The agonies of the agony column.

The Ciphers of The Times project at McGill University (headed by Nathalie Cooke) explores the Victorian agony column in the Times of London that often involved messages from criminals and detectives, including ways that messages in this column were encoded. The project includes an online interactive game where a person can play detective by following clues in a sample column. There also are discussion and data regarding "newspaper novels" (those that involve newspapers in their plots) such as The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew Forrester (aka James Redding Ware) and Lady Audley's Secret (1862) by Mary Elizabeth Braddon. An additional resource is the accompanying exhibition "News and Novel Sensations."

Lady Audley in the dock.

As the Law and Humanities blog mentions, Robert E. Rains (Penn State Dickinson Law) discusses in a new article the many crimes of Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley of Lady Audley's Secret (1862) from a legal perspective. The charges that he believes "a crusading prosecutor might have leveled against Lady A" include arson, attempted murder, bigamy, and manslaughter, and he criticizes the "rather slow" and "lazy" barrister Sir Robert Audley.

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.

"Women & crime fiction" resource, UF Tampa Libraries

Margaret Lewis's biography of Edith Pargeter/Ellis Peters

To accompany the U-Florida course Lit 4386, the Special Collections of the UF–Tampa Libraries has assembled a "Women & Crime Fiction" online exhibition featuring mystery highlights of its collection that focus on female authors, female detectives, femme fatales, and female victims. Some of the works featured are by Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Vera Caspary, Lillian de la Torre, Anna Katharine Green, Margaret Millar, Ellis Peters, and the Stratemeyer Syndicate. Unusual items include The Vulcan Academy Murders by Jean Lorrah, which offers Captain Kirk as detective, and an April 1960 letter from Columbia University student Leigh Marlowe to mystery author Baynard Kendrick related to her study of villains.

Addl funding for online dime novel project.

Villanova's Falvey Memorial Library announced that it has received a nearly $350,000 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities to continue digitizing dime novels in partnership with Northern Illinois University (Nickels and Dimes collection, which offers research opportunities), Bowling Green State University, Oberlin, and Stanford. Comments by Falvey's Demian Katz indicate that the concentration will be on works issued by Street & Smith, a major dime novel publisher.

The project has provided many valuable mystery-related works, including those by female authors such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Anna Katharine Green, and Metta Fuller Victor (aka Seeley Regester).

Illustration from The Figure Eight (1869), by Seeley Regester
(aka Metta Fuller Victor). NIU Nickels and Dimes Collection

Potential undergraduate and other projects, Nickels & Dimes collection.

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's
Three Times Dead (1881).
Nickels & Dimes Collection, NIU

The librarians at Northern Illinois University's Digital Library have suggestions to offer for virtual projects for undergraduates and others involving the Nickels & Dimes collection.

Intl Centre for Victorian Women Writers.

Cover of Wyllard's Weird (1886)
by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

There's a newish International Centre for Victorian Women Writers at Canterbury Christ Church University in the United Kingdom; one focus is crime and sensation fiction (especially by Mary Elizabeth Braddon). The center, which seeks to be a nexus for researchers on the writing of Victorian women and is hosting conferences and projects, is seeking information on birthdays of Victorian female writers for a list it is compiling.

Clues vol. 33 now in Kindle format.

For those with e-readers: Clues 33.1 and Clues 33.2 (Patricia Highsmith issue) are now available in Kindle format.

Clues 33.1 (2015)
• Kindle version
• Abstracts

Clues 33.2 (2015; theme issue on Patricia Highsmith, with new revelations about Per Wahlöö)

• Kindle version
• Abstracts

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).

Clues 33.1: Westlake, Leonard, Reichs, et al.

Clues 33.1 has been published; see below for abstracts. Contact McFarland for issue orders and subscriptions.

Update. The issue is now available on Nook and Kindle.

Introduction  JANICE M. ALLAN
Now You See Her—Now You Don’t: 
Household Spies in Aurora Floyd and Lady Audley’s Secret RACHEL SMILLIE (U Aberdeen) In Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s novels the female domestic servant enjoys a uniquely privileged position; she is granted admittance to the most intimate spaces of the home and given unfettered access to the family’s secrets. By focusing on the role of the female servant as household spy, this essay explores the control these women are able to exercise over their respective narratives.

“Something in a New Key”: Democratizing Poe’s Ratiocination in Psych and Elementary PATRICK KENT RUSSELL (U-Conn) Psych (2006–14) and Elementary (2013–) take steps to democratize Edgar Allan Poe’s ratiocination. Early seasons of Psych take a greater step by providing viewing audiences access to clues and lessons in what to observe. Seasons 1 and 2 of Elementary also show lessons, but as character development, rather than to redistribute necessary knowledge.

