Radio 4 Extra: Charles Paris.

This week on Channel 4 Radio Extra is Simon Brett's Dead Room Farce featuring Bill Nighy as actor Charles Paris, always ready for a drink and a case, such as this one with the death of an audio producer. 

The other sides of Dorothy B. Hughes.

Mystery fans may know of Dorothy B. Hughes' considerable work as a critic and distinguished career as a novelist and biographer (e.g., In a Lonely Place; Ride the Pink Horse; Edgar nominations for The Expendable Man and a book on Erle Stanley Gardner), but I was intrigued to learn of her poetry (published under her maiden name, Dorothy Belle Flanagan).

I've updated Hughes' Wikipedia page with information on the poems I have found, short stories, and other works. Perhaps most intriguing is her mystery serial, "The Turquoise Ring Murders," that was broadcast on a New Mexico radio station in October 1933.

Clues 41.1: Detective fiction and borders.

Clues 41.1 (2023)—a theme issue on Detective Fiction and Borders—has been published. For a print issue or a subscription, contact McFarland.

Update, 10-21-23. The ebook versions are now available:
Kindle. Nook.

Introduction: Detective Fiction and Borders
MANINA JONES (Western University, Canada)

The guest editor of this theme issue of Clues provides an overview of the issue, including essays on Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, Carlos Bulosan, Agatha Christie, Calling All Cars, Criminal Minds: Beyond Borders, Japanese crime fiction, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Henning Mankell, China Miéville, Miguel Pajares, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden. 

Crimes at the Maritime Border: Miguel Pajares’s Aguas de venganza [Waters of Revenge]
SILVIA RUZZI

This essay analyzes Miguel Pajares’s Aguas de venganza [Waters of Revenge, 2016], delving into the representations of the Mediterranean Sea as a constructed lawless maritime border where crimes are unpunished; revenge occurs; and official explanations of border casualties interact with a narrative of border crimes, public negligence, and injustice. 

Policing Mobilities and Boundaries: A Study of Henning Mankell’s The Dogs of Riga and Firewall
ARATRIKA MANDAL and SOMDATTA BHATTACHARYA (Indian Institute of Technology-Kharagpur)

This article examines the representation of racism and immigration and the ways they transform borderline and bordered space into criminal space in two popular Swedish crime novels by Henning Mankell. In Mankell’s Firewall and Dogs of Riga, negotiations between individuals and borders realize the interaction between state apparatuses and technology, potentially destabilizing the physical and the virtual border. 

The Geopolitics of Passing in Carlos Bulosan’s All the Conspirators
SYDNEY VAN TO (UC Berkeley) 

Carlos Bulosan’s mid–twentieth-century noir novella All the Conspirators stages a conflict between guerrillas and collaborators in the postwar Philippines, illustrating a “geopolitics of passing” that examines the triangulation of borders through acts of racial, ideological, and imperial passing. Through the trope of passing, the transgression and eventual reconstitution of these borders is shown to be an alibi for the expansion of U.S. empire. 

Embodied Borders: Countering Islamophobia in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Crime Fiction
PILAR CUDER-DOMÍNGUEZ (University of Huelva, Spain) 

This essay draws from critical race and affect studies in addressing how the police officer Esa Khattak in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s crime fiction embodies race and faith differences within the Global North and thus helps bring attention to bear on the rise of anti-Muslim feelings within allegedly plural liberal democracies.

Orson Welles and The Black Museum.

Illustration of Orson Welles 
to advertise The Lives of
Harry Lime, ca. 1951

Over on Wellesnet, Ray Kelly discusses Orson Welles' role in The Black Museum, an early true-crime radio program based on Scotland Yard cases, and The Adventures of Harry Lime (US title: The Lives of Harry Lime), a radio program based on Welles's shady character in the film The Third Man. 

Listen to Black Museum episodes here.
Listen to The Lives of Harry Lime episodes here.

More Mysterious Journey episodes.

The latest episodes of Mysterious Journey, a podcast of short radio plays produced by the Artists' Ensemble Theater (IL), include the following:

• The Phantom (based on "The Flaming Phantom" by Jacques Futrelle featuring the Thinking Machine)
  
• Poirot and the Egyptian Curse (based on "The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb" by Agatha Christie)
• Poirot Makes a Wager (based on "The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim" by Agatha Christie)
  
• The Tenth Clue (based on the Continental Op story by Dashiell Hammett) 
• Who Killed Bobby Teal? (based on "Who Killed Bob Teal?" by Dashiell Hammett)
  

Radio show, Christie's The Secret of Chimneys.

