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

From the Personal to the Universal: Weaving Personal Stories into Fiction by Jacqueline Winspear

It was 1973, and I was sitting in the front passenger seat of the car, with my fourteen-year-old younger brother in the back, reading a comic. Dad pulled over opposite the hardware store, and he was in a hurry. “Quick son, nip in there and pick up the paint I’ve ordered.”  My brother rolled his eyes as he threw down the comic and stepped out of the car. My father watched him saunter across the road and shook his head.  “When I was that age, I living away from home and fending for myself,” he said. I didn’t think any more of it, assuming that, like my mother, he had been evacuated from London during the war. However, it was decades later, in the hospice where he would spend his final days, that we revisited stories about his childhood, about family and the things he loved, that he began telling me about the years when he lived away from home – and it wasn’t the story I was expecting. Like most working class kids in those days, my father left school at fourteen to go to work – in his case for a painting and decorating business, taking up an apprenticeship secured for him by his father.  It was 1940, and his employer had landed a government contract to paint every RAF building in the country with a special fire retardant – at the time, new aerodromes were being built in a hurry, so there was a lot of work.  Dad joined a crew moving from one region to the next, living in lodgings, and he was doing the sort of work that an apprentice was landed with. He was blending the emulsion as well as painting, and testing each wall as it was finished fell to him.  

“I had to line up blowtorches right next to a wall,” he said. “And after three hours I’d come back, and do you know – there wasn’t a mark to be seen.”

“Really?” I asked. “What was that stuff called?”

“Oh it never had a name, just a number.”

This was in the days when men did not wear protective clothing or masks, so an adolescent boy, still growing, was exposed to an unnamed toxic emulsion that had doubtless not been subject to adequate testing because it was wartime and they needed those buildings to resist fire. I knew in that moment that I had a story, yet it wasn’t until 2017 that I began work on To Die But Once, about a young apprentice painter, a member of a crew applying toxic emulsion to airfield buildings in the spring of 1940.  My character, young Joe Coombes, is not my father – but every aspect of his work is based upon the story my father shared with me that day, just a week before he died.  And because my father loved one of his “billets” more than any other – on a farm in Hampshire – so Joe loves the county.  Of course, other threads had to be woven into that central story, but I drew upon personal experience to give color and texture to the characters. Joe’s sister is a telephonist on the government exchange – an easy choice for me, as my mother worked on the government exchange, and she’d told me a lot about what it was like to be a telephonist working on secure lines in the 1940’s.  Over the years I’ve cherry-picked nuggets of my own and family experiences to provide those often telling details – some very small – that give color and texture to a story; tools to draw in the reader so that they are transported, in the moment, to a different time and place.  And sometimes, it’s those seemingly miniscule details that make all the difference in the crafting of a narrative.

My mother always said I was a nosy child – the kid who asked the embarrassing questions.  I once revealed the pregnancy of my mother’s friend’s teenage daughter, when it transpired I was the only one who’d noticed her swollen belly and asked, in innocence, when she was having her baby! I might use that vignette in a story one day.  Yet I don't think I was nosy, as much as curious – and I believe that we writers were probably all curious kids who kept that curiosity going into adulthood. We noticed details – things we come back to, slipping into our writing something observed in human behavior so it plays a key role in touching upon universal truths.

It was during one of my visits to Whitchurch in Hampshire, where I have family, that I garnered two golden nuggets – precious pieces of information I would come back to.  My cousin happened to mention that paper money was printed locally, and that the Bank of England had moved some of its operations to the area during the war. I tucked that one away, did more research, and used it in To Die But Once. Then my aunt told me a wartime story of having to make her way home through a daytime bombing raid, when the office where she worked sustained damage.  She was walking along when she saw a woman clambering over a pile of searing hot rubble, pulling at bricks and burning her hands. “My girls!  My girls!” she screamed, while the ARP men tried to tear her away.  My aunt began to run, stumbling, crying because people were dying in the street, when she saw my mother running toward her in the distance.  The American Agent opens with a war correspondent broadcasting her report of a nighttime bombing – where she has witnessed a woman tearing at burning rubble searching for her daughters, who have perished in the attack.

There is no secret to using personal experiences in fiction.  As a writer, you’re already an observer of people every day.  But the key is in using those golden nuggets with care, weaving them into the narrative so they fit – and writing from the heart. 

The American Agent (number 15 in the bestselling Maisie Dobbs series) by Jacqueline Winspear is out now and published by Allison & Busby.

Call for Chapters: Agatha Christie Goes to War

Editors: Dr J.C. Bernthal (Middlesex University) and Dr Rebecca Mills (Bournemouth University).

Chapter proposals are invited for an edited collection exploring and evaluating the role of war in Agatha Christie’s life and writing.

Christie’s work is now recognised not only as a distraction from twentieth-century anxieties and conflicts but also as a way of processing them. Christie’s career was created out of her war work in a Torquay dispensary and her awareness of Belgian refugees; her first husband Archibald Christie was an airman during the First World War and her second husband Max Mallowan served in North Africa during the Second, leaving her behind in Blitzed London. Her work cannot be considered as insulated from these conflicts; themes of displacement, violence, military masculinity and women’s duty resonate throughout her fiction. Gill Plain and Alison Light, for example, have examined the traces of the First World War in the bodies and social scenes of Christie’s Golden Age fiction, while recent television adaptations of And Then There Were None (2015) and Witness for the Prosecution (2016) brought subtexts of post-traumatic stress disorder and social upheaval into the foreground as well as heightening military imagery through lighting and flashbacks. 

Engaging with the legacy of the First World War is part of a turn away from a narratological focus on Christie and the clue-puzzle towards a multiplicity of feminist, queer, and sociological readings that contextualise Christie’s work within its contemporary literary, political, and social environments. Existing scholarship tends to focus on World Wars, especially the First, but Christie’s life and career covered diverse fields, stages, and modes of warfare. We aim to present the first detailed study of the theme of war in Christie’s fiction and life-writing, spanning a range of conflicts in England, Europe, the British Empire and beyond, and responses to events from the Boer War to the Cold War. 

We therefore invite 300-500 word abstracts for contributions of 6000-8000 words that take a global and in-depth approach to wars and their traces in Christie’s work. Please include a brief biographical note. Topics might include (but are not limited to) the following:

·       - Re-evaluating the First World War in Christie’s life-writing and fiction

·       - Christie’s war work

·       - A comparative approach to war in the work of Christie and her contemporaries

·       - The Second World War—the Blitz, rationing, fifth columnists

·       - Codes and coding

·       - Gender and/or sexuality and war

·       - Displacement and exile

·       - Colonial wars and empire

·       - Foreign fields

·       - Nation, ideology and extremism

·       - Revolution

·       - Representations of Communism and Nazism

·       - The Cold War and global conspiracies

·       - The Spanish Civil War

·       - Thrillers and espionage

·       - War in Christie adaptations

·       - Memory and war

·       - Commemoration

·       - Loss and bereavement

·       - Terrorism

Deadline for abstracts: 30^th June 2017. Estimated deadline for finished chapters: 30^th November 2017.

Email: christiegoestowar@gmail.com