December 15 Zoom event on the work of Agatha Christie.

On December 15, Nicholas Birns and his mother, Margaret Boe Birns (both NYU), will talk about their new book, Agatha Christie Under the Magnifying Glass: Close Readings of 12 Novels, in a Zoom event. I acquired the book for McFarland and Co. and will make a few remarks. A special guest will be J.C. Bernthal, author of McFarland's Agatha Christie: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (which I edited) and editor of The Ageless Agatha Christie: Essays on the Mysteries and the Legacy.

As Birns and Birns note in the preface, they set out 

to examine how particular characters, phrases, contexts, and plot lines contribute to the success of Agatha Christie’s authorial compositions. But we will also look at them as they tear against the seams and beg for the scrutiny that goes outside the text as traditionally conceived. Rather than concentrating exclusively on overall themes, tropes, and effects in her oeuvre (as in Tison Pugh’s 2023 Understanding Agatha Christie), our emphasis on the uncertainties of particularity leads us to also concentrate on individual works by Christie.

Works covered in the book are The ABC Murders, A Murder Is Announced, At Bertram's Hotel, Curtain, Death Comes as the End, The Hollow, The Murder at the Vicarage, The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, Murder on the Orient Express, N or M?, Third Girl, and Towards Zero.

Event information

When: December 15, 2025, at 4:30P ET
Zoom link

Note that there's a holiday sale at McFarland until the end of the month; take 20 percent off with coupon code HOLIDAY25. 

20 years of The Bunburyist.

The inquiring Elizabeth Foxwell. 

I missed the 20th anniversary of The Bunburyist (which occurred on November 5). I've been very busy as an editor at McFarland and Co., which—although I relish the opportunity to work on many fascinating projects dealing with subjects like women's history and mystery fiction—leaves me less time to devote to social media. I am very grateful for the many visitors who are interested in mystery history and continue to drop by. They might note that lately I've been including posts about mystery-related music (particularly film music), as I tend to find that composers often do not receive much attention for their important work.

The following are the top 10 posts on The Bunburyist based on views, and I should note that my page with links to mystery course syllabi is pretty popular as well. Do you have other favorites?
 

 The Top 10 Posts on The Bunburyist, 2005–25:

10. "Iniquity is catching":  Frank R. Stockton's The Stories of the Three Burglars (1889)

 9. "Security Risk" [TV episode, narrated by Jack Webb, 1963] 

 8. "Iconic Detectives" exhibition at Ohio State

 7. New release, Gerald Fried's crime drama music

 6. Hidden Fear (film, 1957)

 5. McFarland's true crime sale

 4. Upcoming tribute to Rod Serling

 3. "Committed" (TV episode with Alan Ladd, 1954)

 2. "The Grave Grass Quivers," by MacKinlay Kantor (1931)

 1. Dozen Best Detective Stories Ever Written

New Thursday Murder Club CD.

Film Score Friday reveals that there's a new CD from Intrada available of Thomas Newman's score for The Thursday Murder Club (dir. Chris Columbus, 2025; book by Richard Osman). For more information and to hear some sample tracks, go here.

Historical marker honoring Rod Serling unveiled.

Jesse Bethea on Columbus Underground reports on the unveiling of a new historical marker on the Antioch College campus that honors writer-producer Rod Serling, an Antioch graduate and instructor. At the ceremony, Ohio governor Mike DeWine showed a photograph of his grandfather Albert Little teaching Serling. 

New film music releases: Gerald Fried, Bernard Herrmann.

Film Score Friday brings news of the following new releases:

•  Gerald Fried's score for What Ever Happened to Aunt Alice? (dir. Lee H. Katzin and Bernard Girard, 1969; based on Ursula Curtiss' The Forbidden Garden)

• The Devil and Bernard Herrmann, which includes selections from his score for Obsession (dir. Brian De Palma, 1976) 

• Bernard Herrmann's score for Psycho (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1960), performed by the National Philharmonic Orchestra in 1975 and directed by the composer

Film Music Friday: More music from film noir.

