Now available: Dorothy L. Sayers Companion.

Now available is Dorothy L. Sayers: A Companion to Mystery Fiction by Eric Sandberg (City University of Hong Kong), vol. 11 in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series that I edit. It's a comprehensive guide to the mystery work of the creator of Lord Peter Wimsey and also includes info on some of Sayers's religious-related works. 

Opening soon: "Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects" exhibition.

Opening on 21 January 2022 at New York's Grolier Club is the exhibition "Sherlock Holmes in 221 Objects." Selected from the collection of Cathy and Glen Miranker, exhibits will feature artwork, books, correspondence, and manuscripts about the Great Detective. These include:

• Letters and an "idea book" from Arthur Conan Doyle

• A handwritten speech with Conan Doyle's explanation for killing off Holmes

• Original artwork of Holmes by British and US illustrators 

• A pirated edition of The Sign of the Four

An exhibition catalog is available.

In praise of R. Austin Freeman.

In Hektoen International: A Journal of Medical Humanities, pulmonologist Anthony Papagiannis offers a short appreciation of R. Austin Freeman (inverted mystery master, physician, and creator of Dr. John Thorndyke, 1862–1943): "[H]e does equally well in reciting the chattering of the neighborhood gossip, a flowery legal oration, or a layperson’s rather dumb testimony and cross-examination at court. His details, both medical and legal, are meticulous and stand up to the knowledge of his era."

Agatha Christie and Egypt.

At New/Lines Magazine, Jun Yi Wong looks at the relationship of Agatha Christie and Egypt such as her early trip to Egypt at age 17 and her presence on digs with her second husband, archaeologist Max Mallowan.

Upcoming National Museum of Scotland exhibition.

Sketch of William Burke. From George MacGregor, The History of Burke and Hare and of the Resurrectionist Times (1884)

The National Museum of Scotland has announced the upcoming exhibition "Anatomy: A Matter of Death and Life" that will include infamous 19th-century murderers Burke and Hare.

"Investigating Detectives" exhibition.

The National Centre for the Written Word in South Shields, England, is offering an online version of its exhibition "Investigating Detectives" (which will be on display until March 2022). Included are the expected Inspector Bucket, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple but also children's mysteries, detectives on screen, subgenres such as hardboiled and Nordic noir, and forensic history.

LeRoy Lad Panek, 1943–2021.

Panek's last book

LeRoy Lad Panek, a longtime professor at McDaniel College (MD) and a distinguished mystery scholar, died November 5 of pancreatic cancer. His obituary was published in the Baltimore Sun. 

His last book is the newly published Nineteenth Century Detective Fiction: An Analytical History. His other works include the following:

  • Before Sherlock Holmes: How Magazines and Newspapers Invented the Detective Story

  • After Sherlock Holmes: The Evolution of British and American Detective Stories 1891–1914

  • The American Police Novel: A History (Edgar nominee)

  • Early American Detective Stories: An Anthology (ed. with Mary Bendel-Simso)

• The Essential Elements of the Detective Story, 1820–1891 (coauthored with Bendel-Simso)

• Introduction to the Detective Story (Edgar winner)

• The Origins of the American Detective Story

• Reading Early Hammett: A Critical Study of the Fiction Prior to The Maltese Falcon

• Watteau's Shepherds: The Detective Novel in Britain 1914–1940 (Edgar nominee)

Panek's Westminster Detective Library (a project with Bendel-Simso) is an invaluable online repository of short detective works published in the United States prior to 1891.

Wordsworth blog: Collins, Le Fanu.

"These two figures crossed the floor diagonally." Illustration from Sheridan Le Fanu's "Mr. Justice Harbottle," Harper's Bazaar, February 1872. NYPL

Catching up with the blog on the Wordsworth Editions website:

• David Stuart Davies discusses the career of Wilkie Collins: "Remarkably, The Moonstone received a somewhat cool reception from the critics. Even Collins’s friend Dickens was of the opinion that, ‘The construction is wearisome beyond endurance, and there is a vein of obstinate conceit in it that makes enemies of the readers.'"
  
