On 29 March 2025, the British Library will be hosting Deadly: the festival of women writing crime. This full day of events will celebrate the very best in contemporary crime writing by women and features non-fiction as well as fiction, brand-new work from celebrated authors, fresh voices, lively exploration of themes and perceptions of the genre, and plenty of criminally good fun...

Examples of the crime fiction titles available in the British Library collections

 In anticipation of this inaugural event, we’ve been hot on the trail of some of the early sleuths in the British Library archives: those created by women crime writers. From elderly amateur detectives to a hard-boiled private investigator, meet the women who paved the way for the likes of Ann Cleeves’ Vera Stanhope and Busayo Matuluko’s Lara Oyinlola.  

First up is an inquisitive elderly spinster, but not the one you might think. The wealthy New Yorker, Amelia Butterworth, was the creation of the American author, Anna Katharine Green and she teamed up with Detective Ebenezer Gryce of the New York Metropolitan Police in three novels published between 1897 and 1900. Unmarried but financially secure, the respectable Miss Butterworth heralded a new type of female sleuth: an independent woman with the means and time to indulge her natural curiosity - see That Affair Next Door (British Library shelfmark 012622.h.12).  

Leaving the bright lights of Manhattan for the sleepy village of St Mary Mead, we first meet Miss Jane Marple in 1927 in the short story, The Tuesday Night Club published in The Royal Magazine. Although Agatha Christie’s elderly detective has spent most of her life in a small village, she has had plenty of opportunity to study human nature and sees a great deal of wickedness in the world. Her fluffy exterior hides a shrewd intelligence, and Miss Marple went on to solve crimes in twenty short stories and twelve novels including The Body in the Library in 1942 (NN.33239.) 

Not far from St Mary Mead, another white-haired sleuth was at work in London. Miss Maud Silver, retired governess turned private investigator, was brought to our attention in 1928 by Patricia Wentworth. Whilst crimes just seem to happen around Miss Marple, Miss Silver actively seeks them through her detective agency and she features in a whopping thirty-two novels published between 1928 and 1961, with the first being Grey Mask (NN.14586.).  

Leaving England, we venture back across the pond to North Carolina where we first meet Blanche White, an African American domestic worker on the run. Created in 1992 by Barbara Neely, Blanche is another example of an underestimated woman detective, but here this is due to the colour of her skin and position in society rather than her age. Unlike the previous detectives, she is a reluctant sleuth who uses her ‘invisibility’ to solve crimes as an act of self-preservation rather than out of mere curiosity. Blanche features in four novels published between 1992 and 2000 starting with Blanche on the Lam (YA.1999.a.7225).  

Staying in the USA, we are introduced to the tough former police officer turned private eye, Kinsey Millhone. More noir than knitting needles but still dismissed by her male counterparts, Kinsey is a twice-divorced loner who rarely survives the cases she investigates unscathed. Snippets of her life are gradually revealed to the reader through Sue Grafton’s alphabet novel series which started in 1982 with A is for Alibi (Nov.1986/428) and ended with Y is for Yesterday (YD.2018.a.336) with Grafton’s death in 2017. 

To meet more amateur sleuths and private investigators from the archives, check out the British Library's Crime Classics series which resurrects long-forgotten novels from the Golden Age of detective fiction.

The launch event of Deadly: the festival of women writing crime is an evening with the globally celebrated author Tess Gerritsen, talking about her brand-new book The Summer Guests, on Friday 28 March. Tickets here. 

Online tickets for Deadly are are still available.

 

Lucy Rowland 

The Eccles Institute and BAAS’s America Now! series continues on Tuesday 25 March 2025, with ‘True Crime in the USA’. Ahead of the event, here’s a look at the speakers joining us for the evening, and some materials related to true crime in the British Library’s collections.   

"True crime" is a very American genre, and a very American obsession. Evolving from the yellow journalism of press barons like Hearst and Pulitzer, and new forms of literature like Truman Capote's In Cold Blood, true crime has also been central to the rise of new media and technology content creation and consumption over the past decade. Podcasting, streaming, and social media would not be what they are today without the American public's fascination with narrativizing violence, deception, and intrigue involving their fellow citizens. This panel of experts is on the case and will trace the threads that connect everything from Billy the Kid to Luigi Mangione, and from Serial and Making a Murderer to TikTok detectives and the very online, real-time, true crime-style storytelling of the present moment. 

Promotional image for America Now True Crime event, Tuesday 25 March 2025

Chaired by our friends at BAAS, the event will include a panel of experts to lead what’s sure to be an engaging and enlightening discussion:    

Dr George Larke-Walsh (University of Sunderland) 

George is currently Senior Lecturer in Arts and Creative Industries at the University of Sunderland. She began her academic career in the north east, but then moved to the USA, teaching at the University of North Texas from 2004 to 2020. She has published books and articles on mythologies of the mafia on screen, including the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to the Gangster Film (2018) [when the British Library’s digital services are fully restored this item is available to consult at BL shelfmark ELD.DS.326648]*. More recently she has turned her attention to documentary and specifically true crime. Her articles have explored numerous media examples from histories of the mafia wars to well-known series such as Making a Murderer, and The Staircase. Her most recent book is an edited collection of new scholarship called True Crime in American Media (Routledge, 2023).    