Far from Home and Near to Harm: Mazes, Rhizomes, and Illusory Domestic Spaces in Richard Stark’s Parker Novels GREGORY ALAN PHIPPS  This article considers the construction of Richard Stark’s Parker novels in relation to the symbolic models of the maze and the rhizome. These function in the Parker novels as frameworks that capture the structural forms of various spaces, social encounters, and modes of subjectivity.

Scarlet Fever: Communism, Crime, and Contagion in James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere JOSHUA MEYER
 (U of Western Sydney) Throughout James Ellroy’s The Big Nowhere, the threat of communism and the institutional anxiety it engenders is played out through a series of symbolic associations among communism, crime, and contagion. Ellroy’s figuration of communism as a form of criminal contagion takes up underlying tensions involved with the discourse of typology that runs through the detective genre.

E. W. Hornung's unpublished diary.

Libraries are always so interesting: a man's bookcase is something more interesting than the man himself, sometimes the one existing portrait of his mind.
—E. W. Hornung, The Crime Doctor

E. W. Hornung. NYPL

In English Literature in Transition, Edmund G. C. King (Open Univ) discusses the reading experience of British and Scottish soldiers in WWI, with particular attention to the wartime activities of E.W. Hornung (creator of Raffles, gentleman thief).

Sadly, Oscar—the only child of Hornung and Constance, Arthur Conan Doyle's sister—was killed in action at Ypres in July 1915. Seeking solace, Hornung served as a YMCA volunteer during the war—working in a canteen; maintaining a wartime library for soldiers in Arras, France, and a postwar one in the vicinity of Cologne, Germany; looking for friends of Oscar; and hoping to encounter Conan Doyle's serviceman son, Kingsley (who died of flu in 1918). His Notes of a Camp Follower on the Western Front (1919) tells about his war experiences and provides insight into what servicemen were reading (popular authors included Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Marie Corelli, Anthony Hope, and E. Phillips Oppenheim). Interestingly, he reports only one reader for Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. Pertaining to the works of his brother-in-law, he wrote, "Messrs. Holmes and Watson were the most flourishing of old firms, and Gerard the only Brigadier taken seriously at my counter" (Notes 141). His own output was not ignored:

"When I was up the line," said one of my friends, bubbling over with a compliment, "a chap said to me, 'You know that old—that—that elderly man who runs the Rest Hut? He's the author of Raffles.'"

Adds Hornung in mock outrage, "Elderly! One would as lief be labelled Virtuous or Discreet" (Notes 144–45). Hornung died of pneumonia in 1921 at 54, hardly an advanced age.

King relates that Hornung kept a diary between December 1917 and March 1918 that took the format of letters to his wife. He drew on this diary to write Notes, but King indicates that the diary reveals more about Hornung's reasons for war service than Notes does. Hornung's friend Shane Chichester preserved a typescript of the diary, which is now in the University of Birmingham's Cadbury Research Library along with other papers. King also provides a heart-warming glimpse of Hornung at work via the World War I memoir of Carlos Paton Blacker, Oscar's Eton classmate who became a noted psychiatrist.

King's article follows "The A. J. Raffles Stories Reconsidered: Fall of the Gentleman Ideal" by Jeremy Larance from the first 2014 issue of English Literature in Transition.

Jan 31 app deadline, UT-Austin Ransom Center.

Baroness Orczy, from the
May 26, 1906
San Francisco Call

The application deadline for research fellowships at UT-Austin's Harry Ransom Center is Jan. 31. Fellowships range from 1 to 3 months and from $1200 to $3000 for individuals who need to consult the center's collections (including those working on dissertations). Its mystery collections include the Sherlock Holmes and Sherlockian Collection; correspondence from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Patrick Hamilton, and Edgar Allan Poe; and manuscripts of J. S. Fletcher, Dashiell Hammett, A. E. W. Mason, Beverley Nichols, and Baroness Orczy.

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.

Journal issue, law and gender in 19C England.

Edward Bulwer Lytton, NYPL.

The latest issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies focuses on law and gender in nineteenth-century England, including articles on Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady (1875) as well as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edward Bulwer Lytton.

Whistler and Collins.

Collins's Woman in
White with Whistler's
White Girl on cover

The online edition of the letters of artist James McNeill Whistler features a few letters concerning attempts to link Whistler's The White Girl (1862) to Wilkie Collins's Woman in White (1859–60), a letter that reveals that Whistler liked Mary Elizabeth Braddon's The Golden Calf (1883), and witty correspondence from Oscar Wilde. It looks like the 1906 letter from Arthur Conan Doyle is not yet online.

