The many sides of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Robert Louis Stevenson
at age 25. NYPL

The online exhibition "Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850–1894" from the University of South Carolina Libraries Rare Books and Special Collections includes this great cover from Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" (1884), artwork from various editions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as some interesting material on the relationship between Stevenson and poet W. E. Henley. Also featured are two portraits of Stevenson (posted here and here) by John Singer Sargent, who told Henry James that Stevenson was "the most intense creature I had ever met."

John le Carré at the movies.

Sean Connery in
The Russia House

You can still listen online to the episode "John le Carré at the Movies" from WQXR's Movies on the Radio program. Soundtracks covered include the 1979 and 2011 versions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came In from the Cold; The Russia House; and Quincy Jones's score for The Deadly Affair.

Richard Marsh's Judith Lee, continued.

There's been a lot of interest in my review of Richard Marsh's hard-to-find Judith Lee stories (1912–16) since it appeared as part of Patti Abbott's series on Friday's Forgotten Books. Now Black Coat Press has issued The Complete Adventures of Judith Lee. According to editor Jean-Daniel Brèque, the edition includes the stories collected in Marsh's Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (1912) and The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), as well as "The Barnes Mystery" (a 1916 story from the Strand magazine). This is welcome news for fans of early female sleuths and Marsh.

How Vertigo nearly became Cry from the Rooftop.

Lists of Note features proposed alternative titles for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. (My Madeleine? Sounds like a riff on Proust.)

New podcast: Why I Really Like This Book.

University of Ghent professor Kate Macdonald, author of the John Buchan companion that I edited, has started Why I Really Like This Book, a podcast that highlights neglected works. Two recent episodes focus on thriller author Dornford Yates (whose work has been reprinted by House of Stratus) and Erskine Childers's Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone work The Riddle of the Sands (new edition available from Penguin; Macdonald introduced an earlier edition).
(Hat tip to Neglected Books)

Happy birthday, Jules Feiffer.

James Finley and Evan Crump
in the Amer Century Theatre
production of Little Murders.
Photo by Dennis Deloria

Cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer was born today in Bronx, NY, in 1929. His play The White House Murder Case (the First Lady is murdered against a backdrop of an unpopular war—read Vietnam) has been produced in San Jose and Chicago. Arlington, VA's American Century Theatre is staging Feiffer's dark comedy Little Murders through February 11, which deals with the violence surrounding a dysfunctional family.

Inner Sanctum debuts, January 1941.

Richard Widmark, left, gets
physical on the Blue Network.
NYPL

The Museum of Broadcast Communications notes that this month in 1941, the radio program Inner Sanctum (with a signature squeaking-door opening) debuted on the Blue Network (later ABC) with "The Amazing Death of Mrs. Putnam." The producer was Himan Brown, who went on to produce the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre and numerous other series. Several episodes of Inner Sanctum can be downloaded from the Internet Archive, including "Make Ready My Grave" starring Richard Widmark.

Our man in Appomattox.

Grant:
general, president, spymaster?
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div.

In this podcast, the Spy Museum's Mark Stout talks to William Feis, author of Grant's Secret Service: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox.

What might have been: Collins and Drood.

Wilkie Collins,
ca. 1880–90.
Library of Congress,
Prints & Photos Div

The Wilkie Collins Society has issued Addenda and Corrigenda 7, a selection of previously unpublished or hard-to-find letters, including one that confirms that Collins was asked to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood after the death of his friend Charles Dickens and another that records Collins's reaction to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The publication is available free to society members and for a modest £5 (approx. US$8) to nonmembers, which can be paid via PayPal; contact Paul Lewis for details.

Chandler to Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train.

Farley Granger (left) and
Robert Walker
Strangers on a Train (1951)

In time for today's birthday of Patricia Highsmith: Letters of Note features a stormy letter from Raymond Chandler to Alfred Hitchcock regarding Chandler's screenplay of Strangers on a Train.

Chesterton, Greene, et al: Bloomsbury auction results.

