden Age" Mystery and Detective Fiction 1920 - 1945

 Call for Submissions

Third issue of Mean Streets: A Journal of American Crime and Detective Fiction

Topic: AMERICAN “GOLDEN AGE” MYSTERY AND DETECTIVE FICTION 1920-1945

Proposals: July 15, 2021

Final essays: December 1, 2021

The “Golden Age” of mystery and detective fiction is generally agreed upon as bounded by World War I and World War II. While the designation is widely applied to both British and American fiction of the period, it has most closely adhered to British fiction, perhaps because American crime writing in the period was sharply bifurcated between Classical and Hard-boiled writing. Indeed, Stephen Wright claims that “It was in Britain that the clue-puzzle had its richest development” and also traces the important revision of narrative structure that became known as the “inverted” story to an English writer. So, in what lay the contribution of American writers? Are there unique features in their offerings to the Classical detective narrative? Is there any cross-fertilization (or creative friction) between Classical and Hard-boiled practices? Do the circumstances of American life and culture of the period produce qualities notably different from British narratives?

Some possible approaches:

• Interrogate the question: Is there an American Golden Age?

• Thematic explorations

• Contemporary resurgence of Golden Age interest/popularity

• Contributions of particular American publishers to Golden Age popularity and/or rediscovery (e.g., Rue Morgue Press, Library of Congress Crime Classics)

• Juxtaposition of Classic and Hard-boiled fiction in the period

• Analysis of the critical receptions of American writers by British critics

• Selected authors associated with the period

  Anthony Abbot	Stuart Palmer
  Anne Austin	Zelda Popkin
  Hugh Austin	Ellery Queen
  Earl Derr Biggers	Patrick Quentin
  Anthony Boucher	Virginia Rath
  John Dickson Carr	Clayton Rawson
  Clyde B. Clason	Mary Roberts Rinehart
  Dorothy Cameron Disney	Mabel Seeley
  Todd Downing	Rex Stout
  Mignon Eberhart	Kay Cleaver Strahan
  Erle Stanley Gardner	John Stephen Strange
  Frances Noyes Hart	Phoebe Atwood Taylor
  C. Daly King	Darwin Teilhet
  Rufus King	S.S. Van Dine
  Helen McCloy	Carolyn Wells

  Abstracts of 250 words with proposed title should be directed no later than July 15, 2021, to the editors: Rebecca Martin (doc.rmartin@gmail.com) and Walter Raubicheck (wraubicheck@pace.edu).

  Final papers of 7000-8000 words will be due by December 1, 2021, with publication anticipated in spring 2022. Feel free to send questions to both editors.

  About Mean Streets

  This journal is published by the Pace University Press (New York City), which has been sponsoring scholarly journals since the 1980s.

  Mean Streets is a refereed journal edited by two scholars in literature and film and guided by an Editorial Board comprised of distinguished scholars from several disciplines. Submissions will be reviewed by the editors and selected Board members.

  The journal’s first issue appeared in spring 2020, with the second issue anticipated in June 2021. Copies may be ordered at press.pace.edu/journals/mean-streets/.

  
  

Conan Doyle and Storytelling - Call For Papers

 

Edinburgh Conan Doyle Network Conference 

‘Conan Doyle and Storytelling’ 

10–11 December 2021 

Birkbeck, University of London

Keynote speakers: 

Professor Christine Ferguson, University of Stirling 

Professor Robert Hampson, Royal Holloway, University of London 

“‘Pray compose yourself, sir,’ said Holmes, ‘and let me have a clear account of who you are, and what it is that has befallen you.’” (‘The Beryl Coronet’) 

Arthur Conan Doyle was one of the greatest of all storytellers. He is best known and most enjoyed not for the subtlety of his characterisation or the profundity of his ideas, but as a master of narrative, in many different forms. It is because of his powers as a storyteller that his work not only endures in book form, but continues to captivate television and cinema audiences internationally. The conditions of his own time were propitious for an author with his gift for narrative. He was writing in a period described as ‘the Age of Storytellers’, which was also an age of literature in transition, and of emergent Modernism. We would welcome proposals for 20-minute papers, which consider Conan Doyle’s writing in all these wider contexts, and which might explore:

