A new Jury Box columnist for EQMM.

I debut in the July/Aug 2023 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine as The Jury Box columnist (I am the first woman to write the column--I think I'll be writing one column per year). As someone who grew up reading Jon L. Breen's Jury Box reviews, it's a dream come true. I review classic reprints or short story collections by Anthony Berkeley [Cox], Eleanor A. Blake, J. Harvey Bond [Russell Robert Winterbotham], Mary Fitt [Kathleen Freeman], Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, E. C. R. Lorac [Edith Caroline Rivett], Ellery Queen & Josh Pachter, Jack Ritchie [John George Reitci], and Susan Scarlett [Noel Streatfeild].

Coming soon: Golden Age mystery map.

Coming in April is This Deadly Isle: A Golden Age Mystery Map, created by author Martin Edwards, which provides a map and guide to more than 50 locations from Golden Age mysteries. Authors covered include Margery Allingham, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Ngaio Marsh, Dorothy L. Sayers, and others.

The Golden Age map joins Agatha Christie's England by Shedunnit's Caroline Crampton, and The Hardboiled Apple by Jon Hammer and Karen McBurnie, with art by Andy Gregg.

Mystery tropes of the Golden Age.

On the latest episode of the podcast In GAD We Trust, James Scott Byrnside and the podcast host discuss mystery tropes of the Golden Age such as "the dying message," "the false solution," and "the seance." Authors singled out for particular praise include Christianna Brand and Anthony Berkeley Cox, whereas G. K. Chesterton and Ellery Queen come in for some criticism.

Finding Golden Age gems.

The In GAD We Trust podcast chats with short story sleuth Tony Medawar, who has uncovered unknown or neglected works by authors such as Christianna Brand, John Dickson Carr, Agatha Christie, Anthony Berkeley Cox, Edmund Crispin, Ngaio Marsh, and Dorothy L. Sayers. Medawar talks about his favorite mystery finds and other discoveries he has made. A new volume in Medawar's Bodies from the Library series will be out in October in the United States.

Haycraft-Queen: More titles back in print.

Welcome developments in reprints of titles on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list (those mysteries deemed essential by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen):

• Arcturus Crime Classics has reprinted Helen McCloy's Through a Glass, Darkly and Francis Iles's Before the Fact

• Bello (an imprint of Macmillan) has reissued Roy Vickers's The Department of Dead Ends

• Felony & Mayhem has reprinted Edmund Crispin's The Moving Toyshop

• Ramble House has an edition of Harvey J. O'Higgins's Detective Duff Unravels It

• Titan Books has reissued Sax Rohmer's The Mystery of Dr. Fu Manchu

• There are new ebook versions of Charlotte Armstrong's The Unsuspected (1947 film available on DVD as well) and Clayton Rawson's Death from a Top Hat

Note that there was a 2011 edition of Helen Eustis's The Horizontal Man in ImPress's Best Mysteries of All Time series, but this is an abridged version, and I believe this series is available only by subscription.

And to recap previous HQ reissues:
• Rue Morgue Press's new editions of Manning Coles's Pray Silence (US title: A Toast to Tomorrow) and John Dickson Carr's The Judas Window and The Crooked Hinge

• Blue Dolphin Publishing's reissue of H. F. Heard's A Taste for Honey

Haycraft-Queen Out-of-Print Titles in the United States (compiled and revised by Elizabeth Foxwell)

