Happy birthday, Dorothy Bowers.

Detection Club member Dorothy Bowers was born today in Herefordshire in 1902. Her works—most featuring Scotland Yard Chief Inspector Dan Pardoe—include Postscript to Poison (1938), Shadows Before (1939), Deed without a Name (1940), Fear and Miss Betony (1941), and The Bells of Old Bailey (1947). She died of tuberculosis in 1948.

Quote for the day.

"I don't expect to come to New York to 'deal with the publisher.' The only way to deal with him would be to shoot him, and I don't want to spare the ammunition."

—E. B. White to Harriet Walden, 3 September 1971, Letters of E. B. White 574 (White was in the midst of revising Strunk and White's The Elements of Style).

Vintage newspaper search at LOC.

As the Library of Congress noted on its blog, it is working on a better online interface to search selected newspapers from 1880—1910. At left is one result: an August 26, 1906, ad from the New York Tribune for a serialization of Jacques Futrelle's The Thinking Machine (Futrelle died on the Titanic in 1912).

Ask Janet Evanovich.

Time magazine is asking readers to submit questions for Stephanie Plum creator Janet Evanovich for an interview slated for an upcoming issue.

Sister Carol Anne O'Marie, 1933–2009.

Janet Rudolph announced the sad news of the May 27th death of Sister Carol Anne O'Marie, creator of the Sister Mary Helen mysteries. I remember her once telling me she wrote her novels for relaxation—a diversion from the hard realities that she saw in her day-to-day work. Another of my cherished memories is attending a luncheon during one Bouchercon. I was sitting at a table with Sister Carol Anne and Gar Anthony Haywood, as Gar—who had served on a panel with Sister Carol Anne and is himself no mean man with a quip—told her, "Sister, you are a riot."

Donations in Sister's memory may be made to the homeless shelter she cofounded, A Friendly Place, 2298 San Pablo Ave., Oakland, CA 94612, or to her order, Sisters of St. Joseph of Carondelet, 11999 Chalon Rd., Los Angeles, CA 90049.

19th-century infomercials via Dickens.

On the Fine Books blog, Stephen J. Gertz takes this amusing look at advertisements that appeared in Dickens's serialized works, such as one that appears to be for an early mimeograph: "Lookout, Xerox! Twenty pages a minute! Blazing speed!"

An online journey through the dark world of Burke and Hare.

Lisa Rosner, author of The Anatomy Murders (due out in October), has developed an online slideshow dealing with the nineteenth-century Edinburgh murderers William Burke and William Hare. Rosner discusses the Web site and her book here.

(Hat tip to the AHA blog).

About the image: Rendering of William Burke, ca. 1829. History of Medicine Division, NIH's National Library of Medicine

Emma Woodhouse, detective?

The recent Guardian podcast with P. D. James on her novel The Lighthouse contains the reminder that she, a huge Jane Austen fan, once wrote a discussion of Emma as detective story. See the appendix of James's autobiography Time to Be in Earnest. Alas, Emma Woodhouse is not a great detective—she fails to see the clues right in front of her regarding her closest relationships. James states during the podcast that Austen would have made a fine mystery writer.

About the image: Gwyneth Paltrow as Emma Woodhouse in Emma (1996, dir. Douglas McGrath)

US comics corrupt innocent British youth.

I was vastly entertained by this podcast from the National Archives UK, "Kapow! Fifties Britain versus the Comics Menace," which discusses the great fear that we degenerate Yanks were corrupting the innocent youth of Britain with our comic books in the 1940s and 1950s. In reality, as the presenter shows, there was a substantial comics tradition in the UK well before our materials reached its shores. Interesting as well was the statement that in Britain, there was a concerted effort to destroy any copies of Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury that cropped up.

Also fascinating: this National Archives UK podcast on the real story behind the film The Great Escape, which discusses the breakout at Stalag Luft III, the deliberately planned murders of 50 escaping POWs, and the war crimes trials that occurred afterward.

Also of interest: "The Secret Life of Superman" by Jonathan Ross (Times of London)

About the images: Shazam! Captain Marvel from February 1940; Richard Attenborough (left) and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (1963, dir. John Sturges)

Let me entertain you.

