Tutor information
Christopher Pittard
Dr Christopher Pittard is Senior Lecturer in English Literature at the University of Portsmouth. He has published widely on Victorian literature and on detective fiction, including the books Literary Illusions: Performance Magic and Victorian Literature (2025), The Cambridge Companion to Sherlock Holmes (2019), Purity and Contamination in Late Victorian Detective Fiction (2011), and a new critical edition of The Return of Sherlock Holmes (2023) for Oxford World’s Classics.
Courses
Study the development of British detective fiction from Arthur Conan Doyle to Colin Dexter, taking in the golden age whodunit of Agatha Christie and the postwar crime writing of Margery Allingham.
Explore the detective fiction of Agatha Christie, examining her two most famous detectives: Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. We’ll look at the historical contexts and narrative structures of some of Christie’s most successful whodunits.
Investigate the Sherlock Holmes stories of Arthur Conan Doyle. We’ll look at Doyle’s detective fiction and its appearance in the Strand Magazine (and elsewhere) in the context of Victorian history and culture, criminology, and the Gothic.