Sale, McFarland's horror books.

Brian Patrick Duggan's
Horror Dogs

Take 25 percent off horror books during McFarland & Co.'s Halloween sale. Use coupon code HALLOWEEN2023 through Oct 31. 

Joseph Maddrey's
Adapting Stephen King, vol. 2

 

Shirley Jackson panel.

If you missed the online symposium Reading Shirley Jackson in the 21st Century, you can now watch the panel with Jackson's sons and grandchildren as well as Jackson scholar Bernice M. Murphy.

Shirley Jackson, department store clerk.

The New England Historical Society writes about Shirley Jackson's short stint as a worker at Macy's (which includes a link to Jackson's short story "My Life with R.H. Macy").

The work of Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Dover ed. of Braddon's
Lady Audley's Secret

Over at the journal Women's Writing, there is a special issue on the work of sensation author Mary Elizabeth Braddon (1835–1915), guest edited by Janine Hatter (University of Hull) and Braddon companion author Anne-Marie Beller (Loughborough University). It offers analyses of works such as Aurora Floyd, The Fatal Three, Lady Audley's Secret, and Three Times Dead as well as an exploration of Braddon's gothics and an intriguing theory regarding Braddon providing a new take on Dumas' The Three Musketeers.

Ray Bradbury's mystery fiction.

In the LA Review of Books, Cullen Gallagher reviews Killer, Come Back to Me, a new collection published by Hard Case Crime of Ray Bradbury's crime stories. Although Bradbury did not think much of his abilities as a mystery writer, Gallagher believes he was being too tough on himself.

Clues 38.2: Genre b(l)ending.

Volume 38, number 2 of Clues: A Journal of Detection, guest edited by Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna), has been published on the theme "Genre B(l)ending: Crime's Hybrid Forms." Below are the abstracts for the issue. Contact McFarland to order the issue or a Clues subscription. 

Update, 9-14-20. The ebook versions are now available: Google Play, Kindle, Nook.

Introduction: Make It New, but Don’t Forget / MAURIZIO ASCARI (University of Bologna)

G. K. Chesterton’s Postmodern Anti-Detective Story: Generic Innovation and Transgression in “The White Pillars Murder” / NILS CLAUSSON (University of Regina, Canada)
G. K. Chesterton’s undervalued story “The White Pillars Murder” anticipates the postmodern anti-detective story in the way it transgresses the conventions of the Holmes-style analytic detective story and subversively introduces political critique into a genre, the Golden Age country house mystery, widely regarded as either apolitical or conservative. 

Murder, Mayhem, and Madness: John Dickson Carr’s Gothic Detective Stories / STEFANO SERAFINI (University of Toronto)
This essay investigates the contact zones between gothic and detective fiction within the early work of the significant yet largely neglected author John Dickson Carr. By revealing the transgressive and contaminated character of his narratives, this essay also provides a more nuanced picture of interwar crime-writing, the literary boundaries of which were constantly violated and renegotiated. 

The Cowboy and the Detective: The Case of Craig Johnson / ANTOINE DECHÊNE
This essay focuses on Craig Johnson’s charismatic protagonist Walt Longmire, the county sheriff of Absaroka, Wyoming. A cowboy-detective par excellence, Longmire embodies the interrelationship between the Western and detective fiction while offering a good example of “glocal literature”—that is, a form of literature that is both global and local. 

James Church’s A Corpse in the Koryo and His Inspector O Series: A Noir/Spy Thriller Hybrid Set in North Korea / DAVID C. WRIGHT JR. (Misericordia University)
Analysis of A Corpse in the Koryo, the first book in the Inspector O series by James Church, shows that this series featuring a North Korean detective constitutes a successful genre hybrid: a hard-boiled detective thriller, à la Raymond Chandler, combined with a spy novel in the style of John le Carré. 

CFP, Historical Crime Fiction (theme issue of Clues: A Journal of Detection).

Clues has issued a new Call for Proposals for a theme issue on "Historical Crime Fiction" that will be guest edited by Rosemary Erickson Johnsen (Governors State University; author of Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction). The deadline for proposals is November 1, 2020.