• Conan Doyle and genre: romance literature, detective fiction, historical fiction, the Gothic, sport, travel, and life-writing etc 

• Narrative and the market: Conan Doyle and publishing history and practice 

• Late-Victorian and early 20th-century shorter fiction 

• Neo-Victorian adaptation: Conan Doyle’s stories in the 20th and 21^st centuries 

• Conan Doyle and narratology 

• Character and action 

• Narrating the Empire: Conan Doyle and colonialism 

• Storytelling and Modernism 

• Conan Doyle’s narrators 

• Stories of Spiritualism and the supernatural 

  Please send abstracts of 200–300 words together with a brief biography to:- james.machin@birkbeck.ac.uk

  Deadline for proposals: - 31 July 2021 

  ‘Conan Doyle and Storytelling’ is hosted in partnership with the Birkbeck Centre for Nineteenth Century Studies, and will be the third event associated with a new scholarly enterprise,The Edinburgh Edition of the Works of Arthur Conan Doyle, sponsored by the Royal Society of Edinburgh and the Conan Doyle Estate. 

  Further information can be found here.

  
  

Call for Papers (Extended) - New York State of Crime

Mean Streets

Call for Papers--Extended

Mean Streets: A Journal of American Crime and Detective Fiction

Issue 2

Topic: New York State of Crime

Proposals: November 30, 2020

Final essays: February 15, 2021

For the second issue of Mean Streets, the editors seek proposals focusing on crime literature of New York City or elsewhere in the Empire State. The “extended” CFP will give particular preference to crime literature set in New York outside of New York City. 

This “extended” CFP also invites proposals dealing with detective/crime fiction in urban environments in which the urban setting is given particular significance.

Raymond Chandler’s “mean streets” were the deceptively sun-dappled streets of Los Angeles, but the streets of New York City and its environs have a longer history of association with crime fiction. The vice-filled streets upon which Horatio Alger’s ragged newsboys trudged were the gritty New York City streets of the 1860s. Detective Nick Carter made his first appearance in the New York Weekly in September of 1866 in a serial focused on a crime in Madison Square, the original location of Madison Square Garden.

Decades later, Rex Stout, Chester Himes, Elizabeth Daly, Ed McBain, Ellery Queen, S.S. Van Dine, Amanda Cross, George Baxt, Julia Dahl and so many others found in New York the perfect setting for crimes, genteel or gruesome. The neighborhoods, bars, waterfronts, police precincts, theaters, subway tunnels and gleaming towers of New York have provided rich settings for sordid activities. Upstate New York—the Westchester and Long Island suburbs, Hudson Valley hamlets, the political cauldron of Albany, the once-thriving Catskill resorts, the Rust Belt, and the Snow Belt—has been featured in much crime writing, too.

Mean Streets is essentially a literary journal, so while discussion of film or other media is welcome, the balance of discussion will deal with literature.

Abstracts of 250 words with proposed title should be directed no later than November 30 to the editors: Rebecca Martin (doc.rmartin@gmail.com) and Walter Raubicheck (wraubicheck@pace.edu).

Final papers of 7000-8000 words will be due by February 15, 2021, with publication anticipated in spring 2021. Feel free to send questions to both editors.

About Mean Streets

This journal is published by the Pace University Press (New York City), which has been sponsoring scholarly journals since the 1980s.

Mean Streets is a refereed journal edited by two scholars in literature and film and guided by an Editorial Board comprised of distinguished scholars from several disciplines. Submissions will be reviewed by the editors and selected Board members.

The journal’s first issue appeared in spring 2020. Copies may be ordered at press.pace.edu/journals/mean-streets/.

Whodunnit? The Perfect Ending in Detective Fiction

Please join Cleanprose on 22 February for an afternoon of detection at Clean Prose, London's first co-working space for writers.  

How can a solution be satisfying, yet unexpected? A successful solution is essential but it’s as elusive as a master criminal.

Join a panel discussion with Lucy Foley (The Hunting Party), Andrew Wilson (A Talent for Murder) and Mia Emilie (The Watchers Trilogy), in discussion with J C Bernthal and Brittain Bright, to explore how crime and detective novels are constructed and what makes the perfect ending.

