Andrew Pepper is author of the highly regarded Pyke Mysteries crime fiction series, and of the academic study The Unwilling Executioner: Crime Writing and the State (Oxford University Press 2017).

Andrew will discuss the core themes explored in The Unwilling Executioner, primarily how crime fiction has developed in response to a contradiction at the heart of the modern state, whereby 'the state is necessary for the creation and maintenance of public life’ and yet also 'central to the reproduction of the socio-economic inequalities that lead to crime in the first place'.