The International Crime Fiction Association is delighted to announce the fourteenth Captivating Criminality conference, to be held at the conference’s home venue, Bath Spa University, Corsham Court, UK, from 24-26th June 2027. There will also be an Early Career and Postgraduate Research workshop on the afternoon of 23rd June – which this year is open to all. This conference marks ten years since the inception of the journal Crime Fiction Studies (Edinburgh University Press). A themed issue (not conference proceedings) will be published in Spring 2029.

The theme is ‘Methods of Murder’, and we are very pleased to announce that our keynote speakers this year will include Renáta Zsámba alongside two experts on poison, Barbara Hall and John Know, curators of the Poison Garden at the Alnwick Garden, Northumberland, UK.

Renáta Zsámba is a senior lecturer at Eszterházy Károly Catholic University, Eger, Hungary. Her research focuses on British and American as well as socialist and contemporary crime fiction. She has published widely on crime fiction and is also a founding member of the Hungarian crime fiction research group established in 2024.

Barbara Hall joined Northumbria police in 1985. Throughout her thirty-year career, she spent six years in uniform, joined the CID, working on serious offences including murder, followed by a role as a field intelligence officer, later seconded by the Home Office on a specialist team. Barbara joined the Poison Garden team in 2023 and, in this role, has contributed to radio and YouTube interviews.

John Knox was a chief marine engineer for twenty-five years. He came to the Poison Garden in 2015 for five weeks to improve public speaking and got hooked, being made lead poison garden guide in 2018. He now also trains the new guides, researching and developing stories for the Poison Garden. He has been on YouTube, podcasts and TikTok, promoting the Poison Garden.

This combination of keynote speakers reflects the interdisciplinary aims of the conference, which will include true crime alongside literary and other representations of murder across a range of media, including podcasts, social media, film and television. The conference will examine methods of murder in both individual cases and organised forms of violence, including gang-related, state-sanctioned, and terrorist killings. We invite participants to consider how different methods of murder are committed, investigated, reported, and understood across historical, cultural, and media contexts.

Crime fiction is, of course, most commonly about murder, with poison, guns, knives, bombs, and strangulation just some of the ways in which it is carried out within narratives. However, authors have always drawn upon ‘real life’ cases in their work, perhaps most obviously Agatha Christie, whose fascination with poison was rooted in her work as an apothecary during the First World War. Poison features in many of her novels and, in the case of The Pale Horse (1961), the depth of her knowledge of thallium poisoning actually helped authorities solve the real-life case of the so-called ‘teacup poisoner’ Graham Young.

Key questions addressed by the conference will focus on how and why different methods of murder are deployed, both as fiction and true crime. The United States is often characterised as a ‘gun culture’, and the history of crime fiction and its representation is very much shaped by the gun, as seen in the ‘hard-boiled’ subgenre. Also, the novels of Don Winslow investigate the execution style murders carried out by the Mexican cartels, while James Ellroy employs visceral violence in his historical realism.

We will be considering the ways in which gender might play a role in how murder is carried out. How and why is murder described in both contemporary and historical texts? What is our fascination with forensics, and how is the ‘silent witness’ of the cadaver used in the solving of crime? How and why are the boundaries between forensic case reports and fictional depictions – across written and filmic forms – often blurred? Finally, how has the representation of murder evolved from Victorian crime (with its emphasis on blunt objects and knives) to more modern, technologically mediated methods?