  
• Stephen Carter examines the work of legendary Irish ghost story writer Sheridan Le Fanu: "Le Fanu’s reputation was crowded out of Victorian literature by his contemporaries, Dickens, Thackeray, Wilkie Collins, and the Brontës; all of whom he in some form influenced and whose sales he frequently rivalled."

I'm looking forward to Davies's upcoming post on Edgar Wallace.

Exhibition on race and dime novels.

West Virginia University's Downtown Library is offering the new online exhibition "American Dime Novel: Racialization/Erasure" that focuses on ethnic and racial stereotypes in dime novels. Mystery-related items include the following:

• Tiger Dick, the Faro King; or, The Cashier's Crime (1878) by Philip S. Warne (the mixed-race Warne may be the earliest African American mystery writer)
  
  
• Darkie Dan, the Colored Detective (1881) by Prentiss Ingraham
  
  
• Chin Chin the Chinese Detective; or, the Dark Work of the Black Hand (1887) by Albert W. Aiken
  
  
• Nick Carter's Well Laid Plot (1909)
  
  
• The Black Hand Nemesis (1909)
  

Also included: Maum Guinea and Her Plantation Children (1861) by Metta Fuller Victor, which had a similar effect in Britain about the evils of slavery that Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin had in the United States. Victor wrote the first U.S. detective novel: The Dead Letter (1864).

Nancy Caronia, the curator of the exhibition and a teaching associate professor in WVU's Department of English, will be giving a free, virtual presentation about the exhibition on November 4.

"Women & crime fiction" resource, UF Tampa Libraries

Margaret Lewis's biography of Edith Pargeter/Ellis Peters

To accompany the U-Florida course Lit 4386, the Special Collections of the UF–Tampa Libraries has assembled a "Women & Crime Fiction" online exhibition featuring mystery highlights of its collection that focus on female authors, female detectives, femme fatales, and female victims. Some of the works featured are by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Vera Caspary, Lillian de la Torre, Anna Katharine Green, Margaret Millar, Ellis Peters, and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Unusual items include The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah, which offers Captain Kirk as detective, and an April 1960 letter from Columbia University student Leigh Marlowe to mystery author Baynard Kendrick related to her study of villains.

Oct 21 webinar on Christie.

Agatha Christie, 1964.  Dutch Nat Archives

On October 21, the New York Adventure Club is offering the virtual webinar "Agatha Christie: Unraveling the Mystery Behind the Queen of Crime" with tour guide Simon Whitehouse. It will include London locales of Christie's works and life, including where the royal premieres of film adaptations were held; as well as background on her career and 1926 disappearance. Tickets are $10. The webinar will be available for a limited time after the event.

Clues 39.2: Christie, Austen-Leigh, Robinson, Upfield, and more.

Volume 39, no. 2 (2021) of Clues: A Journal of Detection has been published. The issue abstracts follow below; contact McFarland to order a print copy. 

Update, 12-12-21. Ebook versions of the issue are now available: Kindle, Nook, Google Play

Introduction: So Many Books, So Little Time

CAROLINE REITZ (John Jay College of Criminal Justice-CUNY/CUNY Graduate Center)

Caroline Reitz, the new executive editor of Clues, provides an overview of the issue, including articles on authors such as Lois Austen-Leigh, Raymond Chandler, Agatha Christie, Didier Daeninckx, Fergus Hume, Philip Kerr, Peter Robinson, and Arthur Upfield.

Australian Rules: Forensic Culture in the Fiction of Arthur W. Upfield
BETTY J. BRUTHER
Four novels in Arthur W. Upfield’s Napoleon Bonaparte series—Winds of Evil (1937), Death of a Swagman (1946), The Widows of Broome (1950), and The Bachelors of Broken Hill (1950)—deal with multiple murders committed by a single individual in the outback. Each novel reveals the forensic culture of Australia: common investigative techniques, criminal profiling, forensic psychology, and the examination and interpretation of temporary trace evidence on the landscape.

