 Our sixth contributor to the Q & A Blog series is Dr Abby Bentham! Dr. Abby Bentham is a Lecturer in English and Theatre and the Employability Lead for English in the School of Arts, Media and Creative Technology at the University of Salford, Manchester. She is also the co-editor of Divergent Women: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Female Deviance and Dissent (2023).
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 Our fifth contributor to the Q & Blog series is Dr Dorothea Flothow!
Dr Dorothea Flothow is Associate Professor and Deputy Head of the Department of English and American Studies at the University of Salzburg in Salzburg, Austria. She is also a Series Editor for the forthcoming edited collection, Global Historical Fictions.  1. What first sparked your interest in crime fiction studies?
Like most crime fiction scholars, I came to crime fiction because I’ve always liked to read the genre for fun. I started with the typical children’s crime series like The Three Investigators, the German novel series TKKG (which many German readers probably remember better as audio plays) and the Austrian novel series Die Knickerbockerbande. And then, like most scholars, I moved on to Agatha Christie and had one of my first key experiences with literature when I read And Then There Were None when I was 10. I loved it and afterwards read any of the Christies my school library and the city library had. Getting into the genre itself was really easy but when I studied literature and history, I didn’t see crime fiction being given much of a place in scholarship (mainly because we simply had no specialist in crime fiction studies at my uni at the time) and so it never occurred to me that I could actually study the genre in depth until I was nearly done with my PhD (on, as Maurizio Ascari says, a precursor of Crime Fiction – Gothic). I had taught two courses on crime fiction before because I always thought that the diversity within the genre is a fabulous vehicle to discuss discourses and social narratives besides narratology, but it took another key experience, finding the Call for Papers for the 4th Captivating Criminality Conference and attending that conference in Corsham and meeting with so many fascinating researchers, for me to decide to pursue crime fiction studies as a main focus in my research.  1. What first sparked your interest in crime fiction studies? Like so many people, my first introduction to crime fiction was Agatha Christie, although I must confess that I can’t remember much about those early readings. Later, as a teenager, I really got into thrillers – Desmond Bagley, Alistair Maclean, Dick Francis. When I headed off to university, reading crime and thrillers stayed with me as a pleasure, but the idea of ‘crime fiction studies’, or studying crime fiction, just wasn’t an option. It was hard enough to find women writers, let alone popular fiction, on the undergraduate syllabus. But when I came to start a PhD on women writers’ responses to the Second World War, I picked up Dorothy L. Sayers – paying attention to the way her preoccupations changed and her fiction in some sense anticipated the conflict. It was such a pleasure to work with her texts and to start reading the growing critical literature on crime fiction – but it also seemed important to read Sayers outside the framework of genre, and to set her work alongside other women writers of the period, be they modernist or middlebrow. As a result, I ended up with a thesis that ran the gamut from Sayers to Woolf. Emerging the other side of the PhD, though, I felt liberated (who doesn’t?!): I wanted to have a break from thinking about war and felt free now to engage more directly with the crime genre. So that’s when it all came full circle, and I found myself writing about Agatha Christie, gender, sexuality, bodies and the development of the genre across the twentieth century.  The second contributor to the ICFA Q & A series is Professor Emerita Linda Ledford-Miller!
Dr. Ledford-Miller recently retired from teaching and committees, but not from academic endeavours. She continues to work across cultures and continents according to where her interests take her. She has published widely on Travel Writing and American Minority writers. Her recent work focuses on Crime Fiction, including Robert Downey Jr.’s interpretation of Sherlock Holmes, gender roles in the In Death series by the American J.D. Robb, the village mysteries of the Canadian Louise Penny, the philosophical Inspector Espinosa series by the Brazilian Luis Alfredo Garcia-Roza, and the stand alone crime novel by the Mexican Laura Esquivel, best known for the smashing success of her first novel, Like Water for Chocolate (1989). This new Q & A blog series is focused on building community within the ICFA and sharing the love of great writing that has brought us all together. Our first contributor is gender scholar Mary Evans!  Professor Mary Evans is the London School of Economics Centennial Professor at the Gender Institute at the University of Kent, and she was formerly co-editor of the European Journal of Women’s Studies. Rachel Franks is the Coordinator, Scholarship at the State Library of New South Wales and an Honorary Associate Lecture at The University of Newcastle (Australia). She holds PhDs in Australian crime fiction (Central Queensland University) and in true crime texts (University of Sydney). A qualified educator and librarian, her extensive work on crime fiction, true crime, popular culture and information science has been presented at numerous conferences, as well as on radio and television. An award-winning writer, her research can be found in a wide variety of books, journals, magazines and online resources. She is the author of An Uncommon Hangman: The Life and Deaths of Robert ‘Nosey Bob’ Howard (2022).
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