Through March 21st, the Washington Stage Guild is performing in Oscar Wilde's Lord Arthur Savile's Crime, in which his lordship, receiving the news that he is destined to commit a murder, decides to get it out of the way immediately. Go here for the Washington Post review; here to read W. B. Yeats's review of Lord Arthur Savile's Crime and Other Stories (1891).
This week BBC Radio 7 is featuring the Edgar-nominated Seance on a Wet Afternoon by Australian Mark McShane, aka Marc Lovell, in which a purported clairvoyant and her husband are involved in a kidnapping. It was filmed in 1964 by Bryan Forbes and starred Richard Attenborough and Kim Stanley.
Richard Archer, professor of history emeritus at Whittier College, discusses on the Oxford University Press blog why he thinks the Boston Massacre on March 5, 1770, was murder.
A few samples of chess sets with a Sherlock Holmes theme:
Opening today at the Museum of the City of New York is the exhibition "Charles Addams's New York," which features city images by the late New Yorker cartoonist known for his skewed view of the world (especially the creation of the Addams Family). Go here to see a timeline of his career.
rhymes to music, according to this post on Yale's Room 26 Cabinet of Curiosities. It's not as catchy as "Conjunction Junction, What's Your Function?": "Texas is low and marshy near the coast/The north and west can hills and mountains boast/Jacinto battle, eighteen thirty-six/Caught Santa Anna in a doleful fix."
Penguin Books celebrates its 75th anniversary this year with a look back at its history, including its top-selling paperbacks, such as:• Helene Hanff, 84 Charing Cross Road
• John le Carre, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
• Peter Robinson, Gallows View
• Carlos Ruiz Zafon, The Shadow of the Wind
About the image: The "favourite Penguin" poster for February
Museyon Guides previews New York's Museum of the American Gangster, which is scheduled to open March 7.
Aoife Leahy discusses modernist influences on Dorothy L. Sayers, such as Lewis Carroll and Oscar Wilde, in The Victorian Approach to Modernism in the Fiction of Dorothy L. Sayers (2009).
Princeton University Press blogs about its book Swindled: The Dark History of Food Fraud, from Poisoned Candy to Counterfeit Coffee by Bee Wilson, also noting the establishment of the Anti-Counterfeiting and Product Protection Program at Michigan State University.
Out of Print Clothing has a Hound of the Baskervilles T-shirt, along with other book cover shirts such as Fahrenheit 451, Naked Lunch, and Invisible Man.
Larry T. Nix, on the Library History Buff Web site, reminds us of the distinguished history of the American Library in Paris, begun by the American Library Association in 1920 and still in existence today. A major figure in its operation, especially during the Nazi occupation of France during World War II, was Clara Longworth de Chambrun, sister-in-law of Alice Roosevelt Longworth and niece of Maria Longworth Nichols Storer, the founder of Rookwood Pottery. Staff members surreptitiously sent books to Jews, who were forbidden to use libraries by the German forces; one staff member was shot by the Gestapo.
The Library Company's online exhibition "Philadelphia Gothic: Murders, Mysteries, Monsters, and Mayhem Inspire American Fiction 1798–1854" examines that city's contributions to literary "lurid crime" and includes sections on Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Montgomery Bird, Charles Brockden Brown, George Lippard, and Aaron Burr associate Leonora Sansay (more on Sansay here). Two podcasts associated with the exhibition can be found here.
This podcast from London's Resonance 104.4 fm discusses how Patrick McGoohan's The Prisoner (considered by some to be the ultimate fate of McGoohan's spy John Drake from Danger Man/Secret Agent Man) has continued in other forms of media.
Dr. Adrian Eckersley of the Friends of Arthur Machen discusses with Malcolm Hopkins the career of Arthur Llewellyn Jones, aka Arthur Machen (1863–1947)—who inspired H. P. Lovecraft, among others, with works such as "The Great God Pan" (1894) and "The Inmost Light" (1894)—in this broadcast from the "Lost Steps" program of London's Resonance 104.4fm.
As this Wall Street Journal article notes, NBA legend and actor Kareem Abdul-Jabbar is a mystery fan: Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert B. Parker.
Anthony Berkeley Cox's The Poisoned Chocolates Case (1929) returns to print today, courtesy of Felony and Mayhem Press.
• Early photo of P. D. James in the Tube
A quick browse through the British Library Sound Archive uncovered these audio nuggets (in Windows Media files; Mac users need a program such as Flip4Mac to listen to these):
• E. V. and Laura Vanderstoep's bookplates with fingerprints
Jules Verne—friend of Alexandre Dumas pére and author of Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, Around the World in Eighty Days, and other highly imaginative works—was born today in Nantes, France, in 1828.
Christopher Fowler's latest in his Forgotten Authors series for The Independent focuses on Nevil Shute and Eric Ambler, although he does acknowledge that they still have a presence in today's literary world. One aspect of Shute's oeuvre he fails to mention: aeronautical engineer Shute's No Highway (1948; filmed as No Highway in the Sky, 1951), which sounded a prophetic warning against the dangers of metal fatigue in planes.
Last year's "I Know Poe" exhibition sponsored by the Library of Virginia and the Poe Museum of Richmond is now online here.
This BBC Radio 3 Arts and Ideas podcast includes a discussion of Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White on its 150th anniversary.