Joseph Cotten, left, with Jack Moss in Eric Ambler's
Journey into Fear (1943)

A recent episode of Kansas Public Radio's Film Music Friday focused on music from film noir, including selections from Double Indemnity (composer Miklós Rózsa, 1944); Journey into Fear (composer Roy Webb, 1943); Laura (composer David Raksin, 1944); Please Murder Me (composer Albert Glasser, 1956); Sorry, Wrong Number (composer Franz Waxman, 1948); and more.

A history of early female judges.

Illustration of suffragist and lawyer Catharine Waugh
McCulloch, elected as a justice of the 
peace in Illinois in 1907 
(Long Valley [ID] Advocate, 16 May 1907)

As the Law and Literature blog notes, Elizabeth D. Katz, professor of law at the University of Florida, discusses the history of often forgotten early female judges in  "'May It Please Her Honor': The United States' First Women Judges, 1870–1930" in the Washington University Law Review. Some even obtained positions before passage of the 19th Amendment that granted US female citizens the right to vote.

Edward Gorey, mystery fan.

Sign for the Edward Gorey House.
Photo by Elizabeth Foxwell.

I recently visited the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, MA, which was a fascinating place—full of collections compiled by the distinguished artist and author (winner of the Tony Award for set design and costume design for Dracula—the docent referred to the Gorey House as "the house that Dracula built"). His book collection included some 26,000 volumes and is now housed at San Diego State University (about 35 percent of it can be searched here).

Gorey (1925–2000) was a devoted mystery fan. A short browse through his library yields 41 works by Agatha Christie, 39 works by Wilkie Collins, 30 books by Guy Boothby, 24 books by Margaret Sutton [Rachel Beebe], 16 Nancy Drew books, 16 novels by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, 11 works by Jane Langton, 8 books by Patricia Wentworth, 7 books by Catherine Aird, and 6 books by Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar].

Some sample titles:

• Catherine Aird [Kinn Hamilton McIntosh], The Religious Body (1980 ed.); Henrietta Who? (1981 ed.); The Stately Home Murder (1980 ed.)
• Grant Allen, Miss Cayley's Adventures (1899)
• Agatha Christie, Death in the Air (1935); Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (1985); Mort Sur Nil [Death on the Nile] (1948; note that Gorey earned a degree in French literature from Harvard); Murder in Three Acts (1934) 
• Wilkie Collins, Armadale (1866); No Name (1978 ed.); The Dead Secret (1979 ed.)
• J.S. Fletcher, The Markenmore Mystery (1923); Ravensdene Court (1922)
• Michael Gilbert, The Black Seraphim (1985); End-Game (1983)
• Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (1941); Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953)
• Jane Langton, Divine Inspiration (1994 ed.); Emily Dickinson Is Dead (1985); Murder at the Gardner (1989)
• Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters (1958); The Blue Hammer (1976)
• A.E.W. Mason, They Wouldn't Be Chessmen (1985 ed.)
• Ed McBain [Evan Hunter], Lightning (1985)
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor, The Cape Cod Mystery (1965 ed., 1988 ed.); The Criminal C.O.D. (1972 ed.); Death Lights a Candle (1989 ed.), Diplomatic Corpse (1986 ed.); The Left Leg (1988 ed.)
• Patricia Wentworth, Grey Mask (1952 ed.); Poison in the Pen (1980 ed.); She Came Back (1981 ed.)
  
  
  

  

  Edward Gorey in his kitchen, Aug 1999. 
  Wikimedia Commons, 
  Photographer: Christopher Seufert 

  
  

The Rosenbach's Sherlock Monthly programs.

"Lestrade took out his official note-book."
Illustration by Sidney Paget for "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons,"
 by Arthur Conan Doyle. The Strand Magazine, May 1904.

