Podcast with Bramah, Morrison, Orczy mysteries.

Arthur Morrison. NYPL

Staff of the Saint Paul (MN) Public Library have initiated the Adult Storytime Podcast with the following mystery readings:

• "The Lenten Croft Robberies" by Arthur Morrison (with detective Martin Hewitt, 1894)

Ernest Bramah

• "The Coin of Dionysus" by Ernest Bramah (with blind detective Max Carrados, 1913)

Baroness Orczy

• "The York Mystery" by Baroness Orczy (with the Old Man in the Corner, 1902)

 

 

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle

• Update, September 24, 2020. Episode 4, "The Horror of the Heights" by Arthur Conan Doyle (1913)

"As Far as They Had Got" (round-robin mystery, 1911).

"There, in the middle of the upper panel, was the print of a human hand—in blood!"
Arthur Morrison, "As Far as They Had Got" 1911

Long before the Detection Club's round-robin mystery The Floating Admiral (1931), there was "As Far as They Had Got," which appeared in the September 1911 issue of The Strand magazine and included Richard Marsh (The Beetle), Arthur Morrison (Martin Hewitt, Investigator), and spy novel pioneer E. Phillips Oppenheim among its authors. The Strand dubbed it a "Follow-My-Leader Story." Most of the authors provided a footnote that outlined an ending to the story, but they did not have access to these proposed endings as they wrote their particular section.

The story centers on two men out for sail on a river who become ensnared in the aftermath of the Moorgate Street robbery. The story takes a number of twists and turns.

Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery (1891), the press, and Scotland Yard.

Israel Zangwill, NYPL

Published in the spring 2015 Victorian Periodicals Review is Clare Clarke's "Something for the 'Silly Season': Policing and the Press in Israel Zangwill's The Big Bow Mystery." In this article, Clarke (Trinity College Dublin) focuses on Zangwill's critique of crime reportage and Scotland Yard in the locked-room Big Bow Mystery, a novel that she believes has been neglected despite its wild popularity when it was first serialized and its place on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone List of essential mysteries. Zangwill (1864–1926) is best known as a poet and playwright, his works The Melting Pot and Children of the Ghetto, and his commentary on Zionist matters.

Clarke's article continues her interest in somewhat shady fictional detectives of the Victorian era, as she previously wrote for Clues on Arthur Morrison's criminal-detective Horace Dorrington. Her recent book is Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock.

Journal gems from JSTOR.

JSTOR announced on Sept. 6 that it would permit free access to issues of certain periodicals published before 1923 (list here). This means unfettered access to items such as the following:

• "The Modern Novel," by Amelia E. Barr, North American Review, Nov. 1894. "...[I]f people enjoy the game between criminals and detectives, the question is simply whether the exhibition is, or is not, a moral one—whether the details of crime, the telling of how it was done, how it was concealed, and how it was found out, may not be a kind of criminal school, for those whose inclinations lead them in that direction" (593–94).

William A. Pinkerton,
left, and Robert A.
Pinkerton, ca. 1855.
Library of Congress

• "Detective Surveillance of Anarchists," by Robert A. Pinkerton (son of Allan Pinkerton), North American Review Nov 1901. "The picture of the anarchist drawn by most people, a bearded, drunken, lazy creature, is not at all in line with the facts" (616).

•  "A Short-Story Reading List," by Raymond W. Pence, English Journal May 1920. Recommends the following for teaching students about effective writing:


--G. K. Chesterton.  The Innocence of Father Brown, The Wisdom of Father Brown.

--Arthur Conan Doyle. "The Adventure of the Dying Detective," "The Dancing Men,"  "The Final Problem," "The Norwood Builder," "A Scandal in Bohemia," "Silver Blaze," "The Speckled Band."

--Henry James. "The Turn of the Screw"

--Arthur Morrison. "On the Stairs"

--Edgar Allan Poe. "The Gold Bug,"  "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter."

--Melville Davisson Post. Stories from Uncle Abner: "The Doomdorf Mystery," "An Act of God," The Straw Man," "The Adopted Daughter."

--Robert Louis Stevenson. "Markheim," "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"

Clues 28.2: Cornell Woolrich, Vera Caspary, Arthur Conan Doyle, James Lee Burke, et al.

Volume 28, no. 2 of Clues: A Journal of Detection has been published, which offers among its highlights:

• Hilary A. Goldsmith on Darwinian echoes in Conan Doyle

• Clare Clarke on Arthur Morrison's Horace Dorrington, criminal-detective

• Christine Photinos on whether Cornell Woolrich can be considered a member of the US hard-boiled school

• Laura Vorachek on Vera Caspary's rewriting of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret (1862) in Bedelia (1945)

• Patricia Gaitely on the supernatural in James Lee Burke

A particularly interesting article is Lisanne Sauerwald's analysis of Russian absurdist writer Daniil Kharms (1905–42), who was so enamored of Sherlock Holmes that he dressed like an English gentleman and encoded Holmes's Russian name, Kholms, into his pseudonym, Kharms. Sauerwald also notes that Conan Doyle's name appeared on 1920s lists of censored authors in Russia. Some of the passages included in this article have been translated into English for the first time.

For the table of contents with article abstracts, go here. For online access and subscription information, go here. For indices from Clues vols 1 to 28, go here.

Graham Greene's picks, neglected books.

The Neglected Books blog discusses Graham Greene's 1940s picks of neglected literary works, which include Arthur Conan Doyle's Professor Challenger adventure The Poison Belt; Roy Horniman's Israel Rank: The Autobiography of a Criminal (aka the Alec Guinness film Kind Hearts and Coronets); Conan Doyle brother-in-law E. W. Hornung's Raffles, The Amateur Cracksman; William Babington Maxwell's The Case of Bevan Yorke (Maxwell was the son of Mary Elizabeth Braddon); Arthur Morrison's The Hole in the Wall (Morrison is best known for Martin Hewitt: Investigator and A Child of the Jago); and Anthony Hope's The King's Mirror (Hope is best known for The Prisoner of Zenda).