Q & A Blog Series

Our third contributor to the Q & A Blog series is Professor Gill Plain!

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.

2. What have you been reading, watching, or listening to recently? Do you notice any new emergent trends?

I’m aware of trends but seldom on trend. True crime podcasting seems to have taken over the world – but since I’ve never taken to true crime and don’t listen to podcasts, that one has pretty much passed me by. Before that, I remember a turn to domestic noir – which was fascinating in the abstract, but so uncomfortable to read. Even in the case of really gripping examples, I struggled with the claustrophobia, paranoia and women in peril narratives. I’m probably more in tune with what might be the biggest trend since the pandemic: the resurgence of ‘cosy’ crime. The TV manifestation of this is my go-to end of day viewing – which perhaps says more about the state I’m in by the end of the working day than the quality of the shows (no, I’m not naming names). On the page, I think historical crime fiction is a well-established trend and one that’s only going to grow in popularity. Aside from its advantages in evading technological short cuts (ah, the curse of the mobile phone), the past – even the murderous and bloody past – feels a more reassuring space to occupy than the present. Perhaps for the same reason, my reading has been going backwards, catching up with some books I should have read years ago. Most recently, that’s been Frances Iles’s Malice Aforethought, and Dorothy B. Hughes’s In a Lonely Place – amazing book, even if it is full of all the things I said I didn’t like! And, finally, I’ve been reading some of Percival Everett’s genre-defying fiction: Assumption and The Trees. He manages to be both funny and disturbing, and both books have really stayed with me.

3. Which book(s) do you find yourself returning to most often?

Oh, lots of books… or perhaps, more appropriately, lots of series. I re-read crime for work, not for pleasure, but I love a new book in a series. Just as people used to want a Christie for Christmas, I’ve spent decades anticipating a festive Rebus. So, the slowing down of production at the Rankin factory has been a blow to my relaxation. I’m also struggling with the lack of new instalments in Abir Mukherjee’s Wyndham and Bannerjee series, Mick Herron’s Slough House, and Val McDermid’s Karen Pirie series. The list could go on. In terms of rereading, though, I am constantly amazed by the brilliance of Maj Sjöwall and Per Wahlöö’s The Laughing Policeman. Its absurdist humour, its social critique, and its playful deconstruction of the form: all constantly surprising. Otherwise, when I want prose that makes me smile, I read Raymond Chandler and when I want a comfort blanket, I read Agatha Christie. Her best books are satisfying even if you know exactly who did what to whom. Re-reading allows you to revel in the process of being seamlessly manipulated, admire the deftness of her character sketches and enjoy the dry humour that underpins so much of what she writes.

4. What is your best piece of advice for emerging scholars in the field?

Argh. That’s difficult, especially given the current pressures on academia. But the genre is still a space of huge critical potential, with so much space for new scholarship through, for example, transnational comparisons and new historical work that complicates our understanding of the genre and its readership. So, I wonder whether the best advice I can muster is keep pushing the boundaries and embrace unexpected bedfellows? Crime writing invites interdisciplinary approaches – conversations with film, history, psychology, gender studies – but it also flourishes in dialogue with modernism, middlebrow writing, gothic studies, and a whole raft of theoretical approaches. Build a supple CV in a horribly constrained and difficult employment environment by illustrating the wide-ranging disciplinary value, and critical adaptability, of crime fiction studies.