Crime Writing in Interwar Britain
Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age

The interwar period is often described as the 'Golden Age' of detective fiction, but many other kinds of crime writing, both factual and fictional, were also widely read during these years. Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age considers some of this neglected material in order to provide a richer and more complex view of how crime and criminality were understood between the wars. A number of the authors discussed, including Dorothy L. Sayers, Marie Belloc Lowndes and F. Tennyson Jesse, wrote about crime in essays, book reviews, newspaper articles and works of popular criminology, as well as in novels and short stories. Placing debates about detective fiction in the context of this largely forgotten but rich and diverse culture of writing about crime will give a unique new picture of how criminality and the legal process were considered at this time.

1. Revisiting Victorian sensations; 2. F. Tennyson Jesse and the modern murderer; 3. In search of the perfect crime: Dorothy L. Sayers and detection in fact and fiction; 4. Dangerous men in interwar writing.

Victoria Stewart is Reader in Modern and Contemporary Literature at the University of Leicester. She has published widely on topics including war writing, the middlebrow, life-writing and detective fiction. She is the author of Women's Autobiography: War and Trauma (2003), Narratives of Memory: British Writing of the 1940s (2006) and The Second World War in Contemporary Fiction: Secret Histories (2011).