Anderson Frederick Irving - The Book of Murder - 1930
Bailey H. C. - The Red Castle - 1932
Benson G. R. - Tracks in the Snow - 1906
Charteris Leslie [Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin] - Meet the Tiger - 1928
Coates Robert M. - Wisteria Cottage - 1948
Cole G. D. H. [G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole] - The Brooklyn Murders - 1923 
Dane Clemence [Winifred Ashton] and Helen Simpson - Re-enter Sir John - 1932
Davis Dorothy Salisbury - A Gentle Murderer - 1951
De la Torre Lillian [Lillian McCue] - Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector - 1946
Dickson Carter [John Dickson Carr] - Lord of the Sorcerers - 1946
Dunsany Lord - The Little Tales of Smethers - 1952
Eberhart Mignon G. - The Patient in Room 18 - 1929
Ellin Stanley - Dreadful Summit - 1948
Eustis Helen - The Horizontal Man - 1946
Frome David [Zenith Jones Brown] - The Hammersmith Murders - 1930
Gardner Erle Stanley - The Case of the Sulky Girl - 1933
Halsey Harlan Page - Old Sleuth, the Detective - 1872
Hammett Dashiell - The Adventures of Sam Spade - 1944
Hart Frances Noyes - The Bellamy Trial - 1927
Hughes Dorothy B. - The So Blue Marble - 1940
King Rufus - Murder by the Clock - 1929
Lawrence Hilda - Blood Upon the Snow - 1944
Lipsky Eleazar - The People Against O’Hara - 1950
Lockridge Frances and Richard Lockridge - The Norths Meet Murder - 1940
Lustgarten Edgar - A Case to Answer - 1947
MacDonald Philip - The Rasp - 1924
MacDonald Philip - The Nursemaid Who Disappeared [aka Warrant for X] - 1938
MacHarg William and Edwin Balmer - The Achievements of Luther Trant - 1910
Marquand John P. - No Hero - 1935
Paul Elliot - The Mysterious Mickey Finn - 1939
Piper Evelyn [Merriam Modell] - The Motive - 1950
Rhode John - The Murders in Praed Street - 1928
Rhode John - The Paddington Mystery - 1925
Rice Craig - Trial by Fury - 1941
Ross Barnaby [Ellery Queen] - The Tragedy of Y - 1932
Seeley Mabel - The Listening House - 1938
Stribling T. S. - Clues of the Caribbees - 1929
Trevor Glen [James Hilton] - Murder at School [aka Was It Murder?] - 1931
Van Dine S. S. [Willard Huntington Wright] - The Benson Murder Case - 1926
Walling R. A. J. - The Fatal Five Minutes - 1932
Walsh Thomas - Nightmare in Manhattan - 1950
Waters [William Russell] - Recollections of a Detective Police Officer - 1856
Wells Carolyn - The Clue - 1909

Friday's Forgotten Books: Keep It Quiet, by Richard Hull (1935).

It is one of the mysteries of club life that almost every club periodically has at least one fantastic member who systematically steals the books from the circulating library. . . . For many years the thief, or thieves, had been content with detective stories . . . but when the thief changed his literary tastes and started on expensive volumes of memoirs and travel books, it was generally felt that Something had to Be Done . . . —Richard Hull, Keep It Quiet 46

The untimely demise of a cranky club member means blackmail and other unpleasantness in Richard Hull's Keep It Quiet (1935).

Whitehall Club secretary Ford thinks that he has had a narrow escape from scandal when the distracted chef confesses that he may have accidentally poisoned the perpetually irritating Mr. Morrison and the man's doctor agrees to go along with a verdict of heart failure. But soon typed missives begin to arrive indicating that someone else knows what has happened. They first dictate to the inefficient Ford, somewhat comically, about how the club should be run and then take a more sinister turn.

Keep It Quiet is filled with a delightfully sly humor and is a quick, breezy read at 191 pages.

Richard Henry Sampson (1896–1973) left the exciting(?) world of chartered accountancy for mystery writing after he read Malice Aforethought by Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox). Under the pseudonym Richard Hull, he is best known for his debut novel, The Murder of My Aunt (1934), although he produced some 14 additional novels after it plus one short story ("Mrs. Brierly Supplies the Evidence," Evening Standard, repr. EQMM Apr. 1952). Evidence of his sense of humor may be found in My Own Murderer (1940) where he named a villain Richard Henry Sampson.

U-Chicago's Popular Literature Collection.