Susan Elkin reviews Noralee Frankel's Stripping Gypsy, a new biography of stripper Gypsy Rose Lee, in the Independent; there are brief mentions of Lee's sister, actress June Havoc, and Lee's writing of "two thrillers." However, the role of mystery author Craig Rice in the creation of the first one, The G-String Murders (1941), is still debated today.

About the image: Barbara Stanwyck in Lady of Burlesque, film adaptation of The G-String Murders (1943, dir. William Wellman). To see Stanwyck perform one of the best song-and-dance numbers in the film, including some amazing front splits, go here.

The 18th-century roots of Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair.

In the Guardian, author Sarah Waters (The Little Stranger, etc.) looks at the real case behind Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair (1948).

Happy birthday, Max Brand.

The multifaceted Max Brand, aka Frederick Schiller Faust, was born today in Seattle in 1892. Poet, creator of Dr. Kildare, celebrated Western author (Destry Rides Again, etc.), screenwriter, and, as this collection from Crippen and Landru reveals, frequent contributor to the pulps, Brand became a war correspondent and was killed in action in Italy in 1944. To see two Brand-related covers, go here.

About the photo: Lew Ayres in Calling Dr. Kildare (1939, dir. Harold S. Bucquet)

LAPL online film poster exhibit.

The Los Angeles Public Library has now posted some highlights from its past exhibition, "Hollywood Movie Posters." Dates range from 1913 to 1943.

About the image: Murders in the Zoo (1933, dir. A. Edward Sutherland), part of the LAPL's "Hollywood Movie Poster" exhibition.

Judge Sotomayor, mystery fan.

NPR's Blog of the Nation, inspired by an item in the New York Times, notes that Supreme Court Justice nominee Sonia Sotomayor is a Nancy Drew fan and once hoped to be a detective.

Georges Simenon's The Rules of the Game.

The Neglected Books blog looks at Georges Simenon's US-set novel The Rules of the Game (first published as La Boule noire, 1955).

About the image: Georges Simenon on the TV program Apostrophes, November 1981

On Memorial Day: The role of military intelligence, firsts for military women, military medicine in TX.

A few links for Memorial Day:

The latest SpyCast from the International Spy Museum with Brian G. Shellum, a former historian for the Defense Intelligence Agency, discusses the role of the agency, including the duties of military attaches;

a list of firsts for military women; and

a history of military medicine in Texas.


About the image: Civil War surgeon and Medal of Honor recipient Mary Walker. History of Medicine, NIH's National Library of Medicine.

Arthur Conan Doyle's dissertation.

The post on In Reference to Murder regarding the exhibition on Arthur Conan Doyle and Joseph Bell at the Royal College of Surgeons of Edinburgh reminded me that Conan Doyle's 1885 dissertation for the University of Edinburgh, "An Essay upon the Vasomotor Changes in Tabes Dorsalis," is available online. It deals with syphilis (which also appears as a theme in the Conan Doyle short story "The Third Generation" in Round the Red Lamp, 1894). Conan Doyle writes, "It is with diffidence that a young medical man must approach a subject upon which so many master minds have pondered—more particularly when the views which he entertains differ in many respects from any which he has encountered in his reading" (3–4).

(Hat tip to Maria Cairney, "The Healing Art of Detection: Sherlock Holmes and the Disease of Crime in the Strand Magazine," Clues: A Journal of Detection 26.1 [2008]: 62–74. About the photo: Arthur Conan Doyle, date unknown. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.)

Vincent Price on BBC Radio 7.

Coming up on Saturday, May 23rd on the BBC Radio series The Price of Fear hosted by Vincent Price: "Not Wanted on the Voyage," which examines a woman's power over her secretary and husband. For a limited time, you also can catch a previous episode, "Is There Anybody There?", which features an encounter between a fake medium and a client. Other episodes in the series may be found here.

About the image: Vincent Price on What's My Line.

Graphic novel of Richard Stark's The Hunter.

The University of Chicago Press, which has reprinted several of the Parker books by Richard Stark (aka the late Donald Westlake), discusses on its blog the latest Parker incarnation: a graphic novel version of The Hunter issued by IDW Publishing. The Comics Reporter has this interview with the artist, Darwyn Cooke.

