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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.
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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.
 My new book, Crafting Crime Fiction (2023), is my first full length work of non-fiction. I wrote it straight after I wrote two three book crime fiction series in under six years (The Goodwin Crime Family series for Little, Brown in the UK, and the Hotel Inspector series for Kampa Verlag in German). I felt almost fiction-ed out. I needed a pause from the imaginary world. I also thought it was time to consider not just what writing and reading crime fiction meant to me, but how I approached the writing and teaching of it (as a longstanding creative writing professor). Maybe this could be of benefit to others.
 I was fortunate to be pointed toward this 1967 novel by Anne Billson, who wrote the introduction to this new edition. It’s a wonderful example of the flexibility of the crime genre. White employs familiar tropes to unfamiliar ends, brings in the mythic and the folkloric without attracting attention to the fact, even drawing on that hoary lynchpin of adolescent brutality, Lord of the Flies, without allowing the weight of it to drag down her own singular skillset.
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