My July-Aug 2025 EQMM column.

My Jury Box column has been published in the July/August 2025 Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, including reviews of short story collections and classic reprints by Ethel Lina White (of The Lady Vanishes and Some Must Watch fame), Sara Woods, the intriguing Madelon St. Denis, Miles Burton (aka Cecil John Charles Street), Dorothy Cameron Disney, and Mary Fortune (a 19th-century mystery pioneer who emigrated to Australia).

The Great Detective film series in Australia.

Michael Redgrave and
Margaret Lockwood in
The Lady Vanishes (1938)

Envy the lucky Australians who can attend The Great Detective, a series showcasing mystery films at Australian Cinémathèque, Gallery of Modern Art, Queensland Art Gallery, until September 2. Films include the following:

• Sherlock Holmes (1916)
• Sherlock Jr. (1924)
• The Lady Vanishes (1938)
• And Then There Were None (1945)
• Rear Window (1954)
• Witness for the Prosecution (1957)
• Vertigo (1958)
• Charade (1963)
  
• A Shot in the Dark (1964)
• Dirty Harry (1971)
• Death on the Nile (1978)
• The Mirror Crack'd (1980)
  
• Evil under the Sun (1982)
• Erin Brockovich (2000)
• Mystic River (2003)
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2011)

The Unseen (1945).

Publicity photo for
The Unseen

Ethel Lina White's Her Heart in Her Throat (1942) was adapted as The Unseen, with July 23rd birthday boy Raymond Chandler as a  screenwriter. In The Unseen, governess Gail Russell suspects that nefarious activities are going on in the neighborhood and wonders about the role of her employer, shipbuilder Joel McCrea, in his wife's death. Herbert Marshall and Norman Lloyd costar. The film, an attempt by director Lewis Allen to follow up The Uninvited (1944, also with Russell), has some echoes of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw."

McCloy, Moyes, and White reissued.

Among the books just reissued in the Arcturus Crime Classics series:

• MWA Grand Master Helen McCloy, Through a Glass, Darkly (1950). A doppelganger means trouble for a teacher and psychiatrist Basil Willing. The New York Times deemed it one of the best mysteries of 1950. Wrote Dorothy B. Hughes about the book in the Dec. 3, 1950, Washington Post, "Not since the late Bayard Veiller's 'Bait for a Tiger' has this reader been filled with such actual fear by a printed page."

• Patricia Moyes, Who Saw Her Die? (aka Many Deadly Returns, 1970). In this Edgar-nominated novel, Detective Chief Superintendent Henry Tibbett must figure out how a widow died.

• Ethel Lina White, Some Must Watch (1933). A killer preys on vulnerable women in this novel by the author of The Lady Vanishes that was adapted as Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase. 

Ethel Lina White this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Margaret Lockwood and Michael
Redgrave in The Lady Vanishes
(dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1938)

This week on BBC Radio 4 Extra, Iris Carr (the inspiration for K. K. Beck's Iris Cooper) tries to figure out what happened to an elderly woman on board a train in Ethel Lina White's The Lady Vanishes. Go here for the schedule or to listen online; episodes usually may be heard for up to a week after broadcast.

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.

Ethel Lina White.

A word of praise today for author Ethel Lina White (1876-1944), most famous for The Wheel Spins (1936) and Some Must Watch (1933). These were both adapted for film: the former into Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes (1938) with Michael Redgrave and Dame May Whitty, and the latter into Robert Siodmak's The Spiral Staircase (1945) with Dorothy McGuire, George Brent, and Ethel Barrymore. For the film, The Spiral Staircase's setting was changed to early-twentieth-century New England, but not one whit of its nail-biting plot about a serial killer stalking women is diminished. (Remakes appeared in 1961, 1975, and 2000).

The characters Charters and Caldicott, who debuted in The Lady Vanishes, also appear in Night Train to Munich (1940), Crooks Tour (1941), Millions Like Us (1943), and the TV series Charters & Caldicott (1985). Iris Carr in The Wheel Spins inspired K. K. Beck's smart flapper sleuth Iris Cooper (Death in a Deck Chair, Murder in a Mummy Case, Peril Under the Palms).

Sadly, with the exceptions of The Lady Vanishes, Some Must Watch, and While She Sleeps, the rest of White's suspense work is out of print. This includes Midnight House (aka Her Heart in Her Throat, 1942), filmed as The Unseen (1945) with Joel McCrea and Gail Russell and scripted by Raymond Chandler. Go here for a list of White's work.