During September, actors from the Albany Civic Theater in Albany, OR, are performing a radio-play version of Agatha Christie's The Secret of Chimneys (1925), which involves a country house, a secret society, blackmail, and murder. Three episodes are currently available.

Christie radio plays.

The Artists' Ensemble Theater (IL) performed a radio-play version of Agatha Christie's "The Curse of the Western Star," which can be heard here. The theater also offers a podcast of short radio plays, Mysterious Journey, that includes episodes featuring Christie's "The Man in the Brown Suit."

In other radio-play news, the Greenbelt (MD) Arts Center will hold auditions via Zoom on June 30 and July 1 for a virtual production of the Christie radio play "The ABC Murders" (audition sign-ups close today).

Virtual mystery plays from the Jewel Theatre Co.

The Jewel Theatre Company in Santa Cruz has been performing virtual radio plays. Some of the mystery-related ones:

"The Hitch-Hiker" by Lucille Fletcher (a man driving cross-country keeps seeing the same mysterious man)

The Whistler: Stranger in the House (a man comes home after six years, but is he who he says he is?) 

   

The Mysterious Traveler: The Good Die Young by Robert Arthur and David Kogan (all is not well between a girl and her new stepmother)

Mystery radio plays from the Ohio Shakespeare Festival.

Illustration of W. W. Jacobs. NYPL

During the pandemic, the Ohio Shakespeare Festival has been performing original radio plays for at-home listening, including some based on mystery-related works. A few offerings:

• "The False Burton Combs" based on the story by Carroll John Daly
  
  
• Lady Molly of Scotland Yard based on the stories by Baroness Orczy
  
  
• "The Monkey's Paw" based on the short story by W. W. Jacobs
  

Rex Stout and radio.

Rex Stout by Arnold Genthe, 1931.
Library of Congress, Prints & Photographs Div.

Matt Barton, curator of the Library of Congress' Recorded Sound Section, discusses author Rex Stout's roles on the radio that are reflected in more than 40 LOC holdings. These encompass various incarnations of Stout's sleuth Nero Wolfe, Stout's appearances on Information Please, his hosting duties for Speaking of Liberty, and his participation in an episode about the detective story on the NBC program Conversation with critics Clifton Fadiman and Jacques Barzun. Said Stout in the Conversation program, "They're pretty bum stories, the Sherlock Holmes stories. . . . at least two thirds are pretty doggone silly." (It should be noted that Stout wrote the infamous essay "Watson Was a Woman.")

Recent radio production of Sorry, Wrong Number

 

Lucille Fletcher, ca. 1948

You can catch Bay Area Radio Drama's June production of Lucille Fletcher's Sorry, Wrong Number, here.

Philip Marlowe via Australia.

A radio series in Australia, Philip Marlowe Investigates, was broadcast in 1953 starring Australian actor-writer-producer Reginald Goldsworthy as Marlowe. Episode 1 was "The Lady in the Lake," and episode 2 was "The High Window." Below is "The Lady in the Lake." The American accents are fairly proficient.

NFSA · Philip Marlowe, Eps 1 The lady in the Lake (1953)

Mystery through L.A. Theatre Works.

Looking for something mystery-related to listen to during an extended period at home? L.A. Theatre Works has the following program available on Sound Cloud:

• John Ball's In the Heat of the Night

Dragnet, according to Spike Jones.

Spike Jones and His City Slickers perform their own special version of Dragnet in 1953.

Clues 34.2: Webb, Woollcott, and actuarial detection.

The vol. 34, no. 2 issue of Clues (2016) has just been published and can be ordered from McFarland. The issue is also on Kindle, Nook, and Google Play.

The following are abstracts for the issue.

Probability and Capital Crime: 

The Rise and Fall of Actuarial Detection in Victorian Crime Fiction
CHERYL B. PRICE (University of North Alabama)
The author examines the influence of life assurance on early detective fiction. Actuarial detectives in Charles Dickens’s “Hunted Down” (1859) and life assurance influenced both the language and methodology of later fictional detectives, and the life assurance profession impeded detection in Charles Warren Adams’s The Notting Hill Mystery (1865).

