Students create a class murder-mystery game.

Students in the Texts and Gender, Detective Fiction course (ENG 3250), taught by Angela Gili at Hawai'i Pacific University, served as investigators in the fictional murder of Poppy Body, lead editor at Pandora Press. Faculty and staff members as well as administrators were suspects and witnesses. Drawing on various subgenres of mystery covered in class, students created game characters and developed clues. Read more here on the course and the game.

Mapping detective fiction.

The project Digital Cartographies of Spanish Detective Fiction at Grinnell College of assistant professor of Spanish Nick Phillips and undergraduate student Margaret Giles involves creating visual representations of investigations in Spanish detective fiction via the mapmaking program Carto. Authors covered include Carme Riera, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Juan José Millás, and Julio Muñoz Gijón.

Experiment Perilous (1944).

In Experiment Perilous, psychiatrist George Brent begins to ask questions after his traveling companion turns up dead, and a wife (Hedy Lamarr) is suspected of being unbalanced.  The film is directed by Jacques Tourneur, and costars include Paul Lukas.

Spain's Holmes society celebrates 25 years.

El Periódico notes the 25th birthday of El Círculo Holmes, the Sherlock Holmes society based in Barcelona.

Illustration by Sidney Paget from The Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes. Wellcome Collection

 

Japan's contributions to the mystery genre.

The Early Cases of Akechi Kogoro
by Edogawa Rampo
(pseud. of Taro Hirai), 2014

In the Japan Times, Mark Schreiber discusses the contributions of Japanese writers to the mystery genre, including Edogawa Rampo, Seishi Yokomizo (covered in Clues 32.2, 2014), and Seicho Matsumoto, and some fascinating precursors such as Honcho Oin Hiji (Parallel Cases from under the Cherry Tree, 1689) that describes the cases of prominent judge Itakura Shigemune.

"Who Killed Julie Greer?" (1961).

In this episode of the Dick Powell Show written by Frank Gilroy, Powell stars as millionaire inspector Amos Burke (see Gilroy's later Burke's Law with Gene Barry), who investigates the murder of dancer-model Julie Greer (Carolyn Jones). The rest of the cast includes Ralph Bellamy, Edgar Bergen, Lloyd Bridges, Jack Carson, Dean Jones, Edward Platt, Ronald Reagan, Mickey Rooney, and Kay Thompson (known for Funny Face and her Eloise children's books).

"The Story of All Writers."

Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1926. Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

You can read Mary Roberts Rinehart's "Writing Is Work" on the Saturday Evening Post Web site, which she published in the 11 March 1939 issue. Despite her long success as an author, Rinehart wrote, "Even today my wastebasket sees far more words of mine than the public ever does, and it is only twelve years since, with a novel half completed, I walked downstairs to the furnace and burned the whole thing. . . . .At the end of a nine-hour day . . . I may have to soak my right hand in hot water for some time, and my head feels as though it is filled with mush."