Univ of Chicago Library's Special Collections finished an inventory last year of its Popular Literature Collection, which includes about 2000 paperbacks and science fiction magazines, some with lurid

Portrait of Anthony Berkeley Cox
by George Morrow
from Jugged Journalism (1925)

covers. Now, finally, the finding aid is online. Books in the collection include Trial and Error (1945 ed.; film 1941) by Anthony Berkeley [Cox], Death in the Blackout (1946) by Anthony Gilbert, Of Tender Sin (1952) by David Goodis, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher (1944) by C. W. Grafton (father of Sue), Bimini Run (1952) by E. Howard Hunt (yes, the Watergate figure), Dread Journey (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes, Wall of Eyes (1943) by Margaret Millar, and She Faded into Air (1941) by Ethel Lina White (best known for The Lady Vanishes). Some covers from the collection are posted here.

Unlikely Mystery Fan #5: Robert Taft.

Sen. Robert Taft, ca. 1940
(note photo of his father
behind him). Library
of Congress, Prints &
Photographs Div.

According to the New York Times of July 28, 1946, Senator Robert Taft (R–OH) was a devoted mystery fan, with his favorite authors listed as Anthony Berkeley Cox, Dorothy Cameron Disney, and Dorothy L. Sayers.

It seems to have run in the family. His father, President and Supreme Court Chief Justice William Howard Taft, also enjoyed detective stories.

Anthony Berkeley Cox's Jugged Journalism (1925).

Portrait of Anthony Berkeley Cox
by George Morrow,
from Jugged Journalism.

Golden Age mystery author Anthony Berkeley Cox (Before the Fact, Malice Aforethought, The Poisoned Chocolates Case, etc.) published Jugged Journalism in 1925, a collection of pieces that previously appeared in Punch. It is essentially a manual for writing in all sorts of forms, including articles, essays, and short stories, with tongue firmly planted in cheek. To wit, Cox on editors:

"The popular idea of an editor is a sort of literary ogre, gnashing with his fangs the manuscripts of hapless tyros and taking a fiendish delight in trampling upon the efforts of all those whose names are not sufficiently known to the public at large to restrain his savage instincts" (p. 25).

Several of Cox's points should be added to the famous "Decalogue: Ten Commandments for Mystery Fiction" of his fellow Detection Club member, Monsignor Ronald Knox:

• "Your detective is nearly always an amateur and he invariably has two surnames in place of the usual one and a Christian" (p. 36).

• "The mystery story should carry a love interest . . . . she must have slanting green eyes and behave inscrutably" (p. 43)

Cox's sample mystery story in this book is called, memorably, "The Frozen Fang." Also do not miss Cox's "Holmes and the Dasher," a Sherlock Holmes parody written in the style of P. G. Wodehouse:

"What, ho, Watson, old fruit," he said at last, tossing the letter over to me. "What does that mass of alluvial deposit you call a brain make of this, what, what?" (p. 258).

Sadly, this spritely book is out of print. Please, someone republish it.

The return of The Poisoned Chocolates Case.

Anthony Berkeley Cox's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) returns to print today, courtesy of Felony and Mayhem Press.

Journalist-critic and Detection Club secretary Cox (1893–1971) wrote many mystery works that feature his sleuth Roger Sheringham; other works of interest include "Holmes and the Dasher," a Sherlock Holmes parody in the style of P. G. Wodehouse (see Jugged Journalism, 1925), and the Detection Club's round-robin novels The Floating Admiral (1931) and Six Against the Yard (1936), in which Cox participated. His pseudonyms include Francis Iles (Before the Fact, Malice Aforethought).

Vera Caspary's Murder in the Stork Club.

Crippen & Landru has published The Murder in the Stork Club and Other Mysteries, an anthology of Vera Caspary's short stories. I played a small part in the book, as A. B. Emrys, who wrote the Clues 23.3 article "Laura, Vera, and Wilkie," mentioned that mystery stories, which had only been published in magazines, existed in the Caspary papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research; I suggested that she contact C&L's Doug Greene regarding a possible publication.