H. R. F. Keating: Forgotten? Pshaw.

I find it hard to believe that the Independent calls the 82-year-old distinguished author-critic H. R. F. Keating "forgotten," especially when a new Inspector Ghote novel is due out on our shores this summer.

LSU Press: Rough times ahead?

Jennifer Howard of the Chronicle of Higher Education reports that Louisiana State University Press, publisher of James Lee Burke's The Lost Get-Back Boogie and distinguished titles in Southern literature and history, faces trouble due to state budget cuts. If it does not receive its usual university subsidy of some $800,000, it faces "really tough decisions," according to press director Mary Katherine Callaway. I interpret that to mean cuts in the publishing program and perhaps layoffs.

Mark Twain's Is He Dead? playing in Long Beach, CA.

Playing through May 24th at the International City Theatre in Long Beach, CA, is Mark Twain's 1897 play Is He Dead? in which a poor young artist stages his own death to jack up the prices of his paintings and returns to life as his widowed sister.

You can see clips from the play here. The University of California Press published the play in 2003. Is He Dead? is scheduled for theaters in Massachusetts and New Jersey this summer; Chicago, Las Vegas, and Salt Lake City this fall; and Seattle in spring 2010.

Sherlock Holmes, teenager?

In the May issue of Fine Books and Collectibles, Jonathan Shipley reports on a new children's book series by Andrew Lane that features a teenaged Sherlock Holmes. The first book is scheduled to be out from Macmillan in spring 2010.

About the photo: Arthur Conan Doyle, date unknown. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Faber turns 80—and Cyril Hare reprints at Faber Finds.

Sam Jordison on the Guardian blog discusses the 80th birthday of Faber, which includes reissuing P. D. James's Cover Her Face. Over at Faber Finds, the back-in-print program, works that have been reissued include a number by judge and Golden Age mystery author Cyril Hare (1900–58): Death Is No Sportsman, An English Murder, Suicide Excepted, Tenant for Death, That Yew Tree's Shade (aka Death Walks the Woods), and With a Bare Bodkin. Also reprinted: Hare's The Magic Bottle (a children's book) and The Best Detective Stories of Cyril Hare (introd. Michael Gilbert).

Poe and publishing tonight at the Boston Public Library.

Poe scholar Robert Velella talks about Edgar Allan Poe's relationship to U.S. publishing at the Boston Public Library tonight at 6 pm (sponsored by the Ticknor Society).

(Hat tip to PhiloBiblos.)

About the image: William Sartain portrait of Edgar Allan Poe, ca. 1896. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Cornerstone: Blood Upon the Snow by Hilda Lawrence (1944).

Note: This continues my occasional series on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list (those mysteries deemed essential by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen).Mark East arrives in a small town during a snowstorm to help an aged archaeologist, Joseph Stoneman, with his book. But all is not well: Stoneman and the servants seem frightened, the children know more than they are telling, and the lady of the house keeps to her room with what appears to be a case of severe depression. Soon the cook dies in a suspicious fire, the maid is strangled, Stoneman disappears, and the butler is carrying a gun. East is revealed not as a mere secretary but as a New York private detective.

Lawrence does a superb job with the atmosphere of menace over the entire household, keeping the reader guessing as to the perpetrator. Also marvelous is the portrayal of the supporting characters, town busybodies Miss Beulah Pond and Miss Bessy Petty, who assist East in unraveling the case and do not flinch at danger.

In addition to Blood Upon the Snow, Mark East appears in A Time to Die (1945) and Death of a Doll (1947, called "a treasure of a mystery novel" in 1981 by the New York Times's Mary Cantwell). Baltimore-born Hilda Lawrence (1906–76) also wrote The Pavilion (1948); Duet of Death (1948), which includes two novelettes, Composition for Four Hands (adapted as "The Long Silence" [Alfred Hitchcock Hour, 1963]) and The House; a short story, "A Roof in Manhattan," For Love or Money, ed. Dorothy Gardiner (1959); and a two-part serial, "Nobody Dies but Strangers," Women's Home Companion May and June 1951.

