CALL FOR PAPERS / Mid-twentieth-century American Women’s Crime Writing
(theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection)
Guest editors: Erin A. Smith (University of Texas at Dallas) and Clare Rolens (Palomar College)

The guest editors welcome proposals for a theme issue of Clues focusing on American women’s crime writing from the 1940s to the 1960s. The scholarly narrative about mid–twentieth-century American crime fiction has historically focused on white, male writers of the noir thriller. Bestseller lists and literary awards from the period tell a more complicated story, including many commercially and critically successful women crime writers who have only recently been the subject of feminist recovery projects. The goal in this special issue is to foster scholarship on these lesser-known women writers.

Potential authors might include (but are by no means limited to) Charlotte Armstrong, Leigh Brackett, Vera Caspary, Dorothy Salisbury Davis, Dorothy Cameron Disney, Doris Miles Disney, Helen Eustis, Leslie Ford, Patricia Highsmith, Dolores Hitchens, Dorothy B. Hughes, Shirley Jackson, Margaret Millar, Helen Nielsen, Ann Petry, Evelyn Piper, Craig Rice, and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding. Of interest are inter-sectional analyses of how gender/sexuality, social class, and race/ethnicity are represented in these works and how they participated in larger cultural conversations about violence (including sexual violence), crime, and justice at mid-century. Also welcome are explorations of how these writers navigated various historical traditions of crime writing (noir, the cozy, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century domestic detective fiction, the gothic, etc.) and how they remade or reworked these forms. Proposals might also investigate how these mid-century writers influenced subsequent authors, including writers of contemporary domestic noir.

Possible topics include (but are not limited to):

• female/feminist detective-heroes and criminals

• representations of female rage

• representations of and deconstructions of public and private spheres; critiques of domesticity and suburban life

• World War II and Cold-War cultural politics; domestic containment; whiteness

• representations of economic inequality and socioeconomic class; communism or anti-communism

• genre hybrids (crime/romance, crime/horror, crime/comedy, etc.)

• representations of marriage, motherhood, and children

• portrayals of gender and work

• queerness and mid-century women’s crime fiction

• connections to Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, and the larger tradition of hard-boiled/noir writing

• male pseudonyms and male narrators or detective-heroes

• connections to other media (radio, film, or television adaptations of stories; authors as scriptwriters or screenwriters)

• the place of this fiction in mass-market women’s magazines or in genre periodicals

• translations/adaptations and the global influence of these books and films

• the politics of canon formation and the social construction of literary value in mid-century crime fiction (including the place of contemporary reprints of these books)

Submissions should include an abstract of 250–300 words and a brief bio (max 150 words). Proposals are due 15 January 2027. Please submit proposals to the guest editors at erins@utdallas.edu and crolens@palomar.edu. Full manuscripts of 5,000–6,000 words based on accepted proposals will be due 1 August 2027.

About Clues: Published biannually by McFarland & Co., the peer-reviewed Clues: A Journal of Detection features academic articles on all aspects of mystery and detective material in print, television, and film without limit to period or country covered. Executive Editor: Caroline Reitz, John Jay College/ The CUNY Graduate Center; Managing Editor: Elizabeth Foxwell, McFarland & Co.; Clues Web site: https://sites.google.com/site/cluesjournal/