Mystery radio plays from the Ohio Shakespeare Festival.

Illustration of W. W. Jacobs. NYPL

During the pandemic, the Ohio Shakespeare Festival has been performing original radio plays for at-home listening, including some based on mystery-related works. A few offerings:

• "The False Burton Combs" based on the story by Carroll John Daly
  
  
• Lady Molly of Scotland Yard based on the stories by Baroness Orczy
  
  
• "The Monkey's Paw" based on the short story by W. W. Jacobs
  

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)

Clues 35.1: Conan Doyle, French, Mitchell, Oates, Orczy et al.

Clues vol. 35, no. 1 (2017) has been published. Contact McFarland to obtain a print copy of the issue or to subscribe to the journal.

• Kindle version
• Google Play version
• Nook version

The following are the abstracts for the issue:

Introduction: Reevaluating the Past and the Present
JANICE M. ALLAN

After Sherlock: The Age of Fallible Detectives

MAURIZIO ASCARI (University of Bologna)
In the wake of Sherlock Holmes’s success, writers and critics explored the relationship of the fallible detective to the ideological and aesthetic characteristics of the Golden Age. The author examines this phenomenon, shedding light on the transition between the infallible detectives of positivism and the vulnerable detectives of post–World War II psycho-thrillers.

Old Holmes: Sherlock, Testosterone, and "The Creeping Man" SYLVIA PAMBOUKIAN (Robert Morris University)

Arthur Conan Doyle’s “The Creeping Man” captures the early–twentieth century’s interest in male menopause and hormone replacement. The now-retired Sherlock Holmes and the aged Professor Presbury embody the conflict between aging as diminishment and aging as healthy and vigorous, a conflict still affecting readers who hesitate to accept Holmes as elderly. 

"Look at This Map": Arthur Conan Doyle's Use of Diegetic Illustrations in The Return of Sherlock Holmes 
THOMAS VRANKEN (University of Melbourne)

Four stories from The Return of Sherlock Holmes in the Strand Magazine and Collier's Weekly featured hand-drawn maps and other visual material supposedly created by Arthur Conan Doyle’s characters. These peculiar diegetic phenomena serve an ambivalent, even contradictory, function, both drawing in and repulsing the reader.

Arthur Conan Doyle's Lens KATHERINE VOYLES
The author argues that relations of scale are central to the late-nineteenth-century detective fiction of Arthur Conan Doyle, in which the movement between large and small, far and near, and the distant and the intimate is condensed by making Sherlock Holmes’s own vision the locus of that movement.

True Cock-and-Bull Stories: Negotiating Narrative Authority in Emmuska Orczy’s “Man in the Corner” Tales RACHEL SMILLIE
Critical studies of Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s “Man in the Corner” narratives have been dominated by the collected edition The Old Man in the Corner; however, this edition fundamentally alters the dynamic of the original stories. Revisiting the original tales, this article interrogates the relationship among detective, narrator, and reader.

Orczy's Lady Molly on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Baroness Orczy, from the
Aug. 1913 The Bookman

Now airing on BBC Radio 4 Extra are stories featuring Lady Molly of the "Female Department" of Scotland Yard, penned by Baroness Orczy in 1910. The 10 episodes narrated by Sophie Thompson include "The Ninescore Mystery" (featuring a village murder), "The Irish-Tweed Coat" (featuring a man accused of murder), and "A Day's Folly" (featuring a case of blackmail).

Pimpernel Smith (1941).

This wartime update of Baroness Orczy's The Scarlet Pimpernel features Leslie Howard (who also produces and directs) as a mild-mannered professor and champion of those opposed to the Nazis; he was the elusive Pimpernel in the 1934 film.

Orczy's The Emperor's Candlesticks (1937).

Baroness Orczy,
from the July 1908
Brooklyn Daily
Eagle

Baroness Emmuska Orczy was born today in Hungary in 1865. In The Emperor's Candlesticks, based on the Orczy novel of the same name, William Powell and Luise Rainier are rival agents using candlesticks to convey secret messages. Robert Young and Maureen O'Sullivan costar.

Jan 31 app deadline, UT-Austin Ransom Center.

