Clues 43.1: Christie, Hamilton, Hammett, Høeg, multilingual study, Ukrainian crime fiction.

Clues: A Journal of Detection 43.1 (2025) has been published; see below for abstracts. Contact McFarland for a hard copy issue or a subscription. I will update this post once the issue is available in ebook formats.

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Introduction: Insight into Messy Truths
Caroline Reitz (John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center)

The executive editor of Clues discusses this issue’s contents, including a teaching forum on detective fiction in the multilingual classroom and essays on Agatha Christie, Len Deighton, Dashiell Hammett, Peter Høeg, the femme fatale, older female figures in domestic noir dubbed “toxic,” and Ukrainian crime fiction.

Ukrainian Crime Fiction: Trends, Themes, Traditions
Svitlana (Lana) Krys (MacEwan University, Canada)

This article traces the development of crime fiction in Ukraine: its origins in the gothic literary movement, main authors, historical memory and colonial traumas, role as an instrument of Ukraine’s cultural diplomacy, limited presence in the Soviet era, and proliferation following Ukraine’s independence. 

Sympathy for the Devil: Failed Catharsis and Universal Guilt in Agatha Christie's Curtain
Emilie Laurent (Université Clermont Auvergne, France)
Reading Christie's Curtain as a depiction of an ideological battle between good and evil, this essay analyzes the novel as a manipulation of the reader’s moral judgment that dissolves the genre’s over-optimistic promise of restoration social order and generates anxiety about a possible guilt located within the reader’s self. 

Dangerous Skepticism and the Challenge of Acknowledgment in Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Christine Hamm (University of Bergen, Norway)
This essay argues that crime fiction can encourage readings of literature that differ from those criticized by Rita Felski (2015) as outcomes of a “hermeneutics
of suspicion.” Tracing motivations for and effects of skepticism at the plot level,  Nordic noir such as Smilla’s Sense of Snow promotes acknowledgment rather than “critique.”  

Pie in the Sky: Political Readings of Dashiell Hammett’s “Faith”
Jacob A. Zumoff (New Jersey City University)
This essay examines “Faith,” a short story by Dashiell Hammett unpublished in his lifetime, exploring its relationship to detective fiction, proletarian fiction, and literary modernism. The story’s setting suggests a left-wing perspective yet resists easy political categorization, contributing to our understanding of Hammett’s evolving literary approach to detective fiction and complex relationship to left-wing politics and modernism.

A Woman Agent in the Male World of the Cold War Spy Novel:
The Case of Len Deighton’s Fiona Samson
Howard Mason
This essay discusses Len Deighton’s Fiona Samson, a female agent with strong character traits who is working for the West during the Cold War. Samson’s womanhood and femininity, as well as her love of husband and family, eventually take precedence over her agency as a professional intelligence officer.  

New Allingham audiobook.

Cover of 2015 Omnibus ed.
(in French) of Allingham's
The Crime at Black Dudley

New to Librivox's free audiobook catalog is Margery Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley (1929), the first novel in her series with the mysterious sleuth Albert Campion. In the 2 June 1968 New York Times, Allen J. Hubin called The Crime at Black Dudley "a fine tale of death in an English country house."

Peter Lovesey, 1936–2025.

Elizabeth Foxwell (left) and Peter Lovesey,
Malice Domestic VIII, 1996.

 
Like many in the mystery world, I reeled from the news that the multitalented Peter Lovesey died on April 10 at age 88. Over a more than 50-year career, Peter produced many different kinds of mystery works—historically oriented (e.g., the 19th-century Sergeant Cribb series; the hilarious Bertie, Prince of Wales tales; the 1920s The False Inspector Dew, based on the Dr. Crippen case, and winner of the Gold Dagger), contemporary mysteries (the Peter Diamond series), and tons of short stories. The Cribb series was adapted for TV (starring Alan Dobie), and Peter also served as story consultant on the Rosemary & Thyme TV series (with Felicity Kendal and Pam Ferris as gardener-sleuths). Peter became so intrigued by William F. Deeck's regular columns in Malice Domestic's newsletter The Usual Suspects on less-than-stellar writer James Corbett that he managed to track down Corbett's work and Corbett's family. (To give an example of Corbett's work, his novel Devil-Man from Mars notes that the Devil-Man reaches Earth earlier than expected because he had a fine tailwind).

Peter teamed up with fellow writer Edward Marston (aka Keith Miles) to write the light-hearted "The Corbett Correspondence," which pays tribute to Deeck, skewers Corbett, and was nominated for an Agatha Award. It is written as a series of letters between "Agent No. 5" and "Agent No. 6," and I understand that Peter and Keith faxed pieces back and forth to each other as their working method.

Peter was beloved not only for the quality of his work but also for his generosity and keen sense of humor. Malice Domestic attendees will recall his song with writing advice such as "You must make all the characters ugly and mean / And start Chapter 1 with an autopsy scene." He was always up for contributing a short story or a nonfiction piece (as he did for Mystery Scene, when I was asking authors for reflections on their first sale for the magazine) and participating in an event (I once organized a mystery panel at Georgetown University with Peter and Miriam Grace Monfredo). I corresponded with him for years, was privileged to have called him a friend, and will miss him greatly.

Rebecca Josephy on magic and detective fiction.

On The Magic Book podcast, Rebecca Josephy (Oakland Univ) talks about the collection she edited, Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction: Essays on Intersecting Modes of Mystery (McFarland, 2025), on the use of magic and magicians in mysteries, including discussion of impossible crimes and supernatural elements. It analyzes this subgenre's nineteenth-century roots and features reflections on writers such as Canadian-born author Grant Allen (An African Millionaire), Japanese writer Edogawa Ranpo, and American magician-author-editor-illustrator Clayton Rawson. Josephy, a French literature and detective fiction specialist, contributes an essay on gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created by Maurice Leblanc.

• Read about Josephy's earlier Clues article, "A Study in Daniel: Tracing the Biblical Origins of Sherlock Holmes" (38.1, 2020)