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Shedunnit

Detective Fiction As Time Travel

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Arts, Books

4.9 • 1.4K Ratings

🗓️ 4 February 2026

⏱️ 29 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

The best murder mysteries transport us to another era. Support the podcast by joining the Shedunnit Book Club and get extra Shedunnit episodes every month plus access to the monthly reading discussions and community: shedunnitbookclub.com/join. Books mentioned in this episode:— The Conjure-Man Dies by Rudolph Fisher— Mystery in the Channel by Freeman Wills Croft— The Walls of Jericho by Rudolph Fisher To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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1:04.0

I've always loved writing that can immerse me in another place and time, especially one very

1:09.6

different to my own.

1:16.4

There are lots of types of books that do this, historical fiction, science fiction, literary fiction,

1:21.7

even some nonfiction. But for me, one type of book does this better than any other.

1:27.1

Crime writers during the interwar period weren't writing for me, someone a century in the future. As they put pen to paper,

1:29.4

they were thinking about the readers who would pick their book up just weeks or months after they

1:33.3

finished writing it. This was a genre written to be of its moment and then disposed of. And so

1:39.7

its references are unselfconscious, and the version of the past it can show us is unmediated by

1:45.5

any wondering about what might be interesting to an imagined person of the future. The fashion,

1:51.2

politics, media, class dynamics and settings are frozen in time, as the writer wanted to show

1:57.1

them to people to whom they were already familiar. That's why, over the years,

2:02.3

Detective Fiction has become my favourite way to time travel.

2:17.1

Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton. Welcome to She Done It. I'm Caroline Crampton.

...

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