2025 Dove Awardee: David Geherin.

The Detective/Mystery Caucus of the Popular Culture Assocation announced its latest Dove Awardee: David Geherin, professor emeritus of English at Eastern Michigan University, who is an Edgar nominee in the Best Critical/Biographical category this year for Organized Crime on Page and Screen. He received earlier Edgar nominations for The Crime World of Michael Connelly: A Study of His Works and Their Adaptations (2022), Scene of the Crime: The Importance of Place in Crime and Mystery Fiction (2008; also nominated for a Macavity Award), and The American Private Eye: The Image in Fiction (1985). His other books include Carl Hiaasen: Sunshine State Satirist (2019), Funny Thing About Murder: Modes of Humor in Crime Fiction and Films (2017), Small Towns in Recent American Crime Fiction (2015), and Elmore Leonard (1989).

The award, given to individuals who have contributed to the serious study of mystery, detective, and crime fiction, honors well-known mystery scholar George N. Dove. The chair of the Dove Award Committee is Rachel Schaffer (Montana State University Billings). Past recipients include Frankie Y. Bailey (University at Albany, SUNY), Martin Edwards, Barry Forshaw, Douglas G. Greene, P.D. James, Christine Jackson, H. R. F. Keating, Margaret Kinsman, Maureen Reddy (Rhode Island College), Janet Rudolph, J. K. Van Dover (Lincoln University), and yours truly.  

• David Geherin reads from Organized Crime on Page and Screen.

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

 

Mystery-related films considered lost.

Pauline Frederick, star
of Lydia Gilmore,
Woman in the Case, and
The Paliser Case. NYPL

Lost Films is a project of Deutsche Kinemathek in Berlin that is designed to collect information and serve as a resource on films that are believed to be lost.  Some mystery-related films considered lost are the following:

 •  Sherlock Holmes and the Great Murder Mystery (1908). SH and a gorilla?

 • Lydia Gilmore (1915). Philandering husband murders his lover's spouse; wife attempts cover-up. 

 • The Woman in the Case (1916). Is a suicide actually murder?

 • Col. Heeza Liar, Detective (1917). One in a series of cartoons with a Colonel Blimp-type character.

 • The Paliser Case (1920). The murder of a treacherous man throws suspicion on the woman he lured into a sham marriage.

 •  The Radio Detective (1926). Adventure serial with Boy Scouts versus gangsters.

 • Kismet (1930–31, dir. William Dieterle). Thief is embroiled in a plot against a caliph.

 • Murder Will Out (1939). A valuable piece of jade causes a series of murders.

Hammer's 1940s–50s crime films.

Ad for A Case for PC 49.
Hammerfilms.

In the film and TV journal Scope, David Mann examines some crime films of Hammer after World War II, including The Man in Black (1949; adapt. of John Dickson Carr's radio series Appointment with Fear), Dr. Morelle: The Case of the Missing Heiress (1949), Meet Simon Cherry (1949), and A Case for PC 49 (1951). There's an unfortunate and distracting misspelling of noted producer Val Gielgud's surname throughout.

New journal on black cinema.

Indiana University Press has announced that it will publish, in conjunction with IU's Black Film Center/Archive, a new scholarly journal called Black Camera, ed. Michael T. Martin (director of the archive). "Devoted to the study and documentation of the black cinematic experience," the journal will commence in fall 2009 and be published biannually. Go here for contributor guidelines.

There's been some analysis of African Americans on screen in the Journal of Popular Film and Television, such as "Shades of Black on Homicide: Life on the Street: Advances and Retreats in Portrayals of African American Women," by Thomas A. Mascaro.

About the photo: Photographer (later director) Gordon Parks, ca. 1943. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div reproduction no. LC-DIG-ppmsc-00190.