Murder Most Incidental: Arthur Upfield’s Death of a Lake (1954)
RACHEL FRANKS AND ALISTAIR ROLLS
 (University of Newcastle)
Arthur Upfield is well-known for positioning an Aboriginal detective, Inspector Napoleon “Bony” Bonaparte, as the protagonist for his series. In Death of a Lake (1954), Upfield challenges the conventions of mid-twentieth-century Australian crime stories not only through privileging an Indigenous man but also through disregarding the central concept of the modern crime novel: murder.

The Mysteries of the Colonial Metropolis: Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab and 
Donald Cameron’s Mysteries of Melbourne Life
ORLA DONNELLY ((Trinity College Dublin)
Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886) and Donald Cameron’s Mysteries of Melbourne Life (1873) follow the tradition of urban crime writing. This essay examines three essential elements in these Melbourne crime novels: the treatment of crime and detection, the themes of physical and social mobility, and the exoticized images of urban street folk.

Death in a Literary Context: Detective Novels of the Golden Age as Enacted Criticism
ANDREW GREEN (Brunel University)
This article explores the nature of Golden Age crime narrative. It argues that the works of these authors are “enacted criticism”—creative acts that are fundamentally critical responses to genre—that can be read as mutually constitutive meaning-making “spaces”—texts within which form is constantly renegotiated within a literary context.

Clue-Burying and Misdirection-Making in Peter Robinson’s When the Music’s Over (2016)
CHRISTIANA GREGORIOU (University of Leeds)
Close stylistic inspection of detective novel writing can shed light on the skill of weighing up interpretations. In When the Music’s Over, Robinson relies on readers’ schematic expectations, stereotypes, and prejudices to generate false leads and bury a killer into the narrative background until his significance needs to be foregrounded.

Writing History into Fiction in Didier Daeninckx’s Meurtres pour mémoire
JOHN GLEESON
This article demonstrates Didier Daeninckx’s unique blending of historical fact and fiction, particularly the use of state archives in his breakthrough novel Meurtres pour mémoire (1984). It also examines intertextual references to nineteenth-century writers and the French New Wave cinema that expand the traditional boundaries of the genre.

History Detective: Reading the Weimar Republic in Philip Kerr’s Last Novel Metropolis (2019)
NEIL H. DONAHUE (Hofstra University)
Philip Kerr’s last novel Metropolis (2019) returns his detective, Bernie Gunther, to 1928 as both prequel and epilogue to his series of 14 novels. This essay locates the key to Gunther’s identity and actions in his relation to arch-Nazi Arthur Nebe.


A new chapter.

On October 1, I started as a full-time editor at McFarland & Co., where I'll be helping out with production-related operations and acquisitions (particularly in popular culture). I've had a long relationship with McFarland as editor of the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series (six award nominations and one win; the next volume is vol. 11: Dorothy L. Sayers) and managing editor of Clues: A Journal of Detection (the oldest US scholarly journal on mystery, crime, and detective fiction). I'm looking forward to exploring new challenges.

I'm always interested in receiving proposals for the Mystery Companion series; prospective subjects should have a substantial body of work (loosely defined as a minimum of 25 books or a substantial combination of books, short stories, and other mystery-related works). For further details on submitting a proposal, contact me.

Radio show, Christie's The Secret of Chimneys.

During September, actors from the Albany Civic Theater in Albany, OR, are performing a radio-play version of Agatha Christie's The Secret of Chimneys (1925), which involves a country house, a secret society, blackmail, and murder. Three episodes are currently available.

The return of F. Tennyson Jesse.

F. Tennyson Jesse

In October, the British Library will reprint F. Tennyson Jesse's A Pin to See the Peepshow (1934) as part of its Women Writers series. The novel is based on the Thompson-Bywaters murder case of 1922–23. Jesse—the great-niece of Alfred, Lord Tennyson and a war correspondent, playwright, screenwriter, and novelist—was known for involvement in the series on notable British trials as well as her works with female detective Solange Fontaine.

The illustrated Raymond Chandler.

On Creative Boom, Emily Gosling discusses an illustrated Chinese edition of Raymond Chandler's The Long Goodbye (some illustrations from the book included in the post). The artist is Klaus Kremmerz.