The Rosenbach offers Sherlock Monthly, a free series of programs delving into the Sherlock Holmes canon. Recent episodes focus on "The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter" (1904), "The Adventure of the Golden Pince-Nez" (1904), "The Adventure of the Three Students" (1904), "The Adventure of the Six Napoleons" (1904), "The Adventure of Charles Augustus Milverton" (1904), and "The Adventure of Black Peter" (1904). The programs are archived.

Film Music Friday: Jazz in Films.

Steve McQueen in Bullitt (dir. Peter Yates, 1968)

A recent Film Music Friday on Kansas Public Radio pays tribute to jazz in films, including Anatomy of a Murder (music by Duke Ellington, 1959), Bullitt (music by Lalo Schifrin, 1968), and more.

Clues 43.2: Disability and Detective Fiction.

Volume 43, no. 2, of Clues: A Journal of Detection has been published—a theme issue on Disability and Detective Fiction, guest edited by Susannah B. Mintz (Skidmore College) and Mark Osteen (Loyola Univ Maryland). See below for the abstracts. Contact McFarland for a copy of the issue or a subscription; I will update this post when the ebook versions are available.

Introduction: Disability and Detective Fiction
 / Susannah B. Mintz and Mark Osteen 

“The blindest of the blind”: Blind Men, Beggars, and Murderers in Catherine Crowe’s Crime Fiction / Emily Cline
Catherine Crowe portrays literal and figurative blindness in the proto-detective stories Men and Women (1843), Lilly Dawson (1847), and “The Blind Witness and His Dog” (1849).  Embodied and metaphorical blindness propose competing forms of knowledge, sympathetic and diagnostic, revealing the optocentric biases that limit the Victorian criminal court’s means of detection. 

Seeing Is (Dis)believing: Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s Classification of Disability in The Trail of the Serpent  / Roshnara Kissoon (Teachers College, Columbia University)
This essay examines the depiction of disability in Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1860), which features a nonverbal detective protagonist. Braddon’s novel elucidates, and contributes to, a taxonomy of disability that intersects with its nuanced class system, ultimately revealing the limits of both, despite its innovative portrayal. 

Broken Bones: Isolation, Mobility, and Interdependence in Rear Window / Mark Osteen 
This essay demonstrates how the sleuthing of L.B. Jefferies, his girlfriend Lisa, and his nurse Stella metaphorically reassembles Mrs. Thorwald, Rear Window’s murder victim. Jefferies’s disability eventually enables him to recognize not only his but also neighbors’ interdependency and results in his metamorphosis into a more compassionate neighbor and lover. 

“Do you see?”: Disability and “Seeing” Evidence in Thomas Harris’s Red Dragon / Darren Gray 
Red Dragon subverts crime fiction’s tropes of the monstrous criminal and extraordinary detective by exploring both disabled and nondisabled viewpoints. Through disfigured and speech-impaired criminal Francis Dolarhyde, investigator Will Graham, and the blind Reba McAllen, Thomas Harris exposes the subjectivity of perception and the impacts of ableism, marginalization, and prejudice. 

Disabilities and Stephen King’s Detectives / Michael J. Blouin (Milligan Univ)
Stephen King has repeatedly returned to characters with disabilities to explore what it means to be human, intersecting with King’s under-examined forays into detective fiction. Although King’s depictions of individuals living with disabilities remain problematic, his bestselling works offer fecund sites for ruminating upon the relationship between disabilities and detective stories. 

Coming soon: Miklós Rózsa's score to Time After Time.

Scott Bettencourt notes in Film Music Friday of the upcoming release by buysoundtrax of famed Hungarian composer Miklós Rózsa's score for Time After Time (1979, cowrit. and dir. Nicholas Meyer). For more information and to hear some sample tracks, go here. 

Upcoming tribute to Rod Serling.

Rod Serling, from a 1959
Mike Wallace interview

The Yellow Springs Film Festival (Ohio) plans a tribute to Rod Serling on October 2, featuring his author daughter Anne Serling (As I Knew Him: My Dad, Rod Serling) and writer-critic Mark Dawidziak (who has written a book on the Twilight Zone), a performance of the ca. 1948 Serling-Bill Rega radio play "The Air Is Free" (focusing on two endangered coal miners), a screening of the Twilight Zone episode "The Obsolete Man," and a panel discussion. 