Megan Lupton (De Montfort University) 

Megan is a final year PhD candidate at De Montfort University in Leicester. To investigate the ethics of true crime, she has conducted interviews with true crime podcasters and is using her findings to inform the characters, plot and themes in a fictional novel. Megan has previously spoken about child safety on TikTok at the TikTok Cultures Research Network symposium, presented at the 2024 Great Writing Conference, and written for the National Centre of Academic Excellence. She is also the co-founder of an independent, cooperative newspaper in Leicestershire, and a passionate storyteller with a master's degree in creative writing. Through her solutions-focused PhD, Megan’s novel and ethical reflections framework will take true crime practitioners on a journey through ethics.   

Her Instagram account, documents her research journey. 

Dr Lindsay Steenberg (Oxford Brookes University) 
Lindsay is Reader/Associate Professor in Film Studies at Oxford Brookes University where she is Chair of their Equality, Diversity and Inclusion Research Network. She has published numerous articles on the crime and action genres and is the author of Forensic Science in Contemporary American Popular Culture: Gender, Crime, and Science (2017) [BL shelfmark: YK.2013.a.8439], Are You Not Entertained? Mapping the Gladiator in Visual Culture (2021) [BL shelfmark: YC.2022.a.14] and the forthcoming The Hollywood Fight Scene.  She is particularly interested in the gender and race politics of violence in the popular media, from the lighter mode of ‘cozy crime’ to the darker obsessions of ‘dark tourism.’  

The British Library collections hold a host of materials reflecting the American true crime genre and conversation. Secondary sources include true stories of domestic terrorism [BL shelfmark: m22/.10005] to anthologies offering comprehensive examinations of how American writers have explored crime in a multitude of ways, from Nathaniel Hawthorne to James Ellroy [BL shelfmark: m08/.33001]. True crime events which have proven ongoing subjects of fascination and discussion, such as the bloody St. Valentine's Day massacre of 1929, can be examined through online access to FBI documents* and music scores from the 1967 film of the same name [BL shelfmark: VOC/1967/NEWMAN]. If you really want to investigate early depictions of sensationalised crime, look at A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston perpetrated in the evening of the fifth day of March 1770 by soldiers of the XXIXth Regiment [BL shelfmark: 1061.h.11.] which includes Paul Revere’s engraving of the event we know now as the Boston Massacre, a pivotal event leading up to the American Revolution. 

Image of Paul Revere engraving from A Short Narrative of the Horrid Massacre in Boston perpetrated in the evening of the fifth day of March 1770 by soldiers of the XXIXth Regiment ... with some observations on the state of things prior to that catastrophe., Boston, 1770, 1061.h.11.

For those interested in early sensationalised journalism, 1883 examples of the The New-York World can be viewed on microfilm at BL shelfmark: MFM.MA79. The New-York World was established in 1860 but by the late 1870s the newspaper was losing money, tens of thousands of dollars a year. In 1883 it was purchased by Joseph Pulitzer who turned around its precarious fate. Hiring investigative journalists, it became a newspaper that concentrated on human-interest stories, scandal and exaggerated material, capturing readers' attention and upping its daily circulation. In response, William Randolph Hearst purchased the New York Journal in 1895 and employed an approach like Pulitzer. Pulitzer and Heart’s use of promotional schemes, overemphasised stories, and focus on illustrations and colour supplements, became known as yellow journalism and would have a lasting impact on the history of popular American newspaper production.  

Image from Joseph Pulitzer and the New York World. [With plates, including portraits.], BL shelfmark: X.900/2277, Princeton, 1966. The image shows one the newspaper’s front pages: a depiction of James Blaine’s attendance at a banquet in New York City, tendered by the nation’s foremost millionaires.

On our whistlestop tour of true crime through the 19th to 21st centuries in British Library collections, you may also be interested to find Pat F. Garrett's Authentic Life of Billy the Kid (William H. Bonney) [BL shelfmark: 010884.f.37.]. Originally published one year after the killing of Billy the Kid by Sheriff Pat Garrett, Sheriff of Lincoln County, New Mexico, this is considered one of the most authoritative biographies of William H. Bonney and the foundation of the Billy the Kid legend. 

Image from Pat F. Garrett's Authentic Life of Billy the Kid (William H. Bonney) [BL shelfmark: 010884.f.37.] with colour depiction of Billy the Kid by W. M. Allison

Truman Capote is often a name that springs to mind on the subject of true crime. His 1966 novel, In Cold Blood, reconstructs the real-life murder in 1959 of a Kansas farmer, his wife and both their children, combining factual reporting with the imaginary possibilities of storytelling. The book is deemed by many to represent a milestone in the evolution of American true crime writing with Capote himself promoting the book as a new genre: the ‘literary non-fiction' novel. First published serially, in The New Yorker in 1965, Readers at the British Library can consult a first edition of the novel, published by Random House, New York, in the same year, at BL shelfmark: W13/2998 and later British-published edition from 1966 at BL shelfmark: 12208.a.1/2682. 