Preliminary info, Braddon companion (ed. Foxwell).

McFarland has posted some preliminary details on Mary Elizabeth Braddon: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction by Anne-Marie Beller, vol. 4 in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series that I edit (vol. 1 on John Buchan; vol. 2 on E. X., aka Elizabeth, Ferrars; vol. 3 on Ed McBain/Evan Hunter). It is tentatively scheduled for publication in summer 2012. In this work Beller details the life and career of an important figure in the development of the mystery in the nineteenth century; as Lucy Sussex noted in Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre, Braddon created the first clerical sleuth and other characters who detect (such as Robert Audley in Lady Audley's Secret [1861–62] and Eleanor Vane in Eleanor's Victory [1863]). Her first novel, Three Times Dead (aka Trail of the Serpent), was serialized not long after the first installments of Collins's Woman in White. Braddon's long and lucrative career in sensation fiction stretched from the 1860s to 1916, a year after her death in 1915.

Update, 10/24/12. The companion is now available.

Lucy Sussex on 19C female writers and detectives.

Among the most popular posts on this blog are those dealing with early female detectives and women mystery writers. Lucy Sussex's Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre (2010; foreword by Val McDermid) is a solid discussion of women's major contributions to the emerging genre. Sussex has done much to shed new light on often neglected female writers in the genre (most notably Irish-born Mary Helena Fortune), and she published an article in Clues 26.1 (2007) on Edward Bulwer Lytton's contributions to the mystery field that garnered praise from the Hon. Henry Lytton Cobbold (Bulwer Lytton's great-grandson). Both Fortune's and Bulwer Lytton's roles are well reflected in the book.

Sussex traces the cross-currents among the gothic, the Newgate novel, newspaper crime accounts, and the sensation genre that were integral to the establishment of detective fiction. Writers covered include Catherine Crowe, Ellen Davitt, Anna Katharine Green, Ann Radcliffe, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Fanny Trollope. There is some impressive literary sleuthing on Metta Fuller Victor (author of The Dead Letter, 1866) that significantly expands on my article in the Fall 2003 Mystery Scene ("Metta Fuller Victor: A Sensational Life"). Intriguing parallels are drawn between the work of Ellen Wood (East Lynne, etc.) and Agatha Christie as well as the surprising but plausible assertion that Mary Elizabeth Braddon created the first clerical sleuth ("George Caulfield's Journey," 1879). Readers also will like the timeline in the back of the book that traces true-crime milestones alongside ones in fiction (such as the first Newgate Calendar in 1728, the 1833 birth of Pinkerton agent Kate Warne, and the 1859 publication of Spofford's "In a Cellar"). All in all, this is an excellent resource for those who would like to learn more about women's contributions to the emerging mystery genre in the nineteenth century.

Online Victorian fiction database.

"They sat facing each other in a
graceful yellow cockleshell."
Illustration from
Thomas Hardy's sensation novel
Desperate Remedies (1889 ed.)

Spearheaded by Troy J. Bassett at IUPU–Fort Wayne, At the Circulating Library: A Database of Victorian Fiction, 1837–1901, features information on more than 7,000 works of Victorian authors that can be searched by author and title; helpful categories such as genre also are provided. "Detective Fiction" includes the expected Lady Audley's Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon and The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins, but the crossover categories "Ghost Stories," "Gothic Novel," "Newgate Novel," and "Sensation Novel" also may be of interest. The Arthur Conan Doyle works included are only The White Company (1891) and The Refugees: A Tale of Two Continents (1893). There are fascinating statistics as well such as Braddon as the top serialized author and four women authors born in 1834. (Hat tip to PhiloBiblos)

BBC Radio 4 Extra: Mary Elizabeth Braddon.

Illustration from Braddon's
"The Cold Embrace."
Frank Leslie's Popular
Monthly, 3 (1877)

Mary Elizabeth Braddon's ghost story "The Cold Embrace" is featured this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra, which stars Jonathan Firth (Who can resist this description of the main character: "He was young, handsome, studious, enthusiastic, metaphysical, reckless, unbelieving, heartless"). Episodes can usually be heard for up to a week after broadcast. Those looking for a print copy of "The Cold Embrace" can find it here.

Braddon, Corelli in The Latchkey.

Marie Corelli. NYPL

The Latchkey: Journal of New Woman Studies has new essays on sensation masters Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Marie Corelli. I'm particularly entertained by the Latchkey's column "The Whine Cellar," which features antifeminist diatribes from the turn of the century.