The panel will be followed by a cream tea with the authors, then attendees will have the opportunity to purchase books and have them signed.

Tickets are £25, now available on Eventbrite.

When: Saturday 22nd February 2020 from 14:00

Where: Clean Prose, 2 Charlotte Road, EC2A 3DH

Call for Papers - Captivating Criminality 7: Memory, History and Revaluation

7th Annual Conference of the International Crime Fiction Association, in association with Bath Spa University  on the 2-4th July 2020 at Newton Park campus, Bath Spa University, Bath UK.

Professor Mary Evans. Emeritus Professor at the London School of Economics, UK.  

Professor Evans is the author of various studies of feminism and feminist writers.  Her most recent work ( with Sarah Moore and Hazel Johnstone ) is a study of detective fiction ( Detecting the Modern ) and the theme of that book, of how detective  fiction locates the central dynamics of the contemporary world, arises from her continuing interest in  the ways in which we  learn and acquire our social identities. She also wrote the seminal text, The Imagination of Evil: Crime Fiction and the Modern World.

Professor Thomas Leitch, Professor of English at The University of Delaware. USA.

Professor Leitch teaches undergraduate courses in cinema and graduate courses in literary and cultural theory. His most recent books are The Oxford Handbook of Adaptation Studies and The History of American Literature of Film, both on adaptation. His credentials in crime fiction include three books he wrote or co-edited on Alfred Hitchcock and a book on Perry Mason and Crime Films, which was shortlisted for an Edgar in 2003. 

Dr Andrew Pepper, Senior Lecturer in English at Queen’s University, Belfast, Northern Ireland. - 

Andrew Pepper is Senior Lecturer in English at Queen's University Belfast. He is the author of Unwilling Executioner: Crime Fiction and the State (2016) and co-editor of Globalization and the State in Contemporary Crime Fiction (2016) and the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Crime Fiction (2020). He has also written a series of detective novels set in 19th Britain and Ireland, all published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Call for Papers

The Captivating Criminality Network is delighted to announce its seventh conference, which will be held in Bath, UK. Building upon and developing ideas and themes from the previous six successful conferences, Memory, History and Revaluation, will examine the ways in which Crime Fiction as a genre necessarily incorporates elements of the past – the past in general and its own past, both in terms of its own generic developments and also in respect of true crime and historical events. The CfP will thus offer opportunities for delegates to engage in discussions that are relevant to both past and present crime writing. 

As Tzvetan Todorov argued in “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” crime fiction in many of its various sub-forms has a special relationship with the past. In classic forms of detective fiction, the central event around which the narrative is organized – the murder – occurs in pre-narrated time, and the actual narrative of the investigation is little more than a form of narrative archaeology, an excavation of a mysterious past event than is only accessible through reconstruction in the present. But this relationship between crime fiction and the past goes beyond narrative structure. The central characters of crime writing – its investigative figures – and frequently represented as haunted by their memories, living out their lives in the shadow of past traumas. More broadly, crime writing is frequently described as exhibiting a nostalgic orientation towards the past, and this longing for the restoration of an imagined prelapsarian Golden Age is part of the reason it has been association with social and political conservatism. On the other hand, there is a strong tradition of radical crime fiction that looks to the past not for comfort and stability, but in order to challenge historical myths and collective memories of unity, order, and security. Val McDermid argues that ‘…crime is a good vehicle for looking at society in general because the nature of the crime novel means that you draw on a wide group of social possibilities.’ Thus, crime fiction has been used to challenge, subvert and interrogate the legal and cultural status quo. Crime fiction’s relationship with the past is thus inherently complex, and represents a fascinating, and underexplored, focus for critical work. 

Papers presented at Captivating Criminality 7 will thus examine changing notions of criminality, punishment, deviance and policing, drawing on the multiple threads that have fed into the genre since its inception. Speakers are invited to embrace interdisciplinarity, exploring the crossing of forms and themes, and to investigate and challenge claims that Crime Fiction is a fixed genre. Abstracts dealing with crime fiction past and present, true crime narratives, television and film studies, and other forms of new media such as blogs, computer games, websites and podcasts are welcome, as are papers adopting a range of theoretical, sociological and historical approaches.

