Crime Fiction and Missing Persons Appeals to the Public

This book draws upon genre fiction studies, forensic linguistics, and media studies to investigate the overlap between crime fiction conventions and the writing of missing persons appeals to the public. This book is based on a pilot project funded by the Aston Institute for Forensic Linguistics, entitled 'Genre, Pacing, and Narrative in Police Missing Persons Appeals' (Aug 2021-Nov 2022). The authors identify a missing persons appeal as a literary and linguistic genre in its own right and illustrate the problems that arise when the appeals writing process goes unregulated or unstudied: there is currently little-to-no official, national police guidance, regulation, or standard procedure for writing a missing persons appeal in the UK. The authors also identify opportunities for improving the writing and delivery of appeals by further (and more intentionally) applying crime fiction conventions, narrative devices, and pacing, to maximise audience reach and increase the chances of recovering a missing person. This book will be of particular interest to genre fiction scholars (particularly those interested in crime fiction), forensic linguists, and media studies scholars.

Abigail Boucher is a senior lecturer in English literature at Aston University, UK. She is a scholar of genre fiction, literature of the long nineteenth century, and medicine and science in literature. She is also the Director for Aston University’s Research Centre for the Humanities.

Tim Grant is a professor of forensic linguistics at Aston University, UK. He is one of the world’s most experienced forensic linguistic practitioners with a particular interest in forensic authorship analysis, focusing on short form messages.

Emily Powell is the Head of the Centre for International English at the University of South Wales, UK. Her research sits at the intersection between criminology and linguistics and applies corpus linguistics to forensic texts.

Daniel Jenkin-Smith is a lecturer at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, UK, and a postdoctoral researcher at Aston University, UK. He has specialisms in British and French literature of the long nineteenth century and the history of labour and office work.