CLUES 44:1 is out now with all kinds of crime writing fun, including a review by me of a new book that looks at links between Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett — and does it well.
Introduction: Allusions and Illusions
Spotlight on… Indian Crime Fiction
TARUN K. SAINT
Rethinking Democracy and Detective Fiction: The Legacies of Haycraft’s Wartime Writings
BARBARA PEZZOTTI AND FABRICIO TOCCO
“Magical Red Herrings”: Personalized Experience and Specialized Knowledge in Clayton Rawson’s The Footprints on the Ceiling
NEIL TOBIN
Discovering John Franklin Bardin
ROBERT LANCE SNYDER
Metafiction as Misdirection in R.E. Swartwout’s The Boat Race Murder (1933)
COLIN CAVENDISH-JONES
Lost Allusions: The Changing Codes of P.D. James
MARJORIE GARBER
The Gothic and the Girl Detective: Unpacking the Queered) Signification of Nancy Drew
DOROTHY CALABRO
“No Past”: Feminism, Queerness, and Colonialism in The Likeness
MIRANDA STEEGE
People Are Like Homes: Duality in the Novels of Louise Penny
RACHEL SCHAFFER
Postmodern Crime Fiction in Modernist Form: Reading Palahniuk’s Fight Club as Detective Fiction
PHIL HALTON
REVIEWS
Rebecca Josephy, ed. Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction: Essays on Intersecting Modes of Mystery
DANIEL STASHOWER
Robert Morgan. Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe
CYNTHIA S. HAMILTON (Liverpool Hope Univ)
Mary Fortune, auth.; Lucy Sussex and Megan Brown, eds. Nothing but Murders and Bloodshed and Hanging
NICHOLAS BIRNS (New York Univ)
Thomas W. Kniesche. Investigating Crime in a Time of War: Historical Crime Fiction and the Representation of Fascism
TARA KRAFT-AINSWORTH (Univ of Georgia)
Ashley Lawson. On Edge: Gender and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett
K.A. LAITY
Charlotte Beyer. Crime Fiction in the Age of #Me’Too
KATRINA YOUNES (Trent Univ, Canada)
Devin Fromm. Detective Fiction on the Case of Community: The Mystery at the Heart of the Modern
ASHLEY LAWSON (West Virginia Wesleyan College)
APPROACHING RELIGION Vol. 15 No. 2 (2025): The Witching of Art History—How to Approach Women, Art and Esotericism
I am not in this publication but I am intending to read it all! Guest editor Nina Kokkinen has put together an amazing group of scholars that you will want to read — and can! All PDFs you can download or read online.
The Witching of Art History—or How to Approach Women, Art and Esotericism
Nina Kokkinen
Repicturing the Past Jane Stewart Smith, Spiritualism and Psychical History
Michelle Foot
The Interplay of Art, Occultism and Emancipation Subversive Female Perspectives in Tyra Kleen’s Life and Work at the Turn of the Twentieth Century
Birte Bruchmüller
“Get Yourself a Fire Body” Intersections of Clairvoyance, Mediumship and Gender in Early-Twentieth-Century Art
Nina Kokkinen
The Seeker as Weaver A Matrixial Approach to Feminist Futurity in the Artistic Praxis of Paulina Peavy
Rachel Denniston
Embodying the Great Mother Olga Fröbe’s Spiritual Authority at Eranos
Chloë Sugden
Feminist Perspectives on Materials and Making in Leonora Carrington’s Esoteric Art Practice
Helen Bremm
“The Cabbage is a Rose” Feminist Eco-aesthetics from Surrealism to Contemporary Art
Victoria Ferentinou
Marvellous Ecologies The Twilight World(s) of Gabríela Friðriksdóttir
Sólveig Guðmundsdóttir
Everything She Touches, Changes Remix Feminist New Materialism and Contemporary Magical Futurist Art
Amy Hale
Esoteric Potentiality in Creating and Viewing Angel-themed Photographs
Oscar Ortiz-Nieminen, Terhi Utriainen, Alexandra Bergholm