Topics may include but are not restricted to:

True Crime

Gender and the Past

Crime Fiction in the age of #me too

Crime Fiction from traumatised nations

Crime Fiction and Landscape

Revisionist Crime Fiction

Crime Fiction and contemporary debates

Crime Reports and the Press

Real and Imagined Deviance

Adaptation and Interpretation

Crime Fiction and Form

Generic Crossings

Crime and Gothic

The Detective, Then and Now

The Anti-Hero

Geographies of Crime

Real and Symbolic Boundaries

Ethnicity and Cultural Diversity

The Ideology of Law and Order: Tradition and Innovation

Gender and Crime

Women and Crime: Victims and Perpetrators

Crime and Queer Theory

Film Adaptations

TV series

Technology

The Media and Detection

Sociology of Crime

The Psychological

Early Forms of Crime Writing

Victorian Crime Fiction

The Golden Age

Hardboiled Fiction

Contemporary Crime Fiction

Postcolonial Crime and Detection

Please send 200 word proposals to Professor Fiona Peters, Dr Ruth Heholt and Dr Eric Sandberg, to captivatingcriminality7@gmail.com by 15^th February 2020. 

The abstract should include your name, email address, and affiliation, as well as the title of your paper. Please feel free to submit abstracts presenting work in progress as well as completed projects. Postgraduate students are welcome. Papers will be a maximum of 20 minutes in length. Proposals for suggested panels are also welcome. 

Conference Fees: The fee for CC7 will be 155 pounds sterling, with a discounted fee of 105 pounds sterling for students.

Call for Papers - Detecting the Margins: New Perspectives on the Critical History of Detective Fiction

Detecting the Margins: New Perspectives on the Critical History of Detective Fiction

Since its emergence from the periodical press into the first mass-market novelistic craze, detective fiction has occupied a liminal position in the margins of aesthetic legitimacy—and critical study. Detection is a popular genre, a “literature of escape,” that nevertheless seems to make a claim to, and find purchase in, more rarefied aesthetic and intellectual precincts. Michael Holquist styles detection as a guilty pleasure of the reading classes: “The same people who spent their days with James Joyce were reading Agatha Christie at night.” This panel asks what that liminal position might show us about both the genre and the conditions—theoretical, professional, material—of its study. 

Because of this tenuous position, academic critics of detection often experience themselves as operating in a critical vacuum, obliged to defend their object of study—as a result, there are more beginnings than middles in the scholarship of the genre, and its two most frequent themes are 1) the generic origins and parameters of the detective genre, and 2) whether or not it counts as literature. But the critical history of detective fiction is far from sparse: beyond the (persistent) debate over its literary status, the genre has galvanized generalists (Barzun, Haycraft, Symons); attracted the attention of scholars working from materialist, historical, and cultural-studies approaches; supported major critical work (D.A. Miller’s The Novel and the Police, Mark McGurl’s The Novel Art); and fascinated theorists (Lacan, Hartman, Jameson, Boltanski, Moretti). It has also amassed a body of scholarly and parascholarly work from outside the campus gates, foregrounding institutional, methodological, and professional margins as both an obstacle to and an object of study. And as detection proliferates into new media, styles, hybrid forms, and diasporic territory, it shows no sign of going away. 

To move beyond the received sense of critical absence that hamstrings its study, then, the genre’s scholars must play detective: gather the clues, match story against story, synthesize a narrative that matches and contextualizes the facts. This panel solicits new understandings of the critical history of detective fiction. What are its consensuses and its controversies, its conceptions and misconceptions, its crucial terms, lacunae, and stakes? What can reconstructing its critical history make visible about the genre? What can that reconstruction, and the fact of its necessity, make visible about criticism, its institutional contexts, its methods and practices, and its margins? 

