When the Past Comes Calling: Crime Fiction Across America’s Fault Lines

Crime fiction becomes a lens on buried history, fractured families, and the uneasy relationship between past and present in this electrifying conversation featuring Naomi Hirahara, Susie Hara, Faye Snowden, and Élan Les Vies. Though their settings range from early 20th-century California to post-1906 San Francisco, from the contemporary South to a fogbound Northern California cove in the 1980s, these authors share a fascination with what lingers: generational trauma, cultural displacement, family secrets, and the long shadow of violence. Their novels probe how history imprints itself on communities and on the individuals who attempt reinvention in places shaped by exclusion, secrecy, and survival. In Crown City, Hirahara uncovers anti-Japanese violence and artistic intrigue in early California, illuminating overlooked chapters of regional history within a classic investigative mystery. Hara’s Earthquake Shack introduces Sadie García Miller, a half-Mexican, half-Jewish investigator pulled into a mystery involving a vanished 1906 earthquake cottage and her own family’s criminal past. Set in San Francisco’s Mission District, Hara’s noir blends intergenerational conflict, buried histories, high-stakes danger and the moral gray areas of family loyalty. In A Killing Breath, Faye Snowden continues her gripping Southern gothic series featuring homicide detective Raven Burns, the daughter of a notorious serial killer. As Raven hunts a new predator, she must confront the terrifying possibility that her father’s darkness lives on within her. Her work has been called “intense,” “and a pulse-pounding contribution to a genre lacking in Black women authors”. In The Lemon Twist, Les Vies follows a search for truth sparked by a cryptic clue tied to a long-ago disappearance. Through fractured memory, cassette recordings, and coastal isolation, the novel explores identity, shame, and the dangerous undertow of unresolved pasts. Across their work, these writers examine how communities respond to displacement, how families transmit both resilience and harm, and how investigators navigate systems that marginalize or erase. Together, they will discuss historical noir, Southern gothic suspense, California crime fiction, and the craft of writing mysteries that are as socially resonant as they are gripping. The conversation will be moderated by Randal Brandt, Head of Cataloging and Curator of the California Detective Fiction Collection at the Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley and creator of Golden Gate Mysteries, an annotated bibliography of crime fiction set in the San Francisco Bay Area.