Pictures, photographs, paintings, drawings, and many more instances of pictorial art are a staple of literary crime fiction. So are the people who make them, be they famous artists within the story world, detectives reproducing the layout of a crime scene or criminals leaving clues such as maps or pictograms behind. Pictorial art reappears as paratext, such as cover illustrations, or in marketing campaigns. Seeing, in much of crime fiction, is believing – or is it? The genre is not above using textual trompe-l’oeil, and readers should be aware that the apparent straightforward “truth” of any pictorial clue in a novel or a film can be as misleading as any witness statement.

Besides the inclusion of pictorial art in the plot, crime fiction may foreground the world of art as an elusive, multilayered community – cast the suspects among pictorial artists and/or art dealers, as in Margery Allingham’s Death of a Ghost (1934) or Dorothy L. Sayers’s Five Red Herrings (1931), or highlight the stakes inherent to art forgery/art theft as in Michael Innes’s A Private View (1953). Many of the “big names” of crime fiction, among them Agatha Christie (After the Funeral, 1953) or Ngaio Marsh (Artists in Crime, 1938) engage with the pictorial artist’s status and art marketing as a modern social and economic practice.

This panel aims to examine the different functions of pictorial art in British and American literary and filmic detective fiction. We welcome papers that may focus on pictorial paratexts (including cover designs, illustrations, and book marketing), textual or visual representations of pictorial art and art-related crimes, or diegetic portrayals of the artist as a victim, witness, or criminal. In so doing we aim to show the interdisciplinarity of detective fiction and its capacity for an intermedial dialogue with pictorial art.