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.

Chapter 1: Introduction.- Chapter 2: The Deep Dead: Detective Fiction and Archaeology.- Chapter 3: The tongue is a fire: Patricia Wentworth’s Miss Silver Novels.- Chapter 4: The Body in the Library: Georgette Heyer, Dorothy Dunnett, Sarah Caudwell.- Chapter 5: Cover Her Face: Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama.- Chapter 6: Historic Scotland: Val McDermid’s Cold Cases.- Chapter 7: Crime at Christmas.- Chapter 8: Detecting the Dead.- Chapter 9: Conclusion.

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.

“Lisa Hopkins’ provocative and thoughtful study is one of the most original contributions to literature on the crime fiction genre, written in lively fashion and full of intriguing and original notions.” (Barry Forshaw, author of British Crime Film (Palgrave Macmillan 2012) and Crime Fiction: A Reader’s Guide (2019))

“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))

Examines understudied writers of British crime fiction Further studies the influence of drama on crime fiction by identifying allusions to non-Shakespearean early modern plays Considers diverse aspects of the detective fiction genre such as cold cases and Christmas crime

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