McFarland's true crime sale.

In honor of CrimeCon, McFarland is running a sale on its true crime books. Use coupon code CRIMECON25 to save 20 percent through the end of September.

 

New release, Gerald Fried's crime drama music.

As Scott Bettencourt notes in Film Score Friday, there's a new release from Dragon's Domain records, Gerald Fried: The Crime Dramas, which features Fried's music for two Roger Corman films: The Cry Baby Killer (1958, with Jack Nicholson) and Machine Gun Kelly (1958, with Charles Bronson). Go here for more information and some sample tracks. 

Fried composed for TV series such as The Man from U.N.C.L.E., Star Trek, and Roots. 

More on Harry O.

Over on The Rap Sheet, J. Kingston Pierce conducts an extensive interview with Steve Aldous and Gary Gillies, authors of McFarland's Harry O Viewing Companion, about the beloved PI series starring David Janssen and Anthony Zerbe (the latter in an Emmy–winning performance). Topics include Janssen's approach to the role, series locations, costars (such as Farrah Fawcett), the important contributions of screenwriter Howard Rodman, and much more. I acquired the book for McFarland.

Clues CFP: Transportation and Mobility in Crime Fiction.

Richard Hannay (Kenneth More) in a tight spot
in The 39 Steps (1959)

There's a new Call for Papers for a theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection: Transportation and Mobility in Crime Fiction (guest editors: Šárka Bubiková and Olga Roebuck, University of Pardubice, Czech Republic; proposal deadline: 1 Mar 2026).

The CFP follows below. To access a text version, visit this link. 

New releases: On Her Majesty's Secret Service; Prince of the City

As Scott Bettencourt mentions in Film Score Friday, new releases include John Barry's score for the James Bond film On Her Majesty's Secret Service (dir. Peter H. Hunt, 1969) from La-La Land and Paul Chihara's score for the police corruption drama Prince of the City (dir. Sidney Lumet, 1981) from Quartet.

For more information and to listen to some excerpts:

• On Her Majesty's Secret Service 
• Prince of the City

 

A glimpse of Ernest Tidyman.

Ad for Shaft's Big Score
(1972, screenplay by 
Ernest Tidyman)

Archives on the Air of Wyoming Public Radio features an image of a press pass for a young Ernest Tidyman (1928–84; author-screenwriter of Shaft and screenwriter for The French Connection), who worked for newspapers since his teens. His papers are at the American Heritage Center, University of Wyoming.

A blue plaque for J.S. Fletcher.

The Pontefract [UK] Civic Society announced the placement of a blue Heritage Plaque at Denby Farm, the childhood home of mystery writer J.S. Fletcher (1863–1935; author of The Middle Temple Murder [1919], etc.). In the February 1933 issue of American Mercury, Fletcher—seeking to address a question regarding his output vs. that of Edgar Wallace—reported that he had published 233 books, according to the British Museum. 

J.S. Fletcher, ca. 1912. 
Wikimedia Commons

2025 lectures on Arthur Conan Doyle.

Arthur Conan Doyle, 
NYPL

If you missed this year's lectures related to Arthur Conan Doyle (hosted by the Conan Doyle Collection in Plymouth, UK), you can now watch them online:

• "Conan Doyle: Adventurous Life, Enduring Memories" (Burt Wolder. Although the label on this states "Marriage and Divorce," it's actually the "Adventurous Life" presentation)
  
  
• "Conan Doyle: Marriage and Divorce" (Jonathan Cranfield. Although the label on this states "Adventurous Life," it's actually the "Marriage and Divorce" presentation)
  
  
• "Conan Doyle: Misquoter" (Sheldon Goldfarb)
  
  
• "If Arthur Conan Doyle Met Charles Dickens" (Clifford Goldfarb)

For summaries of the lecture topics, go here. 

40th anniv ed., Young Sherlock Holmes score.

