ABSTRACT
Crime fiction and war narratives have long been intimately connected, with military conflicts providing material for criminal plots, villainy, victims, mysteries, clues and detectives since the Golden Age of crime fiction that followed World War I. The era of seemingly permanent war of the early twenty-first century has seen the ascendancy of crime fiction, most notably in the “Golden Age” of television and streaming video, while war stories occupy a much more uncertain place in contemporary culture. The era of globalisation that followed the end of the Cold War, by contrast, has seen a highly productive collision of crime and war genres, which has been escalated by the seemingly unending US global war on terror since September 11th, 2001. A.C. Doyle’s first venture into detective fiction mingles the crime and war genres, even incorporating a western frontier narrative, yet Watson’s war stories remain strictly subordinate to Sherlock Holmes’s dogged pursuit of deduction and crime-solving.