More Charlie Chan from Academy Chicago.

Today Academy Chicago Publishers releases two more of its stylish reprints of Earl Derr Biggers's Charlie Chan mysteries: Behind That Curtain (originally publ. 1928) and The Black Camel (originally publ. 1929).

Quote for the day.

"I don't know which is more discouraging, literature or chickens."—E. B. White to James Thurber, November 18, 1938, Letters of E. B. White 177

About the photo: "The Poultry of the World," ca. 1868. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Flashback: Flu pandemic, 1918.

With the H1N1 virus looking fairly puny in comparison to the 1918 flu pandemic, the AHA blog has posted various links pertaining to the 1918 Spanish flu that killed 50 million people worldwide. In letters to family, my great-uncle, who was quarantined in an army camp along with my grandfather because of the epidemic, described several who died around him. (Both great-uncle and grandfather survived.)

About the image: National Archives photo of New York City mailman, October 1918.

Happy birthday, Nellie Bly.

Elizabeth Cochran, better known as intrepid journalist Nellie Bly, was born today in Cochran's Mill, Pennsylvania, in 1864. Best known for beating the fictional 80-day, around-the-world trip by Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg (she did it in 72 days in 1889–90 and met Verne en route), she also managed (in 1887) to get herself committed to an insane asylum so she could write about the inhumane treatment of the mentally ill.

About the photo: Elizabeth Cochran, ca. 1890. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Lindsey Davis, Josephine Tey this week on BBC Radio 7.

This week on BBC Radio 7: Lindsey Davis's Falco, aka "Sam Spade in a toga," appears in Venus in Copper, and Inspector Alan Grant attempts to solve the mystery of the Princes in the Tower from his hospital bed in Josephine Tey's celebrated The Daughter of Time. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

One for Bill Crider: Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century.

Okay, it has nothing to do with alligators, but somehow the blog Mustaches of the Nineteenth Century—recently selected as one of the Best Archives on the Web by ArchivesNext—seems to me to be right up Bill Crider's alley. Mystery fans might like the post on Edgar Allan Poe.

About the photo: William Howard Taft—president, Supreme Court Justice, great mustache. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

Daphne du Maurier's Don't Look Now from New York Review of Books Classics.

Following the New York Review of Books Classics reprint of Geoffrey Household's Rogue Male is a collection of Daphne du Maurier's short stories, Don't Look Now. It includes the really creepy title story, "The Blue Lenses" (which was just broadcast on BBC Radio 7 and can still be heard here), and "The Birds" (filmed by Hitchcock with a screenplay by Evan Hunter).

About the photo: Donald Sutherland in Don't Look Now (dir. Nicolas Roeg, 1973)

More on Raffles, the Amateur Cracksman.

Over on the Guardian Books blog, Stuart Evers examines the morals of E. W. Hornung's A. J. Raffles—cricket player, man about town, and gentleman thief—and credits Hornung—Conan Doyle's brother-in-law—with considerable foresight. He writes, "Hornung, I believe, saw a new kind of crime story on the horizon: those of the hardboiled pulp novelists, and of the more psychologically acute writers such as Patricia Highsmith."

Evers points out that Atlantic Books has republished Raffles as part of its Classic Crime series (along with Sapper's Bulldog Drummond and Charles Dickens's Bleak House). Jim French Productions has been doing audio productions of Raffles for quite some time.

Bloomsbury April 23rd book auction results.

Some highlights from Bloomsbury's April 23rd literature auction:

• First English edition of James Fenimore Cooper's The Spy (1822; novel about a spy for George Washington during the Revolutionary War; Cooper's second novel): valued at £400–600, sold for £1300 (approximately $1900)
  

• First edition of M.R. James's Ghost Stories of an Antiquary (1904), £550 (approximately $809)
  

• First serialized edition of Agatha Christie's Murder on the Orient Express (1935), valued at £60-80, sold for £360 (approximately $530)
  

• Signed copy of the autobiographical She Goes to War (1942) by Edith Pargeter (aka Ellis Peters), £280 (approximately $412)
  

• Signed first edition of John le Carre's Call for the Dead (1961), £3000 (approximately $4414)
  

• Signed first edition of James Crumley's The Wrong Case (1975), £160 (approximately $235)
  

• First edition of Colin Dexter's The Silent World of Nicholas Quinn (1977), £420 (approximately $618)
  

• First edition of Lindsey Davis's The Silver Pigs (1989), £170 (approximately $250)
  

Sadly, the copies of Leslie Charteris's The Saint vs. Scotland Yard and The Saint and Mr. Teal that I mentioned in this post went unsold (as did copies of Chandler's Farewell My Lovely and The Long Goodbye).