Emrys (University of Nebraska–Kearney) has done significant critical work on Caspary; in addition to her Clues article, she wrote afterwords to the new editions of Caspary's Laura and Bedelia published by Feminist Press. Her introduction to the collection connects Caspary's fiction, play, and film work with events in her life.

As Emrys notes (pp. 8, 15), Caspary was not a great mystery fan, although she admired the work of Wilkie Collins and Cornell Woolrich, as well as Before the Fact by Francis Iles (aka Anthony Berkeley Cox; filmed as Suspicion by Alfred Hitchcock). The stories continue Caspary's interest in sexual politics and racial issues, and further illuminate her role as a trailblazing writer and professional woman. The menace in her "Stranger in the House" (1943) recalls Charlotte Armstrong or Celia Fremlin. "The Murder in the Stork Club" offers a possible future scenario for the relationship between Laura's Mark McPherson and Laura Hunt, as it features a detective husband and his wife, a writer of radio programs (echoing the Ann Sothern character in A Letter to Three Wives, on which Caspary served as screenwriter). It also includes a Christie-like gathering of suspects at the glamorous club.

For my take on Caspary's wry autobiography, The Secrets of Grown-ups, go here.

... to my mind crime is sordid and inevitably associated with gangsters, frustrated choir singers in dusty suburban towns, and starving old ladies supposed to have hidden vast fortunes in the bedsprings.

—Vera Caspary, "Sugar and Spice." 1943. The Murder in the Stork Club and Other Mysteries 60

About the photo: Vera Caspary, by Jane Rady. From The Secrets of Grown-ups.

Freeling: Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke is "deplorable trash."

I picked up Nicolas Freeling's Criminal Convictions: Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License (1994), but found little within that I could embrace. Anthony Berkeley Cox's The Poisoned Chocolates Case? "Arid." Dashiell Hammett? "A bad writer." He likes Sayers's Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors (the latter is called "a sunny, happy work of immense charm"). He is preoccupied throughout with the question of crime and metaphysics, an argument that I found difficult to follow, and likening the writer to an artist or musician. There is a good chapter on Conan Doyle ("Why worry if Doctor Grimesby Roylott—marvellous name—has brought his snake all the way here [and kept it in a safe, poor thing] expressly to bite young girls with financial expectations?"). The estimation of Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke as "deplorable trash" was the final straw.

I shall have to stick with the grace and thoughtfulness of Michael Gilbert and Vincent Starrett, methinks.

Happy birthday, Anthony Berkeley.

Journalist Anthony Berkeley Cox, who wrote as Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles, was born today in Watford, UK, in 1893. Cox, a founder of the Detection Club, created sleuths Ambrose Chitterwick and Roger Sheringham, and his work includes The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Before the Fact (1932; adapted as the Hitchcock film Suspicion), and Trial and Error (1937; adapted as the film Flight from Destiny). The Iles novel Malice Aforethought (1931), in which a downtrodden doctor plots nefarious doings, appeared on PBS's Mystery! in 2006.

Happy birthday, Anthony Berkeley.

Golden Age British mystery author and journalist Anthony Berkeley Cox, aka Anthony Berkeley and Francis Iles, was born today in 1893. He died in 1971.

Cox, a founder of the Detection Club, created sleuths Ambrose Chitterwick and Roger Sheringham, and his The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929), Before the Fact (1931; adapted as the Hitchcock film Suspicion), and Trial and Error (1937; adapted as the film Flight from Destiny) appear on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list. He also contributed to the Detection Club's round-robin mysteries The Floating Admiral, Ask a Policeman, and Six Against the Yard. The screen version of his novel Malice Aforethought appeared last year on PBS's Mystery! series, and Crippen & Landru has published a collection of his short stories.

For more on Cox's life and work, see Elusion Aforethought: The Life and Writing of Anthony Berkeley Cox by Malcolm J. Turnbull (Popular P, 1996).

"The question will be, not, 'Who killed the old man in the bathroom?' but 'What on earth induced X, of all people, to kill the old man in the bathroom?'"--Anthony Berkeley, preface to The Second Shot (1930), on the future of the detective story.