In August 2022, Dr Laura Mayhall, Associate Professor of History at The Catholic University of America, published a co-edited volume of essays with Professor Elizabeth Prevost of Grinnell College.

British Murder Mysteries, 1880-1965: Facts and Fictions (Palgrave Macmillan), conceptualizes detective fiction as an archive, i.e., a trove of documents and sources to be used for historical interpretation. The nine essays in the collection examine the relationship between detective fiction and real events, demonstrate the elasticity of the genre, and extend the "golden age" of detection well into the postwar period. The chapters show that from the late nineteenth century, the genre of detective fiction shaped how contemporaries understood their worlds, and in some cases, became more "real" than fictive to readers. Classic British detective fiction is often portrayed as formulaic and predictable, but this collection shows it to be quite the opposite. Instead, detective fiction emerges here as an archive of stories "good to think with" for historians of modern Britain.