Alexander McCall Smith, Ellis Peters this week on BBC Radio 7.

This week on BBC Radio 7: Alexander McCall Smith's No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency and Ellis Peters's Brother Cadfael in Monk's Hood (sadly, not with Derek Jacobi but with Philip Madoc and Michael Hordern). Go here for the schedule or to listen.

The first female detective in literature?

In today's Washington Post, Dennis Drabelle quotes from John Sutherland's Curiosities of Literature, stating that "the first female detective in literature was probably Amelia Butterworth, who made her debut in Anna Katharine Green's That Affair Next Door (1897)."

The assertion is inaccurate. Miss G. (aka Miss Gladden) in The Female Detective (1864) by Andrew J. Forrester Jr. is commonly identified as the first female detective in fiction. Also predating Butterworth are Mrs. Paschal in the anonymous The Experiences of a Lady Detective (1864, following Forrester by six months; attrib. to William Stephens Hayward, but there is controversy about this attribution), Catherine Louisa Pirkis's Loveday Brooke (1893, stories collected in The Experiences of Loveday Brooke, Lady Detective), and Emma Van Deventer's Madeline Payne (Madeline Payne, Detective's Daughter, 1884; and Moina, 1891). One could also argue that Wilkie Collins's Marian Halcombe acts as a detective in The Woman in White (1860), as well as Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Eleanor Vane in Eleanor's Victory (1863).

Update. The Female Detective is available in an audiobook version from Blackstone.

Aar! Shattering pirate myths.

Over on the Princeton University Press blog, Peter Leeson, author of The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics about Pirates, addresses some of our most cherished myths about those that plundered the high seas in past centuries, such as hapless captives walking the plank.

About the image: Avast! The good people at Price, Stern & Sloan offer Pirate Mad Libs.

Forensic anthropology meets the comic strip.

The Smithsonian's National Museum of National History has posted "The Secret in the Cellar," a Webcomic that follows the clues provided by a recently unearthed, centuries-old skeleton.

About the image: Ana the intern from "The Secret in the Cellar, " Smithsonian Institution.

Alice in Wonderland and Linda Fairstein.

The New York Public Library blogs about rare editions of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland, which form a key component of Linda Fairstein's Lethal Legacy.

Three Richard Stark reprints from University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press blogs about its three new reprints of novels by Richard Stark (aka the late Donald Westlake)—The Mourner, The Score, and The Jugger, all with forewords by John Banville (aka Benjamin Black) —although I was startled to read in the press release that "Richard Stark is available for interviews." Via The Twilight Zone, perhaps?

Mortimer, du Maurier, Christie this week on BBC Radio 7.

This week on BBC Radio 7: The late John Mortimer reads from his memoir Where There's a Will, along with episodes of Rumpole of the Bailey with Maurice Denham; Daphne du Maurier's "The Blue Lenses" and The House on the Strand; and assorted Agatha Christie tales. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

Happy birthday, Norbert Davis; Richard Harding Davis.

Davis birthdays today: Pulp writer (with touches of screwball comedy) Norbert Davis was born today in Illinois in 1909. Swashbuckling war correspondent, playwright, and writer Richard Harding Davis was born in Philadelphia in 1864. The son of novelist Rebecca Harding Davis, Davis covered the Spanish American War in Cuba (where he became a friend of Theodore Roosevelt and helped to create the Rough Rider legend in the press), the Boer War, and World War I (during the latter he was captured by the Germans and accused of spying). He produced some 40 books before passing away in 1916.

About the photo: Richard Harding Davis, ca. 1901. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division

Codebreaking during World War II.

