Jem Bloomfeld | California Literary Review

Profile of Jem Bloomfeld

Bio:

Jem Bloomfield read English at Oxford, taking Bachelor's and Master's degrees, before moving to Exeter University, where he is currently researching a doctorate on the revenge drama "The Duchess of Malfi." His literary and cultural essays have appeared in publications such as "Isis," "California Literary Review" and "Renaissance Magazine." He is the author of two performed plays, one of which ("Bewick Gaudy"), won the Cameron Mackintosh Award for New Writing.

Email Address:

jem (DOT) bloomfield (AT) hotmail (DOT) co (DOT) uk

Articles written for the California Literary Review:

The Solution to History
Posted on 03 Oct 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Historical Fiction, Mystery, Writers

These days the historical mystery buff can choose from works featuring Owen Archer, Prioress Eleanor, Petroc of Auneford, Mathew Shardlake, and many others. From a brief survey of the genre, it’s a wonder that anyone noticed when the Black Death took hold, as the inhabitants of Britain had apparently been offing each other in industrial numbers right through the medieval era.
Who Didn’t Do It?
Posted on 31 Jul 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Mystery

The “golden age” of detective fiction, which began roughly with Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles, occupied the years between the first and second World Wars – anything but a golden age for Britain, and one in which British society was undergoing massive and lasting changes. The experience of total war, which moved women into the munitions factories, and domestic servants into the army, caused serious questioning of the established social order. The assumed codes of deference and conduct never quite recovered. Country estates were shut up or sold, and the rural economy was destabilised by wage increases after the labourers returned from the front, or didn’t. Crime fiction, however, was busy denying that anything had changed, keeping the experience of death safely within rational and domestic confines where it could be explained away.
Book of Hours
Posted on 26 Jun 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Mystery

Clocks, with their symbolic freight of time and plot, can serve as weapons with which the murderer and the detective attempt to impose their will on the world. In changing a clock’s hands, falsifying an alibi, or cheating a timetable, the killer tries to take control of time, and it is up to the detective to wrest it back from him by proving that time is logical and relentless.
Family Values
Posted on 13 Jun 2007 in Horror, Movies, Movies & TV

Their glossy and frequently rather smug “postmodernism”, which refuses to acknowledge any authority other than previous horror movies, masks a fear that such authority is all too real, and is probably furious with them.
The Key to the Case
Posted on 26 May 2007 in Fiction Reviews, Mystery

The locked room mystery has been a staple of detective fiction since Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue presented Auguste Dupin with two corpses and apparently no way for the murderer to have entered or left.