The Association Blog

​PGR symposium: Crime Narratives on Screen
Durham University
Mode: Hybrid
Date: 10th July 2026
Keynote Speaker: Dr Helen Piper (University of Bristol)
Proposal Deadline: May 31st 2026.​

Crime Fiction Studies invites contributions for a themed issue on crime fiction and videogames. Crime and the many facts of its detection are major themes in many videogames, from cozy point-and-click games (such as the long-running Nancy Drew series) to multiple-path morality games (such as Wolf Among Us). Other games not necessarily classed as ‘mystery’ games nevertheless benefit from crime as inciting incidents or moral dilemmas, putting the player in the position of detective, perpetrator, or bystander. By examining the ideological ripples of crime fiction on this interactive storytelling medium, players are asked to engage and often embody themes of justice, morality and crime through avatars and gameplay, offering fruitful avenues for considering the evolution of genre into interactive and often non-linear narrative spaces. How does the element of play impact the themes and expectations of the crime genre? How do different game genres interact with, and produce commentary on, different crime-oriented literary genres?

CFP: "America was Never Innocent": Special issue for the Thirtieth Anniversary of James Ellroy's American Tabloid

Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2025.

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.