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. 

The contributions of Wilkie Collins.

Wilkie Collins. NYPL.

As we enter the bicentennial year of Wilkie Collins' birth, public historian Katherine Hobbs discusses in Smithsonian Magazine how Collins' legal background informed his novels dealing with the inequities of women's place in Victorian society and criticism that always seemed to put him behind Charles Dickens, his friend and sometime rival, despite Collins' ground-breaking contributions to detective and sensation fiction.

Collins & Dickens: Exhibition and conference.

Fine Books and Collections discusses the "Mutual Friends: The Adventures of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins" exhibition at the Charles Dickens Museum that runs until Feb 25, 2024, and looks at the personal and professional relationship of these two Victorian authors.

The Univ of Buckingham will host the conference "Collins and Dickens—Dickens and Collins" on June 20–21, 2014, to celebrate the bicentennial of Collins' birth and examine matters such as Dickens' role as mentor to Collins and Collins' influence on Dickens, Dickens-Collins projects (such as The Frozen Deep) and rivalries, and theatrical and film productions of their works. Proposals are due Jan 31, 2024. 

Wilkie Collins (top),
Charles Dickens. NYPL

 

Upcoming Grolier Club exhibition: "Key Books in Detective Fiction."

Feminist Press ed.
of The G-String Murders

New York's Grolier Club will open the exhibition "Whodunit? Key Books in Detective Fiction" in November 2023, which will feature significant and unusual mystery works from the collection of Grolier Club member Jeffrey Johnson. Items will include The Mystery of Edwin Drood by Charles Dickens,  The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle, The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie, and The G-String Murders by Gypsy Rose Lee (often thought to be ghosted by Craig Rice).

"Investigating Detectives" exhibition.

The National Centre for the Written Word in South Shields, England, is offering an online version of its exhibition "Investigating Detectives" (which will be on display until March 2022). Included are the expected Inspector Bucket, Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, and Miss Marple but also children's mysteries, detectives on screen, subgenres such as hardboiled and Nordic noir, and forensic history.

Sherlock Holmes, Ebenezer Scrooge, and Tiny Tim.

On February 22, the Westport Country Playhouse (CT) will offer the virtual "Script in Hand: A Sherlock Carol," a reading of a play by Mark Shanahan in which Tiny Tim asks the Great Detective to look into the death of Ebenezer Scrooge.

About the images. Sherlock Holmes by Sidney Paget. "The Boscombe Valley Mystery." The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle (New York, 1892), p. 93. Ebenezer Scrooge by Arthur Rackham. A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens (Philadelphia, 1843), frontispiece.

History Extra on real-life and fictional Scotland Yard detectives.

Jack Hawkins in Gideon of Scotland Yard (1958)

History Extra of BBC History Magazine looks at the history of Scotland Yard, including Charles Frederick Field (the model for Dickens's Inspector Bucket in Bleak House). It also covers fictional Yard representatives such as Wilkie Collins's Sergeant Cuff, John Creasey's George Gideon, Andrew J. Forrester Jr.'s Mrs. G, and P. D. James's Adam Dalgleish.

Carolyn Wells's "A Reader's Lament" (1899).

Carolyn Wells,
ca. 1923

Carolyn Wells's The Clue (1909) appears on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list of essential mysteries, and she's also known for her Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In addition, she wrote poetry, such as the following "Reader's Lament" (The Bookman, Mar. 1899, p. 22):

I cannot read the old books
I read long years ago;
Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray,
Bulwer and Scott and Poe.
Marryat's yarns of sailor life,
And Hugo's tales of crime; —
I cannot read the old books,
Because I haven't time.

I love the dear old stories,
My thoughts to them will stray;
But still one must keep posted on
The writers of to-day.
My desk is piled with latest books
I'm striving to despatch;
But ere I've finished all of them,
There'll be another batch.

Hope's new one isn't opened yet,
I've not read James's last;
And Howells is so prolific now,
And Crawford writes so fast.
Evelyn Innes I must skim,
O'er Helbeck I must pore;
The Day's Work I'll enjoy, although
I've read the tales before.

And then there is The King's Jackal,
The Gadfly, Caleb West,
Silence, The Forest Lovers, and—
I can't name all the rest.
I'll try to keep up with the times,
But, oh, I hope that I
May read my David Copperfield
Once more before I die.

BBC Radio 4: The life of Wilkie Collins.

Vanity Fair cartoon of Wilkie
Collins by Adriano Cecioni,
Feb. 1872

This week on BBC Radio 4 is Peter Ackroyd's examination of the life of Wilkie Collins, including his relationship with his artist father, his friendship with Charles Dickens, his unusual personal life, and his landmark mystery works The Woman in White and The Moonstone.

Clues 34.2: Webb, Woollcott, and actuarial detection.

The vol. 34, no. 2 issue of Clues (2016) has just been published and can be ordered from McFarland. The issue is also on Kindle, Nook, and Google Play.

The following are abstracts for the issue.

Probability and Capital Crime: 

The Rise and Fall of Actuarial Detection in Victorian Crime Fiction
CHERYL B. PRICE (University of North Alabama)
The author examines the influence of life assurance on early detective fiction. Actuarial detectives in Charles Dickens’s “Hunted Down” (1859) and life assurance influenced both the language and methodology of later fictional detectives, and the life assurance profession impeded detection in Charles Warren Adams’s The Notting Hill Mystery (1865).