As usual, Clues considers manuscripts on all aspects of mystery, detective, and crime fiction on an ongoing basis, so authors who have a manuscript on a topic that falls outside the Call for Proposals are welcome to submit to Clues Executive Editor Caroline Reitz at any time.

Uncle Silas (aka The Inheritance, 1947).

Katina Paxinou, left, and Jean Simmons, right, with 
producer Laurence Irving on the set of Uncle Silas, ca. 1947

Based on the novel of the same name by Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu, Uncle Silas features a young heiress (Jean Simmons) whose nefarious uncle (Derrick De Marney) is prepared to take drastic measures to gain control of her fortune.

Oct 1 deadline for Clues theme issue, "Crime's Hybrid Forms."

The deadline is October 1, 2019, to submit to the Clues theme issue on "Genre-Bending: Crime's Hybrid Forms" that will be guest edited by Maurizio Ascari (University of Bologna).

CFP for essay collection on the cozy.

La Salle University's Phyllis Betz (Katherine V. Forrest: A Critical Appreciation; Lesbian Detective Fiction: Woman as Author, Subject and Reader) plans to compile a collection of essays on the cozy mystery. Prospective topics/approaches of interest include the following:

• Discussion of authors, including precursors such as Mary Roberts Rinehart, Anna Katharine Green, and Agatha Christie

• Settings
  
• Main characters, including their careers
  
• Other characters
  
• Themes
  
• Subgenres such as the gothic cozy and cozy noir
  
• Problems, including the definition of the cozy and those authors who can be defined as cozy writers
  
• Narrative strategies

Have questions or seek further information? Contact Betz.

BBC Radio's focus on SH, the gothic.

BBC Radio 4 Extra hauls out of its vault a series of programs (dubbed "the Holmes Service") that feature various incarnations of the Great Detective. These include:

• A Study in Scarlet (with Robert Powell as Holmes, dramatized by Michael Hardwick)
• The Adventure of the Speckled Band (with Cedric Hardwicke as Holmes, 1945)
• The Hound of the Baskervilles (with Roger Rees as Holmes)
• The Final Problem (with John Gielgud as Holmes and Orson Welles as Moriarty, 1954)

Horace Walpole, NYPL

A separate series of programs focuses on the gothic, which includes:

• Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw"
• Richard Marsh's paranormal bestseller The Beetle 
• Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho
• Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto

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.

Gothic triumphs: Valancourt's top sellers for 2010.

Sheridan Le Fanu,
from Seventy Years of
Irish Life (1893) by
William Richard Le Fanu

For those who enjoy seeing a different bestseller list, here are the Top 10 Sellers for Valancourt Books for 2010:

1.  Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (1871–72); great-nephew of Irish playwright Richard Brinsley Sheridan

2.  The Blood of the Vampire by actress-author Florence Marryat (1897)

3.  Six Gothic Dramas by Scottish poet-playwright Joanna Baillie

4.  The Witch of Ravensworth by George Brewer (1808)

5.  The Necromancer by Karl Friedrich Kahlert (1794)

6.  Marius the Epicurean by Walter Pater (1885)

7.  Ziska: The Problem of a Wicked Soul by Marie Corelli (1897)

8.  Castle of Wolfenbach by Eliza Parsons (1793)

9.  The Old English Baron by Clara Reeve (1778)

10. The Cenci by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1819)

A Boston murder; the pioneering Gothic career of Charles Brockden Brown.

Charles Brockden Brown.
NYPL.

NEH's Humanities Magazine discusses an 1849 murder of a Harvard-educated doctor in Boston and Gothic novelist Charles Brockden Brown (1771–1810), who may be the first professional writer in the United States. (You can also check out Brown's works in the Library Company of Philadelphia's online exhibition "Philadelphia Gothic").

(Hat tip to the AHA blog)

Philadelphia bad boy gets his own literary society.

The crusading George Lippard (1822–54), a friend of Edgar Allan Poe and a member of the Philadelphia Gothic school with works such as the best-selling The Quaker City; or, the Monks of Monk Hall (1844), now has his own literary society, thanks to Edward Pettit. (Hat tip to PhiloBiblos. About the image: Author-journalist George Lippard, ca. 1850. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)