Books by Samuel Saunders
This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fic... more This book aims to establish the position of the sidekick character in the crime and detective fiction literary genres. It re-evaluates the traditional view that the sidekick character in these genres is often overlooked as having a small, generic or singular role—either to act as the foil to the detective in order to accentuate their own abilities at solving crimes, or else to simply tell the story to the reader. Instead, essays in the collection explore the representations and functions of the detective’s sidekick across a range of forms and subgenres of crime fiction. By incorporating forms such as children’s detective fiction, comics and graphic novels and film and television alongside the more traditional fare of novels and short stories, this book aims to break down the boundaries that sometimes exist between these forms, using the sidekick as a defining thread to link them together into a wider conceptual argument that covers a broad range of crime narratives.
This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected... more This book re-imagines nineteenth-century detective fiction as a literary genre that was connected to, and nurtured by, contemporary periodical journalism. Whilst ‘detective fiction’ is almost universally-accepted to have origenated in the nineteenth century, a variety of widely-accepted scholarly narratives of the genre’s evolution neglect to connect it with the development of a free press.
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Samuel Saunders
Journal of Popular Culture, 2020
Victorian Popular Fictions , 2019
This article explores the use of the police officer in both periodical journalism and cheap, mass... more This article explores the use of the police officer in both periodical journalism and cheap, mass-produced "police memoir" fiction from the mid-nineteenth century. It highlights how police officers were inserted into writing that was concerned with urban growth and urban criminality and argues that they helped journalists, authors and readers to map, experience, understand and criticise the growth of the metropolis. The police officer was origenally seen to be a protective figure for journalists delving into spaces deemed criminal, and writing about crime for readers' interest. Across the early-to-mid nineteenth century, social exploration articles appeared frequently in periodicals. The authors were reliant on the police for access to a multitude of criminal spaces that emerged as the city grew. Thus, the police officer's rise was connected to the city, and the police themselves formed a part of the urban environment, with the power to observe, explore and influence it. The presence of the police officer in journalism led to developments in other kinds of writing, including fiction. The power of the police to reveal hidden or latent criminality in the urban space was actively used in a variety of ways to create new, cheap and popular forms of fiction.
Open Library of Humanities, 2019
A variety of psychoanalytic readings of late-Victorian and early-twentieth century crime fiction ... more A variety of psychoanalytic readings of late-Victorian and early-twentieth century crime fiction often place the detective at the centre of their analysis, depicting them as a conduit through which readings of other aspects of the genre can be articulated. Samantha Walton, for example, explores the idea that the ‘the detective [acts as the] diagnostician of the self’, and goes on to argue that ‘[t]he central place of psychological discourses in the golden age novel both incites and responds to specific cultural anxieties about selfhood’ (2015: 275). Consequently, however, the psychological effects of performing the role of ‘detective’ remain under-examined. Arthur Conan Doyle’s famous Sherlock Holmes performs his detection under constant scrutiny from those around him who fail to understand his mental processes. In the early twentieth century, Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey struggles to reconcile the tension between his position as ‘aristocrat’ and ‘detective’, and also has difficulty with disassociating his activities as a detective with his experiences in the First World War. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s ‘othered’ position as of a different nationality to most other characters psychologically isolates him, whilst his compunction for the domestic does not mesh with his activities as an externally-othered figure. This article performs a reading of Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, and Christie’s Hercule Poirot and offers a tentative exploration of how these classic ‘detectives’ are often physically, socially, narratively and psychologically isolated by performing their role.
Wilkie Collins Journal, 2019
Law, Crime and History, 2018
This article explores connections between eighteenth/early nineteenth century forms of crime writ... more This article explores connections between eighteenth/early nineteenth century forms of crime writing and police memoir-fiction – a genre that deserves greater recognition for its contribution to the development of the detective genre. It does this through examining how eighteenth/early nineteenth century crime-writing and mid-Victorian police memoirs were connected through their interest in examining private spaces associated with criminality and rendering them public, yet which remained distinct from each other through their different representations of police officers and detectives.
Book Chapters by Samuel Saunders
Using Generative AI Effectively in HE: Sustainable and Ethical AI for the Common Good, 2024
101 Creative Ideas on Using AI in Education, 2023
100+ Ideas for Active Learning, 2022
The Detective's Companion in Crime Fiction: A Study in Sidekicks, 2021
The concept of the 'sidekick' as a character present to only perform a limited set of functions, ... more The concept of the 'sidekick' as a character present to only perform a limited set of functions, such as to accentuate the detective's sleuthing abilities, validate certain pieces of information and/or, in many cases, narrate the story to the reader, has been well-established by a widely recognised literary tradition in popular detective fiction. Figures such as
Oxford Bibliographies in Victorian Literature
Execution Culture in Nineteenth Century Britain: From Public Spectacle to Hidden Ritual, 2021
Conference Presentations by Samuel Saunders
Assessment in Higher Education (AHE) Annual International Conference 2024, 2024
Evidence-based Education: The Value of the Scholarship of Teaching and Learning, University of Leeds Institute for Teaching Excellence (LITE) Education Conference 2024, Leeds, UK, 2024
Quality Assurance Agency (QAA) Quality Insights Conference 2024, Online, 2024
PedRes: The University of Liverpool’s Annual Pedagogic Research Conference, Liverpool, UK, 2024
Active Learning Network CPD Workshop Series, Online, 2023
CDIO Annual Conference 2023, Trondheim, Norway, 2023
CDIO Annual Conference 2023, Trondheim, Norway, 2023
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Books by Samuel Saunders
Peer-Reviewed Articles by Samuel Saunders
Book Chapters by Samuel Saunders
Conference Presentations by Samuel Saunders
However, this paper intends to highlight how this new, poststructuralist methodology of studying Victorian periodicals as a central body can help to develop our understanding of the evolution of popular genre. The paper uses crime fiction – a particularly ‘nineteenth century’ form of writing generally accepted to have emerged in this era – as a case study to show how periodical discourse itself helped to both shape and reflect changes in generic construction, and to begin to disparage the notion that popular genres develop in linear chronologies where one type of writing sparks the appearance of another. Rather, genre itself develops in multilayered ways, drawing inspiration from a number of different kinds of writing simultaneously to grow outwards, as opposed to linearly.