Featured in this week's SpyCast from the International Spy Museum is Rear Admiral Donald "Mac" Showers, who served as a codebreaker in the US Navy during World War II. He discusses how codebreaking helped defeat the Japanese at Midway and played a significant role in locating for US forces Admiral Isorku Yamamoto, who planned the attack on Pearl Harbor.

Gothic bestsellers from Valancourt Books.

For those who like to see a different bestseller list, here is one for Valancourt Books to date for 2009:

1. The Witch of Ravensworth by George Brewer (orig. publ. 1808)

2. Carmilla by Sheridan Le Fanu (orig. publ. 1872)

3. The Veiled Picture; or the Mysteries of Gorgono by Ann Radcliffe (orig. publ. 1802)

4. The Snake's Pass by Bram Stoker (orig. publ. 1890; Stoker's first novel)

5. Six Gothic Dramas by Joanna Baillie (orig. publ. ca. 1851)

Clues issue on the girl sleuth.

Clues 27.1 has been published, the first issue in a larger format and with a redesigned cover. It also is a theme issue on the girl sleuth (Nancy Drew, Veronica Mars, et al.), guest edited by Leona W. Fisher (Georgetown University). See below for a table of contents; go here for the abstracts; here for print and online subscription information.



Clues: A Journal of Detection 27.1 (2009)
Theme Issue: The Girl Sleuth

Introduction - Leona W. Fisher

The Accidental Sleuth: Investigating Mysteries and Class in Three Series for Girls
- Ramona Caponegro

“Use Your Head, Judy Girl”: Relationships, Writing, and an Ethic of Care in the Judy Bolton Mysteries - Mary Jeanette Moran

Configuring Identity and Flights of Fancy in the Vicki Barr, Flight Stewardess Series
- Michael G. Cornelius

Trixie Belden, Edgar Allan Poe, and the Secret of the Secret in Girl-Sleuth Literature
- Steven J. Zani

The Legacy of George and Bess: Sidekicks as Normalizing Agents for the Girl Sleuth
- Julie D. O’Reilly

“You Get Tough. You Get Even”: Rape, Anger, Cynicism, and the Vigilante Girl Detective in Veronica Mars - Alaine Martaus

ESSAY
Race, Identity, and Genre in Sujata Massey’s Rei Shimura Series - Jennifer P. Nesbitt

REVIEW ESSAY
“The Unknown—with a capital U!” Richard Marsh and Victorian Popular Fiction
- Christopher Pittard
REVIEWS
Anne Humpherys and Louis James, eds. G. W. M. Reynolds: Nineteenth-Century Fiction, Politics, and the Press - Stephen Knight

Kate Summerscale. The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher or The Murder at Road Hill House
- Janice M. Allan

Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Laurence Talairach-Vielmas, ed. Thou Art the Man and LeRoy Lad Panek and Mary M. Bendel-Simso, eds. Early American Detective Stories: An Anthology - Linda Schlossberg

Michael G. Cornelius and Melanie E. Gregg, eds. Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths and Mark Connelly. The Hardy Boys Mysteries, 1927–1979: A Cultural and Literary History
- Genie Giaimo

Philippa Gates. Detecting Men: Masculinity and the Hollywood Detective Film
- Manina Jones

Alexander N. Howe. It Didn’t Mean Anything: A Psychoanalytic Reading of American Detective Fiction - Pamela Bedore

Mary Hadley and Sarah D. Fogle, eds. Minette Walters and the Meaning of Justice: Essays on the Crime Novels - Martyn Colebrook

Recent releases from Crippen and Landru.

Virginia-based small press Crippen & Landru is always uncovering gems from writers known in other fields who "moonlighted" in mystery (such as Western icon Max Brand). Its latest release, A Little Intelligence, collects mystery short stories by two science fiction authors, Robert Silverberg and Randall Garrett, who teamed up to write under the name Robert Randall.

Another recent release is The Minerva Club, the Department of Patterns, and Others by Victor Canning, in which the club, intriguingly, is made up of criminals involved in various, usually illegal, capers.

Early female detectives this week on BBC Radio 7.