Images of front and back covers of paper back Penguin Books edition of In Cold Blood, 1966 [BL shelfmark: 12208.a.1/2682.]

We move swiftly into the era of podcasts and giant streaming services. The story of a 1999 murder case in Baltimore was reinvestigated in 2014 by Serial, an investigative journalism podcast, in which host Sarah Koenig narrated the nonfiction story over multiple episodes. The show became a cultural phenomenon, launching podcasts into the mainstream. The experience of the young man examined in relation to the murder, Adnan Syed, can be explored further in collection item Adnan's story: the search for truth and justice after Serial [BL shelfmark: YD.2017.a.627]. And finally, with the likes of Netflix tapping into the true crime trend, tough, sometimes controversial, and often needs-to-be-seen-to-be-believed watching has been provided through shows like Tiger King (2020), Monsters (2024) and Apple Cider Vinegar (2025) all of which can be examined in BL items ELD.DS.732936,*  YK.1994.a.14823, and YKL.2018.a.20024 respectively. 

Photo from Adnan's story: the search for truth and justice after Serial [BL shelfmark: YD.2017.a.627] including notes from Baltimore Police Department detailing the discovery of a female body.

From the Supreme Court to Cowboy Carter, you can catch up on the other topics we’ve covered in America Now! via our blog series:  

• “America Now!” events series launches at the Eccles Institute 
• On the Road Again: “America Now!” events series continues at the Eccles Institute 
• The Inauguration of a New President: Where Will American Politics Go From Here? 

If you’ve attended one of our America Now! events or have ideas about what you think we should discuss in the series, we’d love to hear from you. Share your thoughts and feedback via our online form. 

*Access to some digital items and e-resources is currently limited while we recover from the cyber-attack of 2023. We are working to reinstate these and hope to provide full access again when possible. Visit our website for full details of what is currently accessible. 

Twentieth-Century Black Periodicals and Space Symposium
Thursday 8 May 2025
British Library, St Pancras, London

This symposium is about space and geography in the context of twentieth-century periodicals from across the Black Atlantic. Over the course of the twentieth century, Black periodicals negotiate space at several scales: in their pages, in their interests, in their circulation, and in the ways we conceptualise and archive them.  How do Black periodicals occupy and traverse space, and how do the spatial forms of Black periodicals shape their meanings? How have theorists understood periodicals and blackness through spatial metaphors? How do spatial contingencies affect the ways that Black periodicals are collected, archived and accessed? 

In December 2024, Elizabeth McHenry gave the 39th Annual Panizzi lectures at the British Library.¹ Focusing on Black Bibliography, McHenry identified an overarching question which her three lectures asked of themselves and of the field more broadly: What does it mean to inhabit the space of black print?  The symposium takes McHenry’s ending question as its beginning.  It invites scholars, librarians and researchers from a variety disciplines whose primary objects of study are Black periodicals (magazines, newspapers, etc) published 1900-2000 in the Americas, Europe, and Africa to submit papers that ask about what it means to traverse the space of 20th Century Black Atlantic periodicals and what spaces these periodicals themselves traverse.  

Participants are welcome to submit papers on topics including 

• The circulations of specific periodicals 

• Black bibliography, in particular its diasporic aspects 

• Page layout and print space in Black periodicals 

• Internationalism, diaspora and Pan-Africanism in Black periodical cultures 

• Reflections on the spatial conceptualisations of Black periodicals  

• The space of the Black periodical archive 

International scholars, librarians and researchers from beyond the UK are also invited to get in touch.  Although the symposium is in-person, there is the possibility of a follow up event held online if there is enough interest.  

Please submit proposals for 10-minute work-in-progress papers, 20-minute papers, or 10-minute round table contributions. Proposals should be 300-500 words and sent along with a brief CV or bio to [email protected] by Thursday 17 April 2025. Email enquiries are also welcome. 

Three covers of Black World (1961-1976), an important magazine during the Black Arts Movement. The magazine, previously known as Negro Digest, was re-named ‘Black World’ in May 1970 to better reflect the magazine’s diasporic interests and readership.

This symposium is a product of the AHRC Collaborative Doctoral Partnership (CDP) PhD Studentship African American short fiction and magazines in the mid-twentieth century with the University of Cambridge and the Eccles Institute for the Americas & Oceania at the British Library. The Eccles Institute builds, cares for and shares the Americas and Oceania collection at the British Library, and champions knowledge and understanding of these regions through a rich programme of fellowships and awards, cultural events, research training, guides to the collections and programmes for schools.

References

1. Lecture One, 5 Dec 2024: Panizzi Lectures 2024: In Search of Black Readers   

Lecture Two, 10 Dec 2024: Panizzi Lectures 2024: Thinking Bibliographically  

Lecture Three, 12 Dec 2024: Panizzi Lectures 2024: Spaces of Black Study