The England of Agatha Christie.

Shedunnit podcaster Caroline Crampton has produced Agatha Christie's England, a new map and guide to British locations in the Christie canon.

Reading group on Caspary, Highsmith, Hughes, Millar.

Edgar nominee Frankie Y. Bailey (University at Albany, SUNY) will be facilitating a Zoom reading group from late September to December for the Center for Fiction on "Women Crime Fiction Writers of the 1940s and '50s."  Books covered will be Laura by Vera Caspary, Strangers on a Train by Patricia Highsmith, In a Lonely Place by Dorothy B. Hughes, and Beast in View by Margaret Millar.

New Conan Doyle Society seeks nominations.

Arthur Conan Doyle. NYPL

The new Arthur Conan Doyle Society (spearheaded by George Mason University's Ross Davies) is devoted to the study and enjoyment of the works of Conan Doyle. It is accepting nominations until November 1, 2021, for the best scholarly writing on Conan Doyle's works or life that was published in 2020–21.

The Doc Savage film that wasn't.

Lester Dent. The Dux, Chillicothe
(MO) Business College yearbook,
1923, p. 106

Over on ThePulp.Net, William Lampkin discusses a TV movie featuring Lester Dent's multifaceted man of action Doc Savage that was proposed for production in 1978 and did not happen.

New CFP for Clues: "Borders and Detective Fiction."

There's a new call for proposals for a theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection: "Borders and Detective Fiction" (guest edited by Manina Jones, University of Western Ontario). Proposals are sought from a wide variety of critical, national, and cultural perspectives addressing how and why borders are represented in detective fiction, film,television, or other media (e.g., computer games, graphic novels, radio drama, podcasts).

Proposals are due November 1, 2021.

Doggone lit.

"The Dog Show: Two Centuries of Canine Cartoons" exhibition at Ohio State University's Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum includes such sleuthhounds as Scooby-Doo and Dick Tracy's Mugg. The exhibition will be on display until October 31, 2021.

The multiple sides of Erskine Childers.

The book club of Bromley House Library in the United Kingdom posted an appreciation of author Erskine Childers's classic espionage novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903; part of the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstones list): "funny and exciting and very atmospheric." It also includes details on Childers's interesting life and premature death (executed during the struggle for Irish independence).

The Skull Murder Mystery (1932).

In the Skull Murder Mystery, criminologist Dr. Crabtree (Donald Meek) and Inspector Carr (John Hamilton) need to deduce who has been murdered when a box of bones is discovered.

This is part of the series of short films produced from source material written by S. S. Van Dine and featuring Crabtree and Carr; see the previous blog posts on The Wall Street Mystery and The Trans-Atlantic Mystery.

Christie's wartime flat.

Photo of Isokon Bldg by Yuriy Akopov. 2015.

 The modernist landmark Isokon Building—aka London's Lawn Road Flats—offers a short film on Agatha Christie's residence there from 1941 to 1947 (see below). It also is presenting an exhibition on Christie in its gallery. Christie lived and wrote there while her second husband, Max Mallowan, was on assignment in the Middle East and while she was working in the dispensary of University College Hospital.

Further reading: David Burke, The Lawn Road Flats: Spies, Writers and Artists

Christie radio plays.

The Artists' Ensemble Theater (IL) performed a radio-play version of Agatha Christie's "The Curse of the Western Star," which can be heard here. The theater also offers a podcast of short radio plays, Mysterious Journey, that includes episodes featuring Christie's "The Man in the Brown Suit."

In other radio-play news, the Greenbelt (MD) Arts Center will hold auditions via Zoom on June 30 and July 1 for a virtual production of the Christie radio play "The ABC Murders" (audition sign-ups close today).

Sisters in Crime grants for academic research.

Sisters in Crime is offering grants of $500 to those working on research projects that contribute to understanding of the role of women or underrepresented groups in crime fiction. The funds may be used to purchase books. The application deadline is July 15, 2021.

Anna Katharine Green: NYS Writers Hall of Fame inductee.