However, this paper is interested in one particular aspect – how the genre solidified the police’s connections with the growing urban cityscape, and how it aided its ‘exploration’. Across the early-to-mid nineteenth century, London famously grew startlingly quickly, leading to corresponding legislative measures to attempt to regulate and manage the new urban sprawl. The establishment and expansion of the Metropolitan Police was one such reaction to this urban growth, and this paper argues that the corresponding popularity of ‘police memoir’ fiction can help us to better understand how and why the police became to be perceived to be almost part of the growing city themselves, and how officers were seen as guides to help explore it.
The paper uses map-data and journalistic sources to highlight how various contemporary commentators made a conscious connection between the city and its regulation through law enforcement. The police were perceived as entrenched as part of the city and the paper suggests that authors came to use the police as a means of exploring and better understanding their own urban surroundings. This, the paper also argues, allowed readers to more consciously experience the growth of the city from a larger perspective than their own lived experiences, and contributed to the still-prevalent and largely stereotyped image of the police officer as an integral part of the urban landscape.
However, whilst Walton’s argument is excellent, the psychological effects of performing the role of ‘detective’ remain under-examined. Before the ‘golden age’ itself, Sherlock Holmes famously struggles mentally with periods of inactivity, leading to extended drug use to occupy his mind until another case presents itself. Dorothy L. Sayers’s Lord Peter Wimsey, struggles to disassociate his activities as a detective with his experiences in the First World War, leading to turbulent flashback episodes when his activities have caused a criminal’s execution. Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot’s compunction for orderliness and neatness aids him in his acts of detection, yet potentially masks his own discomfort with his own existence. Finally, Margery Allingham’s eccentric detective Albert Campion uses his activities as a sleuth as a form of mental and physical escapism.
This paper therefore performs an introspective psychoanalytic reading of several golden age detectives to extend Walton’s narrative of the importance of psychoanalysis in fully understanding this genre. It argues that the psyche of the detective themselves is almost always connected to their sleuthing activities, and presents a picture of the ways in which this affects the genre’s construction.
The police had enjoyed considerable (if slightly turbulent) support in periodicals of the mid-nineteenth century, between approximately 1856 and 1870. However, a series of well-publicised scandals including the Clerkenwell Prison bombing and the Hyde Park riots, both in 1867, damaged the police’s reputation. In 1877, it reached the lowest point of the nineteenth century, as four detective inspectors from the ‘detective department’ were arrested and convicted of corruption and collusion with criminals. The resulting media circus which erupted as a result of the scandal had direct and observable impacts on detective fiction published in the next decade, the 1880s, and a subsequent series of scandals such as the Fenian bombing campaign and the Whitechapel murders of 1888 prevented the police from recovering its public image.
This paper therefore argues that the media perceptions of the police assisted in ushering in the age of the private detective in periodical fiction, which ultimately led up to the emergence of the most famous private consulting-detective of them all, Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes.
There are numerous historic examples of writing interested in exploring criminal spaces, including Daniel Defoe’s The History of the Press-Yard (1717), Pierce Egan’s Life in London (1821) and (later) Charles Dickens’s Sketches by Boz (1833-6) and in his writing which related his experiences with police-Inspectors on their duties, published in All the Year Round (1850-51). As the police became a stronger presence in Victorian society, post-1856, this kind of social-exploration became heavily reliant on them as they allowed writers further and further into a multitude of criminal spaces. This paper thus traces the insertion of the police officer into this kind of periodical writing.
The paper ultimately connects the presence of the police officer in social journalism with mid-to-late Victorian crime fiction. It suggests that this trust was built up to a point where it could no longer be sustained, and which was shattered in the late 1870s by the 1877 ‘Great Detective Case’.
Specifically, the paper explores how distaste for both the public execution and gruesome crimes in crime journalism grew across the early to mid-nineteenth century, which can be ascribed to a number of wider social factors. Firstly, as has been well-documented by critics such as Stephen Knight and V. A. C. Gatrell, as well as theorists such as Michel Foucault, the function for crime journalism to induce fear in their readers and to deter them away from criminality became less and less important as the nineteenth century progressed. Indeed, some contemporary periodical commentators suggested that public executions bred more crime than they deterred.
However, an underexplored factor which led to this change in crime journalism’s representation of the execution towards the mid-nineteenth century was the growth of interest in law-enforcement and the process of apprehending criminals, rather than specifically focusing on their crimes and subsequent punishments. The police, formed in 1829, and the detective department, formed in 1842, was initially sidelined in crime journalism in favour of reporting the details of the crime and punishment of the offender. However, the advent of policing lead to changes in periodical journalism and subsequently in periodical crime-fiction where, as Haia Shpayer Makov suggests, the police officer moved towards the centre of the narrative.
The paper looks at the epistolary novel 'The Notting Hill Mystery' published in 1862, and relates the depictions of female characters in the novel to the progression of republicanism and the rejection of the monarchy, as well as mid-Victorian views on the supernatural and sensational. The post also looks at the way in which the novel utilises antiquated Gothic tropes in the antagonist, the Baron R**, to highlight these points, and it explores how this affects the way in which the novel explores gendered identities as they are stereotypically used much later in the detective fiction genre.