As Scott Bettencourt notes in Film Score Friday, Intrada has issued a 40th anniversary edition of the score by Bruce Broughton for Young Sherlock Holmes (1985, dir. Barry Levinson, perf. Nicholas Rowe as Sherlock Holmes). For more information or to listen to some excerpts, go here.

Film Music Friday: David Raksin.

Kansas Public Radio's Film Music Friday recently featured the music of composer David Raksin, including his haunting theme for Laura (1944) and music for The Big Combo (1955).

From left: Gene Tierney, Clifton Webb, and Dana Andrews in Laura (1944)

Ohio historical marker for Rod Serling.

Rod Serling testifies before 
the FCC in Jan. 1960.

John Kiesewetter of Cincinatti's WVXU writes of the upcoming unveiling of a historical marker in Yellow Springs, OH, to honor writer, producer, and instructor Rod Serling. The marker will be situated outside One Morgan Place at Antioch College. Serling graduated from Antioch in 1950 and later taught at the college. The Yellow Springs Film Festival plans a tribute to his work in October. 

Presentations, Nancy Drew 95th Anniversary Convention.

Toledo [OH] Public Library, which hosts the Jennifer Fisher Nancy Drew Collection, has posted videos from the April 2025 Nancy Drew 95th Anniversary Convention, including the following:

• Fisher, founder of the Nancy Drew Sleuths group, discusses "95 Years of Nancy Drew" 

• Fisher on collecting Nancy Drew 

• Stacia Deutsch, who has written under the Nancy Drew pseudonym Carolyn Keene 

• Erika Head on using Nancy Drew in the classroom 

My July-Aug 2025 EQMM column.

My Jury Box column has been published in the July/August 2025 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, including reviews of short story collections and classic reprints by Ethel Lina White (of The Lady Vanishes and Some Must Watch fame), Sara Woods, the intriguing Madelon St. Denis, Miles Burton (aka Cecil John Charles Street), Dorothy Cameron Disney, and Mary Fortune (a 19th-century mystery pioneer who emigrated to Australia).

Aldous and Gillies on Harry O.

Steve Aldous and Gary Gillies, authors of McFarland's Harry O Viewing Companion, clear up misconceptions about the beloved PI series and discuss the program's original San Diego location in a two-part episode of Ed Robertson's TV Confidential radio show. Part 1 includes a clip of the late David Janssen talking about the series and some clips from Harry O episodes. Part 2 covers the roles of Farrah Fawcett (as Harry's girlfriend Sue Ingham) and Les Lannom (as aspiring criminologist Lester Hodges) as well as the favorite episodes of Aldous, Gillies, and Robertson.

Score to Pursuit (1972).

Martin Sheen in Pursuit (1972)

As Scott Bettencourt writes in Film Music Friday, Intrada has released Jerry Goldsmith's score to the TV movie Pursuit (dir. and writ. Michael Crichton, 1972). In Pursuit, G-man Ben Gazzara seeks to thwart an extremist who plans to unleash nerve gas on a city. For more information and to hear some selections, go here. 

New mural on Erle Stanley Gardner, Malden, MA.

Malden, MA, has honored its native son, author-attorney Erle Stanley Gardner, unveiling a mural by Fred Seager on May 19 that pays tribute to the Perry Mason mysteries. It is located on the Bike to the Sea bike path in Malden. Gardner was born in Malden in 1889, moving to California with his family when he was 10 years old.

Mural by Fred Seager in Malden, MA, honoring the Perry Mason mysteries
by Erle Stanley Gardner. Photo: Malden's Ward 3 Councillor Amanda Linehan

New dramatization, Peters' Crocodile on the Sandbank.

Graphic Audio will release in June a new full-cast dramatization of Elizabeth Peters' Crocodile on the Sandbank, the first in her series with 19th-century Egyptologist Amelia Peabody (later Emerson). The intrepid Amelia, armed with her trusty parasol, faces skullduggery on an archaeological dig, including a rampaging mummy.