On June 8, mystery pioneer Anna Katharine Green was inducted into the New York State Writers Hall of Fame. Watch the video of the virtual festivities below; the Green portion begins approximately at 1 hour 2 seconds, with a presentation by my co-nominator Clare Meldrum on Green's life and work, followed by an appearance by Rebecca Crozier, Green's great-great granddaughter. Crozier tells an interesting anecdote about Green's reputed response to being barred from a courtroom. 

Want to read works by Green?

• Reprint of That Affair Next Door and Lost Man's Lane
  
  
• Works in the Villanova Digital Library such as The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock and Three Women and a Mystery
  

Another award nomination for the Ian Rankin Companion.

Ian Rankin: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Erin E. MacDonald and edited by me has been nominated for a Macavity Award in the Best Mystery Critical/Biographical category. This follows MacDonald's Edgar Award nomination for the same book and marks the sixth award nomination for the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series.

Literature & Film in Lockdown: Rear Window.

 

Thelma Ritter, James Stewart, and Grace Kelly in Rear Window (1954).

Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Notre Dame's Kylemore Book Club conducted the virtual series "Literature & Film in Lockdown," with one episode on Alfred Hitchcock's Rear Window as "a film about being in lockdown."

Available for preorder: Dorothy L. Sayers companion.

The next volume in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series that I edit is now available for preorder. Dorothy L. Sayers: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Eric Sandberg (no. 11 in the series) looks at the life and work of the creator of sleuths Lord Peter Wimsey and Montague Egg.

The series has garnered Edgar nominations (Ellroy companion, Rankin companion), an Agatha nomination (Paretsky companion), and a Macavity Award (Paretsky companion).

Leslie Charteris in California.

The Desert Sun newspaper looks at the role of Palm Springs in the life and work of Saint creator Leslie Charteris, including the difficulties he experienced because of the Chinese Exclusion Act (Charteris had Chinese and British heritage).

Sherlock Holmes and the Supreme Court.

In a new paper, Ross E. Davies (George Mason University School of Law) looks at connections between Sherlock Holmes and Supreme Court justices such as Louis Brandeis, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., and Charles Evans Hughes. (thanks to the Law & Humanities Blog)

Top, left to right: Louis Brandeis, ca. 1915-21; Charles Evans Hughes, n.d. Bottom: Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr., ca. 1932-33. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

The return of Batya Gur.

In the Tel Aviv Review of Books, Liam Hoare discusses the reissue of the mysteries of Batya Gur (1947–2005) and assesses her place in Israeli literature.

The French Embassy's film noir series.

Out of the Past (1947).

Until July 5, the French Embassy in New York is hosting the series "Out of the Dark: The Mystery of Film Noir" for both in-person and virtual viewing. The films include Rififi (1955), Daybreak (1939), Out of the Past (1947), Nightfall (1956), Two Men in Manhattan (1959), Elevator to the Gallows (1958), Pepe le Moko (1937), Diabolique (1955), Breathless (1959), and Tirez sur le pianiste (Shoot the Piano Player, 1960).

Flashback: Sue Grafton.

Two interviews with Sue Grafton can be seen via the Internet Archive.

"G Is for Grafton" (TV Santa Barbara, 2008). In a short clip, Grafton talks about how she started writing.

"Kinsey and Sue: An Interview with Sue Grafton" (Maryville Talks Books, Maryville University/Left Bank Books/St. Louis Public Radio/Higher Education Channel Television, 2014, coinciding with the release of Grafton's W Is for Wasted and Kinsey and Me). In addition to talking about these works, she discusses the three mysteries of her lawyer father, C. W. Grafton, and the travails of Hollywood.

Virtual mystery plays from the Jewel Theatre Co.

The Jewel Theatre Company in Santa Cruz has been performing virtual radio plays. Some of the mystery-related ones:

"The Hitch-Hiker" by Lucille Fletcher (a man driving cross-country keeps seeing the same mysterious man)

The Whistler: Stranger in the House (a man comes home after six years, but is he who he says he is?) 