Baroness Orczy, from the
May 26, 1906
San Francisco Call

The application deadline for research fellowships at UT-Austin's Harry Ransom Center is Jan. 31. Fellowships range from 1 to 3 months and from $1200 to $3000 for individuals who need to consult the center's collections (including those working on dissertations). Its mystery collections include the Sherlock Holmes and Sherlockian Collection; correspondence from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Patrick Hamilton, and Edgar Allan Poe; and manuscripts of J. S. Fletcher, Dashiell Hammett, A. E. W. Mason, Beverley Nichols, and Baroness Orczy.

The return of Lady Molly of Scotland Yard and a classic Jack the Ripper tale.

It's nice to see that, courtesy of Academy Chicago Publishers, two mystery classics by female authors will be back in print: Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger (1914; Hitchcock film 1927), where an elderly couple begin to think the unthinkable about their mysterious tenant (out in March); and Baroness Emmuska Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910), where Lady Molly and her maid, Mary Granard, put "the test of feminine investigation" to unsolved crimes (out in May).

Lowndes (1868–1947), author of more than 50 books and sister of poet Hilaire Belloc, also created vain French detective Hercules Popeau. Several of her books are based on real cases or are true crime studies; go here to read her 1912 McClure's article on poisoner Marie Lafarge. Orczy (1865–1947), best known for The Scarlet Pimpernel, also wrote some of the earliest armchair detective stories with the "Old Man in the Corner," who related his tales of deduction to an eager lady journalist in a teashop.

About the image: George Sanders in The Lodger (1944, dir. John Brahm)

More items from LOC.

More interesting items I've found from the Library of Congress:

• 1934 panel from the comic strip Secret Agent X-9 (text by Dashiell Hammett; art by Alex Raymond).

• "Hungarian Baroness Scores Success as Authoress," on Baroness Orczy, from the December 24, 1905, issue of the San Francisco Call, in which the baroness reveals that she reads Edgar Allan Poe, Victor Hugo, Georg Ebers, and Bret Harte.

• A promotion for the upcoming serialization of Anna Katharine Green's Lost Man's Lane in the January 2, 1898, St. Paul Globe, in which Green talks about her writing philosophy: "I look for the naturally unexpected, and when I have found such a treasure, I take pencil in hand and take the 'dear reader' into my confidence and tell him or her just what, in my estimation, will induce him or her to go on."

About the photo: Anna Katharine Green, taken bet. 1870 and 1890. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Baroness Orczy, Josephine Tey this week on BBC Radio 7.

Baroness Orczy's armchair sleuth The Old Man in the Corner is featured this week on BBC Radio 7 in The Teahouse Detective. Also airing: Inspector Alan Grant finds a dead man in the Highlands in Josephine Tey's The Singing Sands. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

Clues 26.4 published

Vol. 26, no. 4 of Clues: A Journal of Detection has been published. A list of the articles and reviews follows below; go here for the article abstracts, or here for more information about the journal.

Investigating Domestic Disorder: Harriet Prescott Spofford's Detectives Karen J. Jacobsen (Valdosta State U, Georgia) The "Test of Feminine Investigation" in Baroness Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard Stories Ellen Burton Harrington (U of South Alabama) Tijuana the American Town: Images of the Corrupt City in Hammett's "The Golden Horseshoe" J. A. Zumoff (City College of New York) Feline, not Canine: The Rise of the Female Arch-Villain in the 1940s Sherlock Holmes Films from Universal Amanda J. Field (U of Southampton, UK) The Phenomenology of Noir Perception: Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place and Cornell Woolrich's I Married a Dead Man William Brevda (Central Michigan U) REVIEWS Mary W. Tannert and Henry Kratz, eds. and trans. Early German and Austrian Detective Fiction: An Anthology Gundela Hachmann David Geherin. Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction Rachel Schaffer

Happy birthday, Baroness Orczy.

Emma Magdalena Rosalia Maria Josefa Barbara Orczy, aka Baroness Orczy, was born today in 1865. Best known for the gallant Scarlet Pimpernel, she also wrote some memorable mysteries: Stories (1908) with Bill Owen, aka "The Old Man in the Corner," often considered the first appearance of the modern armchair detective; and Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910), in which Lady Molly and her maid Mary Granard join Scotland Yard's "Female Department," as Lady Molly seeks to exonerate her wrongly accused husband. The York Theatre Royal (UK) staged a production of Lady Molly in 2006.