 Netflix’s Ripley (2024) is a fascinating rendering of Patricia Highsmith’s respected crime fiction The Talented Mr Ripley, which has already previously received a celebrity-heavy film adaptation (1999). The series pays an unmistakable tribute to classic film noir by calling back the latter’s high-contrast, black-and-white cinematography and scenic preferences for stairs and midnight streets. It also recreates the morally ambiguous protagonist commonly seen in the genre: Tom Ripley, a small-time con artist, is sent to Italy to retrieve a wealthy man’s wayward son, Dickie. But instead of bringing him back, Tom becomes obsessed with Dickie’s life–imitating him, trying on his clothes, then trying to become him. Elizabeth A. Hatmaker and Christopher Breu argue that Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley represents the imposter narrative prevalent in post-war American noir fiction (38-39). Focusing on the tropes of identity theft and masquerade, this group of works express anxiety towards the loss of a heroic masculinity as fight-till-death soldiers come home and become generic suburban middle-class with office jobs. A man can be any man now: they are all the same. Highsmith, however, performs a queer inversion of this narrative by highlighting how her gay-coded protagonist is fixated on another man’s identity that is inherently ‘a performance based primarily on the accumulation of aesthetic objects’ (38). This queer perspective is rendered more explicit by the audiovisual medium of Ripley, which emphasises the visual aspect of gender, thereby portraying masculinity as a gender expression to be seen and imitated.
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 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. I love to kill people. I love to watch them die. I would shoot them in the head and they would wiggle and squirm all over the place, and then just stop. Or I would cut them with a knife and watch their faces turn real white. I love all that blood.
- Richard Ramirez, the “Night Stalker” CFP: "America was Never Innocent": Special issue for the Thirtieth Anniversary of James Ellroy's American Tabloid
Deadline for submissions: March 1, 2025. 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).
 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. “A silly game:” Playing ‘Murder in the Dark’ in Ada Moncrieff’s Murder at Maybridge Castle (2023)5/12/2023  Many detective stories use physical gameplay elements as a setup for the narrated murder mystery. One famous example is Agatha Christie’s Cards on the Table which focuses heavily on the game Bridge. Other games equally lend themselves to mysteries: jigsaw puzzles, crosswords, chess, and even a variety of sports. One reader favourite is the ‘murder game,’ or ‘murder in the dark’: guests are invited to a dinner or a couple of days in a hotel during which a murder performance is acted out, giving them the chance to play at being investigators. It is an intellectual challenge for the guests with no other aim than having fun and harmless competition – until, of course, a real murder happens, and everybody is a suspect. One recent example of this setup is Ada Moncrieff’s latest Christmas mystery, Murder at Maybridge Castle. Charles, the new owner of the castle, has turned it into a hotel and markets it as haunted, appealing to spiritualists and sceptics alike. On a weekend in December, he invites a selection of guests to the Cumbrian countryside to celebrate the castle’s opening, with a programme consisting of a tarot card reading, a visit to the witch burial grounds near the castle, a séance – and a supposedly innocent game of murder in the dark which, however, soon turns serious when one of the guests meets an untimely end.
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