   

The Mysterious Traveler: The Good Die Young by Robert Arthur and David Kogan (all is not well between a girl and her new stepmother)

Houdini's mystery tale.

Harry Houdini. NYPL.

Over on the Harry Houdini Circumstantial Evidence blog, Joe Notaro reproduces parts of the serial The Zanetti Mystery (1925), featuring the "genius faker and arch-rogue" Zanetti (future blog posts will have additional chapters). The tale was published under Houdini's name, but Notaro believes it was ghostwritten by Fulton Oursler (aka mystery author Anthony Abbot).

New U-Del exhibition: "Agatha Christie's Poirot."

A new online offering from the University of Delaware Library, Museums, and Press is the exhibition "Agatha Christie's Poirot" that draws from collections of materials on the iconic Belgian detective. It is presented in conjunction with the radio productions by the Resident Ensemble Players of Christie's "King of Clubs" (freely available until May 21) and "The Cornish Mystery" (freely available starting April 23).

Remembering the founding of Malice Domestic.

Barbara Mertz, by Sue Feder

My friend Dean James (aka Miranda James) and I were invited by Dr. Elizabeth Mertz (daughter of Barbara Mertz/Barbara Michaels/Elizabeth Peters) to reminisce about the founding of the Malice Domestic convention in which her mother played such an integral role.  It's presented in two parts: Part 1, Part 2.

Clues 39.1 published: Domestic noir.

Volume 39, no. 1 (2021) of Clues: A Journal of Detection—a theme issue on domestic noir guest edited by Eva Burke and Clare Clarke—has been published. The abstracts follow below. To order the issue or a subscription, contact McFarland. 

Update, 5-10-21. This issue is now available on Kindle and Google Play.

Introduction: Domestic Noir

EVA BURKE AND CLARE CLARKE (Trinity College Dublin)
The guest editors discuss the development of the domestic noir subgenre and the contents of this theme issue of Clues, including an interview with British author Julia Crouch, who coined the term domestic noir, and articles on Irish and Scandinavian domestic noir; women’s book groups; mid-century antecedents of domestic noir; and authors such as A. J. Finn (aka Dan Mallory), Gillian Flynn, Tana French, Paula Hawkins, and Evelyn Piper (aka Merriam Modell).

At Home in Irish Crime Fiction
BRIAN CLIFF (Trinity College Dublin)
The author discusses the connections among domestic noir, Irish crime fiction, and the wider Irish literature, including examples from works by Jane Casey, Sinéad Crowley, Tana French, Catherine Ryan Howard, and Liz Nugent.

“I Am Not the Girl I Used to Be”: Remembering the Femme Fatale in The Girl on the Train
ROSIE COUCH (Cardiff University)
This article situates Rachel from Paula Hawkins’s novel The Girl on the Train (2015) as a contemporary incarnation of the femme fatale, redeployed within the domestic noir subgenre. The analysis demonstrates how Rachel’s perspective works to enact a feminist backlash against postfeminist rhetoric.

The Girl Who Got Mad: Challenging Psychopathology in Domestic Noir’s Antiheroines 
via Sarah Vaughan’s Anatomy of a Scandal (2018)
LIZ EVANS (University of Tasmania)
The author argues that Sarah Vaughan’s legal thriller Anatomy of a Scandal (2018) challenges domestic noir’s questionable tendency to pathologize anger and badness in its female protagonists (often depicted as survivors of rape or abuse) while showing how the persistent alignment of negative emotion with psychological instability undermines these central characters by impeding their self-agency.

Smoke and Mirrors: Dan Mallory, A. J. Finn, and The Woman in the Window as Postfeminist Noir Pastiche
ROBERTA GARRETT (University of East London)
The author discusses The Woman in the Window by A. J. Finn (pseudonym of Dan Mallory), examining Finn’s treatment of female characters and the tropes of the noir and domestic noir subgenres through the lens of postfeminist criticism.

