Clues 44.1: Indian crime fiction, French, Haycraft, James, Nancy Drew, Palahniuk, Penny, Rawson, and more.

Clues vol. 44, no. 1 (2026) has been published. See below for abstracts. For a subscription, contact McFarland. 

Update, 19 Jun 2026: Nook and Google Play versions are now available.

Introduction: Allusions and Illusions
CAROLINE REITZ (John Jay College of Criminal Justice, CUNY/CUNY Graduate School)
Caroline Reitz, the executive editor of Clues, discusses the contents of the issue, including articles on crime fiction from India, Howard Haycraft's World War II writings, and queer aspects of Nancy Drew, as well as authors John Franklin Bardin, Tana French, P.D. James, Chuck Palahniuk, Louise Penny, Clayton Rawson, and Robert Egerton Swartwout.

Spotlight on... Indian Crime Fiction
TARUN K. SAINT
This essay traces the genre's evolution in India from its inception in the colonial era to recent times. Discussed are regional contexts of crime writing in Bengali, Hindi, Urdu, and Tamil to establish the historical framework and the recent efflorescence of crime writing in English that has feminist and postcolonial aspects.

Rethinking Democracy and Detective Fiction: The Legacies of Haycraft's Wartime Writings
BARBARA PEZZOTTI (Monash Univ) AND FABRICIO TOCCO (Australian National Univ)
Howard Haycraft's "Dictators, Democrats, and Detectives" (1939); "The Future of the Detective Story"; and "The Rules of the Game" (1941) argued that detective fiction could only flourish in democracies. The authors demonstrate that crime fiction has proven versatile under dictatorships, functioning as a propaganda tool and an instrument of resistance.

"Magical Red Herrings": Personalized Experience and Specialized Knowledge in Clayton Rawson's The Footprints on the Ceiling
NEIL TOBIN
Clayton Rawson, like other magician-authors, was known to employ transferable magical skills while writing his popular mysteries. What may be unique in the genre was his use of a particular magical technique to create extra-deceptive red herrings that target subsets of his readership—and turn their specialized knowledge against them.

Discovering John Franklin Bardin
ROBERT LANCE SNYDER
John Franklin Bardin's The Deadly Percheron (1946), The Last of Philip Banter (1947), and Devil Take the Blue-Tail Fly (1948) explore dissociative identity disorder. His works, as well as novels by Patricia Highsmith, Helen Eustis, Shirley Jackson, and Margaret Millar, substantiate the syndrome's topical frequency after World War II.

Metafiction as Misdirection in R.E. Swartwout's The Boat Race Murder (1933)
COLIN CAVENDISH-JONES (Xiamen Univ, Malaysia)
The Boat Race Murder, Robert Egerton Swartwout's only mystery novel, presents the reader with a plethora of literary references to the previous century of detective stories and locked-room mysteries. Through these references, Swartwout misdirects the reader to expect an intricate solution and an obscure motive for a murder, which is, in fact, simple and committed for sordid financial gain.

Lost Allusions: The Changing Codes of P.D. James
MARJORIE GARBER (Harvard Univ)
Like Dorothy L. Sayers, Agatha Christie, and Josephine Tey, P.D. James sometimes used literary allusions in her book titles and plots. Over time, however, the signifying codes in her work began to change, first to hidden "Easter egg" messages and "true crime" references, and finally to modern scientific markers like DNA.

The Gothic and the Girl Detective: Unpacking the Queered) Signification of Nancy Drew
DOROTHY CALABRO (Auburn Univ)
This essay connects the gothic and the queer in the original Nancy Drew mysteries with modern, queer(ed) adaptations to the Nancy Drew universe, including Mabel Maney's Nancy Clue series and Kelly Thompson's Nancy Drew comics. The rift between the represented ideology of the original Nancy Drew mysteries and the gothic truths they hide are embodied in the interpretations and adaptations of queer audiences.

When Rex Stout met John le Carré.

The Spy Writes blog discusses the interview of John le Carré by Rex Stout for Mademoiselle's July 1964 mystery issue. Stout calls le Carré "unobtrusively handsome" and covers le Carré's revision process; le Carré thinks his own strongest quality is his "critical faculty" (61).

Bonuses for Nancy Drew and Patricia Moyes fans: There's a piece on the girl sleuth plus Moyes's novel Falling Star in the issue. Also, pp. 62–63 features a photo that includes Edgar awardees of that year and other MWA members. Among the luminaries, one can spot Clayton Rawson, Hillary Waugh, and Lawrence Treat in the back; Stout and Dorothy Salisbury Davis in the middle; Howard Haycraft in the front row at left; and Phyllis Whitney in the front row at right.

Haycraft on Chesterton.

Howard Haycraft.
From the 1927
Univ of Minnesota
Gopher

In April 1945, H. W. Wilson executive and mystery scholar Howard Haycraft reviewed The Father Brown Omnibus, a new collection of G. K. Chesterton's stories with the mild-mannered clerical sleuth. The review, which appeared in the 31 Aug. 1945 Palestine Post as "Chesterton Tales," discussed the genesis of Father Brown and addressed the question of whether these stories could be classified as detective stories because Father Brown's deductions are often intuitive rather than based on hard evidence. Haycraft's opinion was unequivocal: ". . .[A]t his best Chesterton is indisputably one of that small company of writers most responsible for the curious vitality and appeal of the detective story to modern readers, and Father Brown has been called the best loved of fictional sleuths after the immortal Holmes" (7).