Online museum exhibition: "Nancy Drew at 90."

Due to COVID-19, the Museum of Childhood Ireland was unable to launch its exhibition "Nancy Drew at 90" in Dun Lagohaire, so it is online instead. It includes details on the cover illustrators and some fascinating international editions such as Alice et les trois clefs (aka The Clue of the Black Keys).

Clues 38.2: Genre b(l)ending.

Volume 38, number 2 of Clues: A Journal of Detection, guest edited by Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna), has been published on the theme "Genre B(l)ending: Crime's Hybrid Forms." Below are the abstracts for the issue. Contact McFarland to order the issue or a Clues subscription. 

Update, 9-14-20. The ebook versions are now available: Google Play, Kindle, Nook.

Introduction: Make It New, but Don’t Forget / MAURIZIO ASCARI (University of Bologna)

G. K. Chesterton’s Postmodern Anti-Detective Story: Generic Innovation and Transgression in “The White Pillars Murder” / NILS CLAUSSON (University of Regina, Canada)
G. K. Chesterton’s undervalued story “The White Pillars Murder” anticipates the postmodern anti-detective story in the way it transgresses the conventions of the Holmes-style analytic detective story and subversively introduces political critique into a genre, the Golden Age country house mystery, widely regarded as either apolitical or conservative. 

Murder, Mayhem, and Madness: John Dickson Carr’s Gothic Detective Stories / STEFANO SERAFINI (University of Toronto)
This essay investigates the contact zones between gothic and detective fiction within the early work of the significant yet largely neglected author John Dickson Carr. By revealing the transgressive and contaminated character of his narratives, this essay also provides a more nuanced picture of interwar crime-writing, the literary boundaries of which were constantly violated and renegotiated. 

The Cowboy and the Detective: The Case of Craig Johnson / ANTOINE DECHÊNE
This essay focuses on Craig Johnson’s charismatic protagonist Walt Longmire, the county sheriff of Absaroka, Wyoming. A cowboy-detective par excellence, Longmire embodies the interrelationship between the Western and detective fiction while offering a good example of “glocal literature”—that is, a form of literature that is both global and local. 

James Church’s A Corpse in the Koryo and His Inspector O Series: A Noir/Spy Thriller Hybrid Set in North Korea / DAVID C. WRIGHT JR. (Misericordia University)
Analysis of A Corpse in the Koryo, the first book in the Inspector O series by James Church, shows that this series featuring a North Korean detective constitutes a successful genre hybrid: a hard-boiled detective thriller, à la Raymond Chandler, combined with a spy novel in the style of John le Carré. 

Seattle Public Library's Thrilling Tales podcast.

E. Phillips Oppenheim. NYPL

The Seattle Public Library offers the Thrilling Tales podcast with short story readings (in both audio and transcription form). One episode features E. Phillips Oppenheim's "The Reckoning with Otto Schreed" (1922), and another has the G. K. Chesterton story "The Hammer of God" (1910) with Father Brown.

Foxwell on Velona Pilcher, Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Velona Pilcher (center) in the Stanford opera
In Dutch. Stanford Quad, 1917, p. 110.

Over on the blog of my publisher Deborah Adams, I talk about World War I Red Cross searcher Velona Pilcher (playwright of the "female 'Journey's End'"), my book on US women in World War I, and author Lucy Maud Montgomery.

Another library podcast with mystery short stories.

William Faulkner by Carl Van Vechten.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Div

The Elmhurst (IL) Public Library offers the Storytime for Grown-Ups podcast. The following mystery-related stories have been read on the podcast:

• "Wasps' Nest" by Agatha Christie
  
• "The Landlady" by Roald Dahl (Edgar winner, Best Short Story)
  
• "Poison" by Roald Dahl
  
• "A Rose for Emily" by William Faulkner
  
• "Wikipedia Brown" by B. J. Novak
• "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe
  
• "Here Lies Another Blackmailer" by Bill Pronzini
• "The Hangman" by Ian Rankin