E. C. Bentley, from
The Bookman 37 (1913)

There was a mixed bag of results for the Jan 12th Bloomsbury bibliophile auction, although it seems that works by Graham Greene continue to do respectably at auction. The mystery-related items included the following:

• Strand magazine vols 1–16, 1891–98, which contain the Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (illust. Sidney Paget): £100 (approx. US$153).

• E. C. Bentley, Trent's Last Case (1913), with G. K. Chesterton's The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914) and some Agatha Christie works, £110 (approx. US$168).

• Raymond Chandler, 1st English ed. of The Big Sleep (1939), £260 (approx. US$400).

• G. K. Chesterton, 1st ed. of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), £60 (approx. US$92).

• Graham Greene, 1st ed. of The Third Man and The Fallen Idol (1950), £240 (approx. US$368).
(Hat tip to PhiloBiblos)

Ngaio Marsh this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

A lethal country house party requires Inspector Alleyn's investigation in Ngaio Marsh's A Man Lay Dead (1934), which airs this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Go here for the schedule or to listen; episodes usually may be heard online for up to a week after broadcast.

"Let's be careful out there."

The first episode of Hill Street Blues, "Hill Street Station," debuted today in 1981. Although the Museum of Broadcast Communications credits it with affecting every TV cop show ever since, sharp-eyed observers note more than a passing influence on the TV series of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct.

Happy half-century, Jasper Fforde.

Jasper Fforde, author of the rollicking Thursday Next series (most recently One of Our Thursdays Is Missing) and the nursery crime series (The Fourth Bear, etc.) turns 50 today.

Joyce Porter on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

The untidy Inspector Wilfred Dover of British mystery writer Joyce Porter is featured this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Go here for the schedule or to listen online; episodes generally may be heard for up to a week after broadcast. Several of Porter's mysteries have been reprinted (introduction to the Dover short story collection by Robert Barnard).

Irene Adler, cross-dresser.

Gayle Hunnicutt as Irene Adler
in "A Scandal in Bohemia"
(Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes, 1984)

There's an interesting discussion by Constance Crompton of Irene Adler's cross-dressing in "A Scandal in Bohemia" in the new issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.

Neglected Books on Christopher Morley.

Christopher Morley
Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Div.

The Neglected Books blog discusses Christopher Morley's Human Being (1932). Morley, instrumental in the founding of the Baker Street Irregulars, is best known for Kitty Foyle (1939), but I've enjoyed his novels featuring a bookseller, Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919), as well as his essays (collected in various volumes such as Pipefuls, 1920) and his sense of humor (such as his spoof of Henry James).

"We had been talking at dinner of the extraordinary number of grievous deaths of well-known authors that had happened that year. . . . [T]here was Dunraven Bleak, the humorous essayist, who was found stark (in both senses) in his bathtub; and Cynthia Carboy, the famous writer of bedtime stories, who fell down the elevator shaft. . . . [T]he detective bureau insisted that in some unexplainable manner she must have fallen up the shaft; but as Dulcet pointed out at the time of the Authors' League inquiry, the body might have been carried upstairs after the accident. Then there was Andrew Baffle, the psychological novelist, whose end was peculiarly atrocious and miserable, because it seemed that he had contracted tetanus from handling a typewriter ribbon that showed signs of having been poisoned."—Christopher Morley, "The Curious Case of Kenelm Digby," Tales from a Rolltop Desk (1921).

Elisabeth Saxnay Holding in ebook format.

Joan Bennett and James Mason
in The Reckless Moment
(1949, adapt. of Holding's
The Blank Wall)

Persephone Books has an ebook version available of Elisabeth Saxnay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947); print edition also available. This book by Holding—a favorite author of Chandler—features a woman who finds herself under suspicion in the death of her daughter's boyfriend.

Happy 95th birthday, Helen Eustis.

