“Marcie R. Rendon’s Cash Blackbear Crime-Fiction Series and Nordic Settler Colonial Legacies in Minnesota’s Red River Valley” appeared in MidAmerica 51 (2024): 69-84. MidAmerica is a peer-reviewed academic journal published annually by The Society for the Study of Midwestern Literature.
“Serial Domestic Noir: Louise Phillips’ Kate Pearson Series” appeared in Guilt Rules All: Irish Mystery, Detective, and Crime Fiction, ed. Elizabeth Mannion and Brian Cliff. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2020. 207-22. The volume was a finalist for an Edgar Award (Best Critical/Biographical Work).
“The House and the Hallucination in Tana French’s New Irish Gothic,” Domestic Noir: The New Face of 21st Century Crime Fiction, ed. Laura Joyce and Henry Sutton. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. Pages 221-38.
“Teaching Crime Fiction Criticism” appeared in Teaching Crime Fiction, ed. Charlotte Beyer. Teaching the New English series. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 179-93. The book offers lively original essays on teaching crime fiction written by experienced British and international scholar teachers, providing vital insight into this diverse genre through a series of compelling subjects.
An intellectual history, a manifesto, a call to academic affairs administrators everywhere: I’m proud to see “Reading on the Dark Side, Or, The Productive Pleasures of the Scholarly Administrator” published in Reception. Please read and share!
Research in the University of Minnesota’s Sherlock Holmes Collections underpin my recent article on Edith Meiser, showing how her 1930s Sherlockian radio scripts influenced expectations of genre as the older detective stories were translated into the modern medium of the interwar radio serial. Article is open access at Feminist Modernist Studies.
I was delighted to have the opportunity to guest edit a theme issue on historical crime fiction for Clues: A Journal of Detection, the oldest US scholarly journal on mystery/detective/crime fiction. The call for papers received a robust international response, and issue 40.1 (Spring 2022) offers a diverse yet interconnected set of peer-reviewed articles which together constitute an important contribution to scholarship on the subgenre of historical crime. My introductory essay provides an overview of the subgenre and observations of emerging themes.
Read my essay, “Crime Fiction’s Dublin: Reconstructing Reality in Novels by Dermot Bolger, Gene Kerrigan, and Tana French,” in Éire-Ireland‘s special issue on Irish crime since 1921.
Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009)
View the table of contents and copyright page
Read Chapter 4, “(Re)Presenting Sherlock Holmes” (scanned as PDF)