Sites of interest include but are not limited to:

Detection and empiricism

The pedagogy of popular culture

Detection, mass culture, and the Frankfurt School

Detection and the canon wars

Detection and deconstruction

Detection and modes of readership: close reading, symptomatic reading, distant reading, "just reading"

Genre and economies of academic prestige

Networks and methods of critique: lay criticism, fan criticism, professional criticism, and academic criticism

Detection and neoliberalism

Detection and the humanities crisis

Please submit abstracts through NeMLA's submission portal here by September 30: https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/18221

Call for Papers - Mystery and Detective Fiction

CALL FOR PAPERS:

2020 POPULAR CULTURE ASSOCIATION NATIONAL CONFERENCE 

IN PHILADELPHIA, PA.

Philadelphia Marriott Downtown, Wednesday, April 15 – Saturday, April 18, 2020

For information on PCA/ACA, please go to http://www.pcaaca.org

For conference information, please go to http://www.pcaaca.org/national-conference/

CFP: MYSTERY & DETECTIVE FICTION AREA DEADLINE: NOVEMBER 1, 2019

The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of the Popular Culture Association invites proposals for our annual conference. We seek proposals from educators, graduate students, and independent scholars for academic discussions on all aspects and periods of mystery and detective fiction, including history, criticism, and theory, as well as explorations of social justice, diversity, inclusivity, and other current trends in scholarship. We welcome a wide range of topics and approaches on writers and works ranging from classic to contemporary, but ask that proposals go beyond plot summary to extend existing scholarship in new directions. Proposals should have a clear and focused argument that can be developed adequately in a 15-minute presentation.

We welcome proposals on the following:

Regional detective fiction, including texts set in or around Philadelphia, PA

Storytelling styles, stock characters, and tropes relevant to the genre (e.g. individual mysteries compared to series, long-term story arcs)

Axes of diversity and identity politics in mystery/detective fiction(e.g., race/ethnicity/class/gender/sexual orientation)

Critical race theory and other approaches that interrogate marginalization

Various subgenres (e.g., hardboiled detective fiction /cosy detective fiction)

Mystery and detection on film (including film noir, horror, romance)

Overlaps with other genres (e.g., horror, romance, dystopia, Westerns)

Trauma theory and other psychological approaches (e.g., cognitive poetics)

Representing crime, justice, violence, stereotyping, etc.

Comparisons between fictional and “true crime”/news representations of crime

Questions of high/low culture

International incarnations of mystery, detective, and crime works

Analyses of promotional and/or contextual materials (reviews, handbooks, etc.)

Mystery community culture (e.g., conferences, associations, forums, bookstores, listservs, author events, fandoms)

The genre as represented outside of print media, including film, television, podcasts, mystery dinner theatre, computer games, transmedia experiments, etc.

Please submit your 100- to 250-word abstract outlining both your object(s) of analysis and your primary argument by November 1, 2019. If you are a first-time presenter in our division (it does not need to be your first time presenting at PCA/ACA), please identify yourself with a note after your abstract. First-time presenters in Mystery & Detective Fiction are eligible for the Earl Bargainnier Award.

To propose a panel, submit individual presentations, then email both area co-chairs with a request to be considered as a panel. This year, PCA/ACA is requiring a minimum of four papers per panel. In your email, name all participants and briefly explain the thematic link between your papers.

ABOUT US

The Mystery & Detective Fiction Area of PCA/ACA is dedicated to recognizing, furthering, and promoting the scholarly study of all aspects of mystery and detective fiction. The M&D Fiction area offers an inclusive community where new and returning scholars can engage in sustained critical evaluation of texts, film, and television, podcasts, and other mediums relating to the theme. Each year we present the Earl Bargainnier Award for best paper by a first-time presenter in the M&D Fiction area and the George N. Dove Award for outstanding contributions to the serious study of crime fiction. In addition to panel presentations on all aspects of mystery and detective fiction, we organize a panel of local mystery authors and partner with other PCA sections with overlapping interests as well as coordinate formal and informal tours of the host city. We also invite members to participate in a group dinner, making this a truly collegial event. Members are also encouraged to participate in the annual business meeting, where we set the area’s course for the next year, and hold a raffle of fun low-cost items donated by area members.

For the rest of the year, we maintain contact through a listserv where we discuss ideas, circulate calls for contributions, and post book reviews and recommendations. 

To join the listserv, contact Karen Waldron at (kwaldron@coa.edu). Follow us on Twitter: @pca_mystery.

Please send all inquiries to co-chairs:

Patrick Russell University of Connecticut

patrick.k.russell@uconn.edu

AND/OR

Jennifer Schnabel

The Ohio State University schnabel.23@osu.edu

2020 CONFERENCE DATES AND DEADLINES

August 1, 2019                 Submission Page Goes Live
October 1, 2019               Early Bird Registration Rate Opens

November 1, 2019           Deadline for Paper Proposals and Endowment  Grants

December 1, 2019           Early Bird Registration Rate Ends
January 1, 2020               Regular Registration Rate Ends
January 2, 2020               Late Registration Rate Begins
January 15, 2020             Brigman and Jones Awards Deadline
January 20, 2020             Preliminary Schedule Available

February 1, 2020             Presenter Registration Deadline – participants who have not registered are removed from the program.

February 2, 2020              Registration ends for presenters at midnight.
April 15-18, 2020             National Conference

All presenters must be current, paid members of the PCA and fully  registered for the conference.

Refund requests must be submitted in writing. Full or partial refunds will be processed according to the following schedule:
Requested by Jan. 1: 100% refund
Requested by Jan. 15: 75% refund
Requested by Jan. 25: 50% refund
Requested by Feb. 1: 25% refund
After Feb. 1: 0% refund

Membership fees are not refundable.

What do you Write by Sara Gran

People ask me what I write. I have to say something, so I tell people I write detective fiction. This means very little. Detective fiction is most fiction; it covers everything from Genesis (who killed Abel?) to CRIME & PUNISHMENT (go Detective Porfiry!) to that fat paperback you picked up at the airport. But it still means something: genre is a joyous and beautiful set of rules, boundaries, formulas, and tropes. Everyone knows a murder mystery will be solved. Everyone knows the prime suspect didn't do it. A private eye with a bottle of whiskey in his hand is an image that has become a symbol: it tells a story to people. We know this man and we know his history: tough, bitter, hard-drinking, solves cases, easy prey for a certain type of woman. In this way, genre can be seen as a kind of language, and we can think of the tropes of genre as words. If you put a whiskey-drinking PI on a page with a woman in a tight red dress, you know what you're reading, and it's something like noir.

The joy in writing genre fiction is in the privilege of using this language. Once we see a scary little girl in a white dress and long hair, we all pretty much know where this story is going, and it ain't toward a happy ending. Imagine if every time you wanted to use the word "chair" you had to, instead, explain what a chair was and what it did. Genre gives us a series of building blocks to build a story without having to start from scratch every time.

If we use these building blocks exactly as they've been used before, we might end up with something smart and cool and fun, but we probably won't make anyone think twice if we give them exactly what they expect. Sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes we need a fucking break. Sometimes we need to enter a story and know it's going to play by the rules and take us exactly where we expect -- maybe because the rest of life never seems to play by the rules, and we can never know what to expect at all.  

But the other joy in writing genre fiction is taking those boundaries and formulas and tropes and fucking them all up. Language is so wonderful when we use it as expected. Maybe it's even more wonderful when we use it in unexpected ways. For example, put together the word "chair" with something you haven't seen before. Maybe "apple." Now you've got something to think about. What's an apple chair? Or is it a chair apple? Or is it a chair with an apple on top? Hey now, what if it's an apple with a tiny chair on top? And a mouse lives there? See, here we are, already thinking and creating and making something new.

The Infinite Blacktop by Sara Gran (published by Faber & Faber)

Driven off the desert road and left for dead, Claire DeWitt knows that it is someone from her past trying to kill her, she just doesn't know who. Making a break for it from the cops who arrive on the scene, she sets off in search of the truth, or whatever version of it she can find. But perhaps the biggest mystery of all lies deeper than that, somewhere out there on the ever rolling highway of life. Set between modern day Las Vegas and LA, The Infinite Blacktop sees Claire at her lowest point yet, wounded and disorientated, but just about hanging on. Too smart for her own good, too damaged to play by the rules, too crazy for most - have you got what it takes to follow the self-appointed 'best detective in the world'?

More information about the author and her books can be found on her website.