Edward Albert in
The Fool Killer (1965)

Helen Eustis—author of the Edgar-winning The Horizontal Man (1946) and The Fool Killer (1954), friend of Carson McCullers, and ex-wife of Smith poet-professor Alfred Young Fisher—turns 95 today in New York City. Eustis is one of two living writers on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list of essential mysteries (the other is Dorothy Salisbury Davis). The Best Mysteries of All Time series of Reader's Digest issued a new edition of The Horizontal Man this year. (post updated to reflect correct age from Eustis's son)

Chan, music in noir in Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles, 2011.

In the inevitable "best of" lists that appear toward the end of the year, Choice: Current Revews for Academic Libraries has selected its outstanding academic titles for 2011. The mystery-related ones include:

• Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History

• Robert Miklitsch, Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir

Preliminary info, Camilleri companion (ed. Foxwell)

McFarland has posted some preliminary details on Andrea Camilleri: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, no. 5 in the series I edit for the publisher. University College London's Lucia Rinaldi is the author, and the book is tentatively slated for release in summer 2012.

Camilleri, a mega-bestseller in his native Italy and quite popular in other countries as well, created Sicilian inspector Salvo Montalbano, who has been featured in a

DVD from
Detective Montalbano
series

long-running television series, Detective Montalbano.

His novels have been shortlisted several times for the British Crime Writers Assn's International Dagger. As there are few resources available on his work in English, this companion should be useful to fans and scholars alike.

Info on Harvard's sci-fi collection.

Cover from Nightmare Tales
(1892) by Helena Blavatsky,
part of Harvard's sci-fi
collection

Harvard has provided further details on the 3000-volume science fiction collection within Houghton Library's Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection. Two covers on the Web site are Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (which has thinly disguised versions of Robert Heinlein, Hugo Gernsback, and L. Ron Hubbard) and Frederic Brown's What Mad Universe.

Also see this cover from Nathan Schachner's Space Lawyer (a joke must be lurking somewhere in there).

Collins/Dickens/Gaskell tale, BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Illustration of
Elizabeth Gaskell, NYPL

For the Christmas issue of Household Words in 1858, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Adelaide Ann Procter teamed up to write "A House to Let" featuring episodes in the history of a desolate house. BBC Radio 4 Extra is airing a version this week; episodes usually may be heard for up to a week after broadcast.

Bah, humbug.

Illustration by
John Leech for
"A Christmas Carol"
1845

You can hear an excerpt from Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" read by noted actor Richard Briers in a podcast from Vintage Books.

The two Ronnies: Radio mysteries w/Ronald Colman, Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Colman, NYPL

Among the latest highlights posted online at the National Radio Hall of Fame: the 1945 Suspense production of "August Heat" (the future fates of two men intertwine, from the 1910 short story by W. F. Harvey) featuring Ronald Colman and the 1938 Warner Brothers Academy Theatre production of "One Way Passage" (Ronald Reagan as a killer en route to the gallows).

Green for Greene: Book fetches $24K.

As PhiloBiblos noted, a first edition of Graham Greene's Rumour at Nightfall (1931) garnered £17,000 (about US$24,500) at Bloomsbury's Dec 14 auction. Greene viewed the Conrad-influenced Rumour, in which a journalist hunts for an outlaw in Spain, as a very bad novel and refused to reprint it after its 1932 US edition. (Factoid of the day: According to a NYT review of Greene's The Name of Action [1931], Greene was related to Robert Louis Stevenson.)

Margaret Millar this week on Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Encore.

Joan Hackett in "Beast in View"
Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Margaret Millar's Edgar-winning Beast in View (1955) is featured this week on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour on Encore. Joan Hackett and Kevin McCarthy star. (YouTube clip here)

Hallmark Hall of Fame: Quo vadis?

Stephanie Zimbalist in
"Caroline?"
Hallmark Hall of Fame, 1990

The Paley Center for Media's Rebecca Paller laments the decline of TV's Hallmark Hall of Fame and provides a look back at some of its major highlights (including clips from Amahl and the Night Visitors and Ibsen's A Doll's House with Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer).