New from McFarland: History of Dial M for Murder.

Hot off the presses at McFarland and Co. is Frederick Knott and Dial M for Murder, in which playwright Richard Weill traces the history of the Edgar-winning play. Included are discussions of Knott's great difficulties in writing Dial M, the Alfred Hitchcock and Andrew Davis films, international productions, and other works by Knott such as Wait Until Dark and Write Me a Murder.

Best Part of the Book podcast: Clues: A Journal of Detection.

On McFarland's Best Part of the Book podcast, executive editor Caroline Reitz (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY/CUNY Graduate Center) and I chat with host Mark Perzel about Clues: A Journal of Detection. Topics include the appeal of mysteries, the history of the journal, revelations that first appeared in the journal, and the most recent issue on disability and detective fiction. Those who would like to subscribe to the journal can receive a 25% discount with the coupon code BESTPART (email journals [at] mcfarlandpub.com).

Film Music Friday: Alfred Hitchcock.

The latest episode of Kansas Public Radio's Film Music Friday focuses on music in the films of Alfred Hitchcock, including The Man Who Knew Too Much (composer: Bernard Herrmann), North by Northwest (composer: Bernard Herrmann), Psycho (composer: Bernard Herrmann), Rear Window (composer: Franz Waxman), To Catch a Thief (composer: Lyn Murray), and Vertigo (composer: Bernard Herrmann).

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

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.

Update, 11 Jan 2026: Kindle version and Nook version available.

Update, 18 Jan 2026: Google Play version 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. 

Score to Cape Fear (1991).

In Film Score Friday, Scott Bettencourt discusses the release by Quartet Records of the score to Cape Fear (dir. Martin Scorcese, 1991), in which composer Elmer Bernstein incorporated elements of composer Bernard Herrmann's score for the earlier Cape Fear film (dir. J. Lee Thompson, 1962) as well as Herrmann's score for Torn Curtain (1962) that Alfred Hitchcock rejected (see Steve Vertlieb's account for the story behind that, which resulted in a permanent rupture in the Hitchcock-Herrmann relationship). To listen to clips from the 1991 Cape Fear score, go here. Both films were based on the novel by John D. MacDonald.

Film Music Friday: Chase films, Jerry Goldsmith.

"Top o' the world":
James Cagney in
White Heat (1949)

The latest episodes of Kansas Public Radio's Film Music Friday feature music from chase films (e.g., The Bourne Identity, The Fugitive, North by Northwest, The 39 Steps, White Heat) and that by famed composer Jerry Goldsmith (e.g., Chinatown).

Film Music Friday: Bernard Herrmann.

Catching up on Film Music Friday episodes from Kansas Public Radio, there's an episode on composer Bernard Herrmann, including excerpts from his scores for Psycho and North by Northwest.

Fan of the theremin? There's an episode on it, including an excerpt from Spellbound.

Prof. Leon Theremin with his eponymous
device, 1928. NYPL

1950s thriller posters.

In the Ransom Center Magazine, Ash Kinney D'Harcourt looks at the design of some 1950s film posters, including for Alfred Hitchcock's North by Northwest (with Cary Grant, 1959) and Ken Hughes's Case of the Red Monkey (aka Little Red Monkey, with Richard Conte, 1955).

Henry Mancini and Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy.

As Scott Bettencourt discusses in Film Score Monthly, Quartet Records has issued on CD the score to Alfred Hitchcock's Frenzy (1972), which includes the version by Ron Goodwin and the version by Henry Mancini that was rejected by Hitchcock. Visit Quartet Records to listen to some clips from both scores.

Kickstarter campaign to re-record Bernard Herrmann.

As Scott Bettencourt notes in Film Score Monthly, Intrada has launched a Kickstarter campaign to support a re-recording by the Royal Scottish National Orchestra of Bernard Herrmann's scores to Nicholas Ray's On Dangerous Ground and Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much. 

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."

Notre Dame's London Book Club: "Hitchcock in London"

Oscar Homolka and Sylvia
Sidney in Hitchcock's Sabotage

The virtual London Book Club of the University of Notre Dame is currently covering "Hitchcock in London." The episodes include discussions of works adapted for Alfred Hitchcock films such as Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger and Joseph Conrad's The Secret Agent. Catch up with episodes here.

Exhibition inspired by Hitchcock films.

Beth Accomando on station KPBS discusses an art exhibition based on Hitchcock films that will be on view at San Diego's Subterranean Coffee Boutique until September 6.

The Great Detective film series in Australia.

Michael Redgrave and
Margaret Lockwood in
The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Envy the lucky Australians who can attend The Great Detective, a series showcasing mystery films at Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery, until September 2. Films include the following:

• Sherlock Holmes (1916)
• Sherlock Jr. (1924)
• The Lady Vanishes (1938)
• And Then There Were None (1945)
• Rear Window (1954)
• Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
• Vertigo (1958)
• Charade (1963)
  
• A Shot in the Dark (1964)
• Dirty Harry (1971)
• Death on the Nile (1978)
• The Mirror Crack'd (1980)
  
• Evil under the Sun (1982)
• Erin Brockovich (2000)
• Mystic River (2003)
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

Bon Voyage (dir. Hitchcock, 1944).

In Bon Voyage, a short film directed by Alfred Hitchcock for the British Ministry of Information, a French intelligence officer questions an RAF sergeant about his escape from France, as the involvement of a German agent is suspected. The film is in French (with English subtitles), with John Blythe as the sergeant and members of the Molière Players in the other roles.

Marie Belloc Lowndes, diarist.

A plot mind, is curiously rare, and does secure for its owner a kind of immortality. By that I mean that long after the writer is dead, the books go on being reprinted.
—Marie Belloc Lowndes

Marie Belloc Lowndes,
ca. 1935

The Diary Review looks at some diary entries of author Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868–1947), including her explanation of the genesis of and reaction to The Lodger (serialized in 1911, published in book form in 1913). Said Lowndes, "When The Lodger was published, I did not receive a single favourable review."

Interview with Evan Hunter (1994).

1963 ad for 87th Precinct
with Robert Lansing as
Steve Carella

Evan Hunter (aka Ed McBain) was the guest on Connecticut Voices in October 1994 to discuss his book There Was a Little Girl (featuring attorney Matthew Hope). He covers his background in art, the reaction to his novel The Blackboard Jungle and to the start of a new series with Hope, the beginning of the McBain pseudonym, the 87th Precinct novels, and the experience of working with Alfred Hitchcock on The Birds. "Paint the picture for the reader to see . . . with words," says Hunter.

Leopold and Loeb exhibition.

Northwestern University's online exhibition "The Murder That Wouldn't Die: Leopold & Loeb in Artifact, Fact, and Fiction" examines the 1924 murder of young Bobby Franks through items such as ransom notes, confessions and psychological evaluations of Leopold and Loeb, court transcripts, trial photos, and fictional versions of the case such as Meyer Levin's Compulsion and Alfred Hitchcock's Rope.

Nathan Leopold (top) and
Richard Loeb in 1924.

Early Hitchcock.

Ad for Three Live Ghosts (1922)

Henry K. Miller in the BFI's Sight & Sound magazine discusses recently discovered Hitchcock silent film work—The Man from Home (1922) and Three Live Ghosts (1922)—but the versions found bear evidence of hands other than Hitchcock's.