“He Had It Coming”: Reading the Revenge Plot in Domestic Noir’s Gone Girl (2012)
KATHARINA HENDRICKX (University of Sussex)
This article examines Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl (2012) and its popularity with female readers. It suggests that female readers are not only interested in the portrayal of women’s experiences but also engage with the depiction of the revenge plot, which allows women readers to negotiate their frustration and anger with the current postfeminist climate.

Mystery radio plays from the Ohio Shakespeare Festival.

Illustration of W. W. Jacobs. NYPL

During the pandemic, the Ohio Shakespeare Festival has been performing original radio plays for at-home listening, including some based on mystery-related works. A few offerings:

• "The False Burton Combs" based on the story by Carroll John Daly
  
  
• Lady Molly of Scotland Yard based on the stories by Baroness Orczy
  
  
• "The Monkey's Paw" based on the short story by W. W. Jacobs
  

New versions of Glaspell's "Trifles."

Susan Glaspell, NYPL

In February, the Deos Contemporary Ballet in Michigan debuted a ballet version of Susan Glaspell's "Trifles" (1916), the play that preceded her well-known short story, "A Jury of Her Peers" (1917), in which the female characters learn more than male law enforcement officials about the murder of a farmer. 

Upcoming virtual performances of "Trifles":

• Ankeny Community Theatre (IA), March 28

• University at Buffalo–SUNY, April 9–11

More on Chester Himes.

Chester Himes in 1967.
Fotocollectie Anefo,
Dutch National Archives

On UT Austin's Harry Ransom Center Web site, Melanie Alberts highlights a few documents on Chester Himes in the Ransom Center's Knopf archive, concentrating in particular on Himes's novel Lonely Crusade (1947) and his autobiography The Quality of Hurt (1971).

Crime fiction from the Maghreb.

Whitefly, by Abdelilah Hamdouchi

On Al-Fanar Media,  M. Lynx Qualey discusses with Nadia Ghanem, British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at University of London's SOAS, the evolution of crime fiction in the Maghreb (discussing, for example, works by authors from Algeria, Libya, Morocco, and Tunisia).

Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Tiny Tim.

On February 22, the Westport Country Playhouse (CT) will offer the virtual "Script in Hand: A Sherlock Carol," a reading of a play by Mark Shanahan in which Tiny Tim asks the Great Detective to look into the death of Ebenezer Scrooge.

About the images. Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget. "The Boscombe Valley Mystery." The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (New York, 1892), p. 93. Ebenezer Scrooge by Arthur Rackham. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Philadelphia, 1843), frontispiece.

The popularity of Inspector Maigret.

Georges Simenon,
10 May 1965.
Anefo, Dutch Nat Archives

On The Conversation, Véronique Duché (A. R. Chisholm Professor of French at the University of Melbourne) explains why Inspector Maigret is her favorite detective: "Sucking on his pipe, Maigret observes from a distance, inhaling the soul of people and places. Then he slowly closes in."

Edgar nomination for the Rankin companion.

The Edgar Award nominations were announced on January 25, and in the Best Critical/Biographical category is Ian Rankin: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Erin E. MacDonald (edited by me). 

This is volume 10 in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series. It marks the second Edgar nomination for a book in the series (the first was for the James Ellroy companion by Jim Mancall).

An evening with Walter Mosley.

On February 8, the Dallas Museum of Art will be hosting a virtual event with Walter Mosley in connection with his new novel Blood Grove.

"Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer."

S. J. Perelman, 1973,
by Jill Krementz. NYPL.

Cleo Zani of the Eventide Theatre Company (Dennis, MA) performs "Farewell, My Lovely Appetizer," S. J. Perelman's 1944 spoof of hard-boiled detective fiction: "Her bosom was heaving and looked even better that way." Originally published in the New Yorker, it is included in this anthology.

"The father of Russian detective fiction."

Dostoevsky

In "E. A. Poe and A. A. Shklharevskij" in the Dec. 2020 SIC: Journal of Literature, Culture and Literary Translation, Maja Pandzic (University of Zadar, Croatia) discusses the connections among Edgar Allan Poe, Emile Gaboriau, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Aleksandr Andreevich Skljarevski (the last dubbed here "the father of Russian detective fiction").