Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction

Burial Plots in British Detective Fiction offers an overview of the ways in which the past is brought back to the surface and influences the present in British detective fiction written between 1920 and 2020. Exploring a range of authors including Agatha Christie, Patricia Wentworth, Val McDermid, Sarah Caudwell, Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett, Jonathan Stroud and Ben Aaronovitch, Lisa Hopkins argues that both the literal and literary disinterment of the past use elements of the national past to interrogate the present. As such, in the texts discussed, uncovering the truth about an individual crime is also typically an uncovering of a more general connection between the present and the past.  Whether detective novels explore murders on archaeological digs, hauntings, cold crimes or killings at Christmas, Hopkins explores the underlying message that you cannot understand the present unless you understand the past.

• detective fiction
• crime fiction
• Golden Age detective fiction
• Agatha Christie
• cold cases
• Christmas crime
• psychic detectives
• British and Irish Literature

“If you like to find novel and entertaining ways of killing somebody, this is the blood-stained book for you. Lisa Hopkins writes with witty panache and an enviably capacious literary recall, in a book mercifully littered with spoilers so we are not left in suspense. An ideal Christmas present, supplying a handy chapter on seasonal crime.” (R. S. White, Emeritus Professor, University of Western Australia, and author of Shakespeare’s Cinema of Crime (2016))

• Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK

  Lisa Hopkins

Lisa Hopkins is Professor of English, Sheffield Hallam University, UK. Her previous books include Shakespearean Allusion in Crime Fiction: DCI Shakespeare (Palgrave Macmillan 2016).

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