On 12 September 2025

Silent Echoes: Golden Age Crime Fiction and Trauma

Location: FSU (Florida State University) London Study Centre

Organized by: Stefano Serafini, J.C. Bernthal, Sarah Martin, Mia Dormer

Event Program

Day 1: Friday 12 September 2025

08:30 09:00 Registration and Welcome
09:00 10:30 Panel 1:

Kemper Donovan – “Cozy” Violence and Trauma in the Works of Agatha Christie

Carol Westron – Watching Tortoises Sprint: a consideration of humour as a defensive strategy in Golden Age fiction

Elizabeth Prevost – “Christies for Coping: Reading Detective Fiction to Escape, Confront, and Critique a War-Torn World, 1939-51”

10:30 11:00 Break
11:00 12:30 Panel 2:

Kelly Thomson – Trouble on the Home Front: Exposing and Exploring the Patriarchal Bargain in The Mysterious Affair at Styles

Felicitas Mayer – Dorothy L. Sayers’s “sleuth family”: Reimagining familial ties in the aftermath of war trauma

Mary C. Rawlinson – Gender Trauma in Dorothy L. Sayers’s Wimsey-Vane Novels

12:30 13:30 Lunch
13:30 15:00 Panel 3:

Charlotte Beyer – “No Third Way”: The Immigrant Woman as Traumatised Other in Agatha Christie’s Mr Quin story “Harlequin’s Lane”

Marthe Jocelyn – “People do very terrible things”: Child Victims, Killers, and Spies in Agatha Christie

Tina Hodgkinson – “Unfit Lives”:  Raising the Curtain on Eugenics in Poirot’s Last Case

15:00 15:30 Break

 

15:30 17:00 Panel 4

Daniel Ogden – Domestic Trauma in the Interwar Period: C. S. Forester’s The Pursued

Robin Ramsey – “Rise, Lord Bickleigh of Wyvern”: Trauma, Emasculation, and Malice Aforethought

Brittain Bright – Reading the Signs: Trauma, Haunting, Deception, and Detection in Gladys Mitchell’s When Last I Died

Day 2: Saturday 13 September 2025

09:00 10:15 Keynote: Jessica Meyer – ‘About the only thing I could read’: Golden AgeDetective Fiction as War Fiction
10:15 10:45 Break
10:45 12:30 Panel 5:

Benedict Morrison – Vanity and Virtuosity: The Healing of Wounded Time in Golden Age Crime Fiction

Emma Curryer and Leia Tilley – Golden Age Detective fiction: Reflections on Trauma:  Reality can be stranger than fiction

Bethan Davis – Reading Agatha Christie’s Writing as a Social History of Suicide

Michelle M. Kazmer – Information Trauma and Epistemic Injustice: “One has no accurate information”

12:30 13:30 Lunch
13:30 15:00 Panel 6:

Nina Muždeka – Shaken Foundations: War Trauma and the Gendered Self in Agatha Christie’s Golden Age Fiction

Sarah Martin – ‘Undoubtedly, Bombing does Something to you’: Trauma, Dislocation, and the Blitz-torn Landscape in E.C. Lorac’s Murder by Matchlight

James Mortimer – An Endless Night with Mike and Santonix: Outliving Trauma in Queer Space

15:00 15:30 Break
15:30 17:00 Panel 7:

Benjamin Parris – The 120 Days of Sleuthing: Detecting Sexual Trauma and the Irish War of Independence in Lynn Brock’s The Kink (1927)

Marta Usiekniewicz – Consumption, Trauma, and Masculinity in Dorothy L. Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey Series

Caroline Derry — War, Food Rationing, and Hinch as ‘Liminal Lesbian’ in A Murder is Announced

17:00   Conference close

 

 

 

 

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