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].

BFI's lists on "perfect crime" and noir films.

From an ad for The Killing (1956)

One of the latest lists on the British Film Institute blog is on "10 Great Films on Committing the Perfect Crime." These include The Asphalt Jungle (1950), Les Diaboliques (1954), Lift to the Scaffold (1958), The Killing (1956), and Thief (1981).

Another is a list of "10 Great American Film Noirs." Among expected entries (The Big Sleep, Double Indemnity, Laura) are The Lady from Shanghai (1947) and The Reckless Moment (based on Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall, 1949).

Sign in, please.

Vincent Starrett, NYPL

The Greenwich Village Bookshop Door exhibition at UT-Austin's Harry Ransom Center shows the signatures of notable visitors to Frank Shay's Bookshop in New York; they signed the door to the bookshop from 1920 to 1925. Among those of interest to mystery fans: Theodore Dreiser, Elisabeth Sanxay Holding, Christopher Morley, and Vincent Starrett.

Elisabeth Saxnay Holding in ebook format.

Joan Bennett and James Mason
in The Reckless Moment
(1949, adapt. of Holding's
The Blank Wall)

Persephone Books has an ebook version available of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947); print edition also available. This book by Holding—a favorite author of Chandler—features a woman who finds herself under suspicion in the death of her daughter's boyfriend.

Why aren't women writers remembered?

Dorothy B. Hughes,
one author reprinted
by Persephone Books

As Women's History Month begins, Nicola Beauman of Persephone Books (which has reprinted US mystery authors Dorothy B. Hughes and Elisabeth Sanxay Holding) provides a thought-provoking piece on women authors: "...why are a small number of women writers remembered and given a comfortable, settled place in the great tradition while the majority suffer E. V. Thompson's 'enormous condescension of posterity'?"

Literary gatekeeping is a perpetual, much-debated topic. Although it seems to operate more aggressively against women, it also occurs with men. Fitzgerald, for one, was not recognized as a literary craftsman until well after his death. How many pulp writers were considered to be "slumming" in their lifetimes? The mystery genre suffers from the Rodney Dangerfield syndrome (i.e., receives little respect as a literary form worthy of study) and persistent perceptions that women write "fluffier" works, as can be seen in the sneering about the hugely successful Mary Roberts Rinehart. Powerhouses such as Charlotte Armstrong, Vera Caspary, Hughes, Margaret Millar, Ruth Rendell, and others would tend to refute the fluffy notion, but it would be interesting to see how many works by female mystery writers of the past are reprinted versus those by men.