Victoria Stewart – författare

Literature and Justice in Mid Twentieth Century Britain: Crime and War Crimes examines how ideas about crime, criminality, and judicial procedure that had developed in a domestic context influenced the representation and understanding of war crimes trials, victims of war crimes, and war criminals in post-Second World War Britain. The representation of Belsen concentration camp and the subsequent British-run trial of its personnel are a particular focal point. Drawing on a range of source material including life-writing, journalism, and detective fiction, as well as criminological and sociological works from this period, this book explains why the fate of the Jews and other victims of the Nazis was sometimes brought starkly into focus and sometimes marginalised in public discourse at this period. What remain are glimpses of the events now called the Holocaust, but glimpses that can be as powerful and as meaningful as more direct or explicit representations.

The interwar period is often described as the 'Golden Age' of detective fiction, but many other kinds of crime writing, both factual and fictional, were also widely read during these years. Crime Writing in Interwar Britain: Fact and Fiction in the Golden Age considers some of this neglected material in order to provide a richer and more complex view of how crime and criminality were understood between the wars. A number of the authors discussed, including Dorothy L. Sayers, Marie Belloc Lowndes and F. Tennyson Jesse, wrote about crime in essays, book reviews, newspaper articles and works of popular criminology, as well as in novels and short stories. Placing debates about detective fiction in the context of this largely forgotten but rich and diverse culture of writing about crime will give a unique new picture of how criminality and the legal process were considered at this time.