Silent Echoes: Golden Age Crime Fiction and Trauma

About This Event

We are proud to present our 2025 Golden Age of Crime conference, Silent Echoes: Golden Age Crime Fiction and Trauma at the Florida State University London Study Centre in London, UK.

This conference brings together over twenty academic speakers and keynote speaker Professor Jessica Meyer to discuss the reach and impact of an enduring body of literature at a crucial point in history.

Registration for this two-day conference includes lunch on both days. Please note: tickets are non-refundable, and a ticket does not include accommodation.

The Golden Age of crime fiction, roughly associated with the interwar and immediate post-war period, has been commonly defined as a therapeutic and comforting form of literature. As Alison Light famously puts it, after the First World War, especially in Britain, detective writing became a ‘literature of convalescence’ (Forever England, 1991, 69). The conventions of Golden Age detective fiction – fair play, a closed circle of upper-class characters, isolated settings, ‘sacrificial’ bodies (Plain, Twentieth-Century Crime Fiction, 2000), and the final restoration of social and moral order – have been interpreted as mechanisms for containing, exorcising, and defusing the cultural anxieties emerging in the wake of war. 

However, the extent to which Golden Age crime fiction reflects, articulates, and reshapes the trauma shaping its consumption remains underexplored. While such a form of literature typically concludes with the apprehension of the criminal, the underlying trauma of profound cultural and individual disruption remains pervasive. War experience, as Wyatt Bonikowski writes, has a traumatic aspect: ‘there is something in the nature of modern war experience, both physical and psychical, that resists representation; it overwhelms the senses, disturbs memory, and leaves traces in the form of disruptive symptoms that persist years after the events have passed’ (Shell Shock and the Modernist Imagination, 2013, 3). Additionally, other traumas in the twentieth century – international, national, domestic, and personal – are inextricable from the pages of Golden Age crime novels, thematically, as backdrop, and ‘behind the scenes’ in writing and reception.