Making Crime Pay: 
Alexander Woollcott, the Algonquin Round Table, and the Aesthetics of Crime Fiction
MARY LOUISE REKER (Library of Congress)
Between the two world wars New York theater critic Alexander Woollcott was deeply enamored of crime writing. He corresponded with both U.S. and British crime writers and promoted their work through his columns and broadcasts. Woollcott also wrote a regular column for the New Yorker, whose founding editor, Harold Ross, encouraged the writer Edmund Wilson to challenge Woollcott’s crime fiction aesthetic.

Policing the Crime Drama:
Radio Noir, Dragnet, and Jack Webb’s Maladjusted Text
JEFF OUSBORNE (Suffolk University)
The links between film noir and “radio noir” crime drama remain largely unexamined. The author explores the relationship between Jack Webb’s early radio-noir mystery program Pat Novak, for Hire and his work on the semi-documentary police procedural Dragnet. The programs suggest the porous borders of film, radio, and television, which together shed light on aesthetic, thematic, generic, and cultural shifts in the development of noir and procedural drama across different media.

Judith Flanders's The Invention of Murder on BBC Radio 4.

BBC Radio 4's Book of the Week is offering readings of Judith Flanders's The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime. I reviewed the book here for the Washington Independent Review of Books.

Of related interest: Readings are starting of Kate Summerscale's The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher (on the Constance Kent case).

Drood exhibition, Dickens Museum.

Ad for The Mystery of
Edwin Drood (1935)

On view until November 22 at London's Charles Dickens Museum is the exhibition "A Dickens Whodunit: Solving The Mystery of Edwin Drood," which is curated by Clues contributor and Dickens specialist Pete Orford (University of Buckingham). It features clips from  adaptations and discussions of various theories about the perpetrator in Dickens's unfinished work. Visitors can also see the desk on which Dickens wrote Drood.

Orford is also involved in The Drood Inquiry, an interactive investigation into Dickens's mystery.

Exhibition: "Mystery Writers Past and Present."

Frances Fyfield

There is a photographic exhibition from UK's National Portrait Gallery, "Mystery Writers Past and Present," on view at Darlington's Head of Steam Museum until December 14. The photos feature contemporary writers such as P. D. James taken by Nicola Kurtz as well as Victorian photos of authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle and Charles Dickens. The list of Kurtz's photographic subjects in the gallery's collection includes Clare Curzon, Stella Duffy, Frances Fyfield, the late H. R. F. Keating, Val McDermid, Andrew Taylor, and Minette Walters.

A similar 2002 exhibition included photos of Colin Dexter and Ian Rankin.

BL's "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians."

1877 Chatto & Windus edition
of Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone

The British Library's online exhibition on "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians" has some items of interest for mystery fans:

• Under "the Gothic" are features on "The Victorian Supernatural," "An Introduction to The Woman in White," and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• Under "The Imperial Gothic" are works by H. Rider Haggard and Richard Marsh, as well as Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone.

• Under "Crime and Crime Fiction" are "Crime in Oliver Twist," "Crime in Great Expectations," and "Juvenile Crime in the 19th Century." Also featured (by Judith Flanders, author of The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime that I reviewed) are "The Creation of the Police and the Rise of Detective Fiction" "Jack the Ripper," "Murder as Entertainment," and "Penny Dreadfuls" (including The Boy Detective, 1865).

Note that the attribution for Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) is incorrect; it is not by the pseudonymous Andrew Forrester (James Redding Ware), but rather William Stephens Hayward.

Update. The BL has corrected the attribution for Revelations of a Lady Detective.

Foxwell review: Victorian crimes in fiction.

Today in the Washington Independent Review of Books is my review of Judith Flanders's The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime.

Alexander McCall Smith on serial publication.

Charles Dickens, NYPL

In this essay on BBC Radio 3, Alexander McCall Smith, creator of Botswana sleuth Precious Ramotswe, muses on the challenges of writing serial fiction (with examples from Charles Dickens) and states: "I fail to meet the standards he sets."

The mysteries of G. W. M. Reynolds.

G. W. M. Reynolds.  NYPL

In this podcast, BBC Radio 3 discusses the often hardscrabble life of G. W. M. Reynolds (1814–79), whose serial The Mysteries of London (1844–56) featuring the seamy side of the city was wildly popular, but he was decidedly unpopular with Dickens for his appropriation of Mr. Pickwick. Stephen Knight examines Reynolds's work in the recent Mysteries of the Cities.

Dickens, Drood, and Holmes.

Claude Rains as John Jasper
in The Mystery of
Edwin Drood (1935)

The University of Delaware Libraries exhibition "Dickens at 200," which runs until June 8, discusses the uncompleted Mystery of Edwin Drood, including attempts by some authors to have Sherlock Holmes solve the case and the 1914 mock trial of protagonist John Jasper that featured G. K. Chesterton as judge and George Bernard Shaw as jury foreman.

What might have been: Collins and Drood.

Wilkie Collins,
ca. 1880–90.
Library of Congress,
Prints & Photos Div

The Wilkie Collins Society has issued Addenda and Corrigenda 7, a selection of previously unpublished or hard-to-find letters, including one that confirms that Collins was asked to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood after the death of his friend Charles Dickens and another that records Collins's reaction to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The publication is available free to society members and for a modest £5 (approx. US$8) to nonmembers, which can be paid via PayPal; contact Paul Lewis for details.

Collins/Dickens/Gaskell tale, BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Illustration of
Elizabeth Gaskell, NYPL

For the Christmas issue of Household Words in 1858, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Adelaide Ann Procter teamed up to write "A House to Let" featuring episodes in the history of a desolate house. BBC Radio 4 Extra is airing a version this week; episodes usually may be heard for up to a week after broadcast.