Some early female detectives are featured this week on BBC Radio 7: American author Anna Katharine Green's socialite Violet Strange in "The Golden Slipper" (1915) and British writer Catherine Louisa Pirkis's Loveday Brooke in "The Redhill Sisterhood" (1893). Go here for the schedule or to listen.

About the photo: Anna Katharine Green, taken bet. 1870 and 1890. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.

The Peeple's Choice.

The Washington Post gets into the Marshmallow Peeps diorama act with this display of 40 finalists, including new takes on M.C. Escher, Edward Hopper, John Steinbeck, The Day the Earth Stood Still, The Twilight Zone, and the game Clue.

Mary Peeppins?

Copyediting at newspapers—or the lack thereof.

My former journalism professor Carl Sessions Stepp discusses the impact of the lack of copyeditors at newspapers in the April/May 2009 issue of the American Journalism Review.

And speaking of the need for copyeditors: Look here (under "Take 2") at a headline that could have badly used a copyeditor.

Marshmallow Peeps—and Eliot Ness?

Just in time for Easter, you can now view and vote for your favorite Chicago-themed Peeps diorama at the University of Chicago magazine Web site. I think I would have to go with no. 9, "Eliot Nest and the UnPeepables," Katie Hrinya's re-creation of the climatic train station scene from The Untouchables.

Make way for thieves.

After PhiloBiblos reported the theft of Pack, one of the ducklings that compose the Boston Public Garden statue commemorating Robert McCloskey's beloved Make Way for Ducklings (1941), Pack was found in Beacon Hill, four blocks from his bronze family.

Obviously, fowl play was involved...

007 beats The Saint at auction.

There's not much mystery related to report from Bloomsbury's April 2nd bibliophile auction. The Leslie Charteris books featuring Simon Templar, aka The Saint—Trust the Saint, Saint Overboard, and The Saint on the Spanish Main—went unsold. There were a few Ian Fleming titles that did respectably: A first edition of From Russia, with Love, £320 (approximately $470); a first edition of Goldfinger, £300 (approximately $440); copies of Octopussy and The Living Daylights, signed (respectively) by Maud Adams and Maryam D'Abo (who appeared in the respective films), £280 (approximately $411).

Perhaps the copies of The Saint vs. Scotland Yard and The Saint and Mr. Teal, which will be offered for sale on April 23rd, will do better. They are each estimated at a minimum of £200.

Eddie Chapman, Doctor Syn, Father Brown this week on BBC Radio 7.

Featured this week on BBC Radio 7: Agent Zigzag, about ex-con and British World War II double agent Eddie Chapman (whose story was dramatized in 1966's Triple Cross, starring Christopher Plummer) and G. K. Chesterton's Father Brown; plus Russell Thorndike's swashbuckling vicar Doctor Syn rides again in The Further Adventures of Doctor Syn. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

Happy birthday, Katherine Neville.

Katherine Neville, best known as author of the multifaceted thriller The Eight (1989), was born today in St. Louis in 1945. The Fire, her follow up to The Eight, was published in 2008. Other works include A Calculated Risk (1992) and The Magic Circle (1998).

Scientific terms? Nope, they're from sci-fi.

Jeff Prucher, of the Hugo-winning Brave New Words: The Oxford Dictionary of Science Fiction, provides on the Oxford University Press blog "Nine Words You Might Think Came from Science but Which Are Really from Science Fiction." I love the fact that Dave Gerrold (of Star Trek's "The Trouble with Tribbles") first linked the word virus with nasty computer programs in 1972.

Rooster Cogburn rides again.

Overlook Press, which has reprinted Charles Portis's True Grit with an afterword by novelist Donna Tartt, reports that the Coen brothers are planning to remake this classic western (Adam Sandler had better not be cast as the legendary lawman. Is Sam Elliott available?).

True Grit is an entry on the Telegraph's list of "100 Books Every Child Should Read."

Historical hoaxes.

For April Fool's Day, the Oxford DNB talks about historical hoaxes such as Piltdown Man and Princess Caraboo, while the Museum of Hoaxes lists the Top 100 April Fool's Day Hoaxes of All Time (see also the museum's Famous Hoaxes throughout History).