2015 marks the twentieth anniversary of Patricia Highsmith’s death, and a themed issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection will concentrate on her developing reputation as an important twentieth-century writer. Clues seeks previously unpublished papers about how Highsmith’s work can both illuminate and challenge established assumptions concerning both crime and literary fiction.

Topics may include but are not limited to:

– The ways in which Highsmith’s novels have been adapted into film, by directors such as Anthony Minghella, Alfred Hitchcock, and Wim Wenders.

– The ways that Highsmith’s work (or some of it) disturbs conventional liberal and anti-liberal versions of emancipatory sexual politics, while claimed for queer and feminist critics.

– Considerations of the ways in which Highsmith’s work has recently been integrated into the category of “American novelist” (such as the inclusion of a chapter on her in 2011’s Cambridge Companion to American Novelists).

– The nature of guilt and anxiety within Highsmith’s work; either its lack or the overwhelming nature of it.

– Highsmith, the psychological novelist, and how she may be considered as part of a tradition that includes Fyodor Dostoevsky, her favorite author.

– Tom Ripley: an amoral and reprehensible serial killer who presents a twenty-first-century model of the inhuman?

Each potential contributor should send a 300-word proposal and one-page CV to Janice Allan, Clues executive editor, at j.m.allan@salford.ac.uk. Full-length essays of between 3,500 and 6,000 words will be solicited from these proposals, with final essays due by September 2, 2014.

Visit the Clues Web site at http://tinyurl.com/aboutclues