Making Crime Pay: 
Alexander Woollcott, the Algonquin Round Table, and the Aesthetics of Crime Fiction
MARY LOUISE REKER (Library of Congress)
Between the two world wars New York theater critic Alexander Woollcott was deeply enamored of crime writing. He corresponded with both U.S. and British crime writers and promoted their work through his columns and broadcasts. Woollcott also wrote a regular column for the New Yorker, whose founding editor, Harold Ross, encouraged the writer Edmund Wilson to challenge Woollcott’s crime fiction aesthetic.

Policing the Crime Drama:
Radio Noir, Dragnet, and Jack Webb’s Maladjusted Text
JEFF OUSBORNE (Suffolk University)
The links between film noir and “radio noir” crime drama remain largely unexamined. The author explores the relationship between Jack Webb’s early radio-noir mystery program Pat Novak, for Hire and his work on the semi-documentary police procedural Dragnet. The programs suggest the porous borders of film, radio, and television, which together shed light on aesthetic, thematic, generic, and cultural shifts in the development of noir and procedural drama across different media.

Edgar Wallace's PC Lee on BBC's Radio 4 Extra.

Edgar Wallace, from
Wallace's My Hollywood
Diary (1932)

"England," said Police Constable Lee presently, "is the home of the free, an' the half-way house to liberty." (Wallace, "Pear-Drops" 1909)

This week, BBC Radio 4 Extra is airing stories featuring Edgar Wallace's London police constable P. C. Lee (1909). Actor Toby Jones stars, and the production company is Greenlit, which is responsible for Foyle's War.

The P. C. Lee stories can be found at this Web site; the ones noted below with an asterisk are the BBC Radio 4 Extra episodes:

• "Mr. Simmons' Profession"*
• "Change"
• "A Man of Note"*
• "A Case for Angel, Esquire"* (aka "The Inspector Gets a Brainwave" and "The Impossible Theft")
• "For Jewey's Laggin"
• "Pear-Drops"
• "How He Lost His Moustache"*
• "Sergeant Run-a-Mile"*
• "The Sentimental Burglar"
• "Contempt"
ª "Confidence"
• "Fireless Telegraphy"
• "The General Practitioner"
• "The Snatchers"*
• "The Gold Mine"
• "Mouldy the Scrivener"
• "Mrs. Flindin's Lodger"
• "The Derby Favourite"
• "The Story of a Great Cross-Examination"
• "Tanks"
• "The Silence of P.-C. Hirley"
• "The Power of the Eye"
• "The Convict's Daughter"
• "The Last Adventure"

Danger on the Air (1938).

Lee J. Cobb in
Danger on the Air (1938)

An unpopular sponsor is murdered during a radio broadcast, and an engineer (Donald Woods) investigates. This comedic mystery, based on Death Catches Up with Mr. Kluck by Xantippe (aka actress, writer, and radio producer Edith Meiser), features Nan Grey, William Lundigan, and Lee J. Cobb.

M. Pamplemousse on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Featured this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra are Michael Bond's hapless sleuth Monsieur Pamplemousse and his faithful doggie sidekick Pommes Frites.

The Unguarded Hour (1936).

Franchot Tone, left, and Roland Young
in The Unguarded Hour

In The Unguarded Hour, Lady Helen Dearden faces a tough situation: if she testifies in a murder trial, the career of her barrister husband will be ruined. But if she doesn't, an innocent man will be convicted. Further complications include the implication of her husband in another murder and the threats of a blackmailer. Based on a play by Ladislas Fodor and directed by Sam Wood, the film stars Loretta Young, Franchot Tone, Roland Young, and Henry Daniell.

There also are some radio versions: a 1944 Lux Radio Theater production with Robert Montgomery, Loraine Day, and a reprise by Roland Young, plus a 1952 Theatre Guild on the Air version with Nina Foch and Michael Redgrave.

"Sorry, Wrong Number" added to LOC registry.

Lucille Fletcher's radio play "Sorry, Wrong Number" has been added to the Library of Congress' National Recording Registry. This 1943 episode of Suspense stars Agnes Moorehead as an invalid who overhears something she shouldn't on the telephone line.