• A comic book on the Montgomery bus boycott of 1956 that was influential in the civil rights movement
includes "1891: The Proof That Fingerprints Are Unique," which discusses the still-used classification system for fingerprints developed by Sir Francis Galton, a cousin of Charles Darwin.About the image: Detective John Christie in disguise as a tinker. Museum Victoria• a carte de visite of detective John Christie, dubbed "the Sherlock Holmes of Victoria police"
• an image of the posse that captured outlaw Ned Kelly
• an account of the first Australian policeman killed in the line of duty (in 1803)
• an image of the police escort for British aviator Amy Johnson
• an image of a mobile forensic van of the Victoria police, ca. 1960
Valancourt Books has republished Edward Bulwer Lytton's Eugene Aram (1832); as Lucy Sussex discussed in this article for Clues 26.1, Bulwer Lytton (friend of Dickens and Collins) made important contributions to the mystery genre with Eugene Aram, Paul Clifford (1830), and Night and Morning (1841; go here to read Edgar Allan Poe's review of this book) .About the image: Cigarette card of G. K. Chesterton, NYPL• an account of his lectures there in fall 1930: "... there was the man himself, nearly three hundred pounds of him, who, thinking of some delicious aside, would start to chuckle and so convulse the audience before he had said what he had to say, that they were in a constant state of good nature. "
• a faculty admission card to Chesterton's Notre Dame lectures, which reveals that he spoke on history on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays; and on literature on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays.
• online text of the 1912 Chesterton Day by Day, which features Chesterton quotes organized by days of the year. For example, the entry for January 31 is from The Defendant: "The Iliad is only great because all life is a battle, the Odyssey because all life is a journey, the Book of Job because all life is a riddle."• online text of Greybeards at Play: Literature and Art for Old Gentlemen, written and illustrated by Chesterton (note the dedication to "E.C.B.," who is Chesterton's old friend, mystery writer E. C. Bentley)
In the Guardian Euan Ferguson reviews Operation Mincemeat by Ben Macintyre (author of Agent Zigzag, about World War II secret agent and con man Eddie Chapman). The book details the successful British effort to misdirect the Nazis about the invasion of Sicily during WWII.
Among the items of the Boston Public Library's "Cool and Collected" exhibition that you can see online at Flickr:
who wrote the Clues 23.3 article "Laura, Vera, and Wilkie," mentioned that mystery stories, which had only been published in magazines, existed in the Caspary papers at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research; I suggested that she contact C&L's Doug Greene regarding a possible publication.... to my mind crime is sordid and inevitably associated with gangsters, frustrated choir singers in dusty suburban towns, and starving old ladies supposed to have hidden vast fortunes in the bedsprings.About the photo: Vera Caspary, by Jane Rady. From The Secrets of Grown-ups.
—Vera Caspary, "Sugar and Spice." 1943. The Murder in the Stork Club and Other Mysteries 60
the photo below shows. I interviewed him in 2006 for a Bryant Park program just outside the New York Public Library (go here to listen to the interview). He was jovial, unsurprisingly snide about Hollywood, and, after he'd said he wasn't a short story writer, touchingly pleased when I disagreed and mentioned "Surrogate" (1982; rpt. in New Crimes 3, ed. Maxim Jakubowski, 1991). Most of all, I was impressed by his serious commitment to taking care of his family.
Among the small number of collections featured online at the Wisconsin Center for Film and Theater Research is one on Kirk Douglas:• Documents and a still from Seven Days in May (1964; dir. John Frankenheimer, writ. Rod Serling), including suggestions by Stanley Kubrick• Annotated script from "Never Steal a Butcher's Wife" (Suspense, 1950). You can listen to the episode here.
George Simmers on the Great War Fiction blog has another look at the presence of WWI in Patrick Hamilton's work after Rope—this time in Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953) and Unknown Assailant (1955), part of Hamilton's Gorse trilogy. Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse was adapted for television as The Charmer (1987) starring Nigel Havers as con man Ralph Gorse, and one of the blog commenters notes that Gorse is believed to be based on murderer Neville Heath.
Actor-writer and Yale alumnus Thomas Tryon was born today in Hartford in 1926. His best-known films are probably I Married a Monster from Outer Space (1958), The Cardinal (1962), The Longest Day (1962), and In Harm's Way (1965). His highly successful books include The Other (1971), Crowned Heads (1976; adapted as the Billy Wilder film Fedora, 1978), and All That Glitters (1986). He died of cancer in 1991.
The online exhibition "Here Today, Here Tomorrow: Varieties of Medical Ephemera" from the National Library of Medicine's History of Medicine division includes bookplates with medically related subjects. Go here to see sample bookplates from individuals such as Danish actor-book collector Jean Hersholt and physician-writer Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr.
Roosevelt from various sources (according to his autobiography [18], he was not allowed to read dime novels when he was a child, which apparently did not thwart him from obtaining a few. He was forbidden to read Ouida's Under Two Flags but did so anyway):Roosevelt's concentration of mind when reading was quite as remarkable as his ability to read at any and all times and under the most unfavorable circumstances without inconvenience or annoyance. When interested in a book, he seemed to be absolutely dead, for the time being, to all the rest of the world. Noise did not affect him in the least. He could sit in the midst of a talking, shouting crowd and be totally oblivious of and insensible to everything but the contents of the volume in his hands.About the image: TR reads, ca. 1904. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division
— J. A. Zahm, C.S.C., "Theodore Roosevelt as a Hunter-Naturalist," The Outlook 121 (March 1919): 435
Michael Carlson on BBC Radio 4's Open Book addresses a question on US gangster fiction in this podcast, recommending Dashiell Hammett's Red Harvest, Raoul Whitfield, and Elmore Leonard, among other authors.
It's nice to see that, courtesy of Academy Chicago Publishers, two mystery classics by female authors will be back in print: Marie Belloc Lowndes's The Lodger (1914; Hitchcock film 1927), where an elderly couple begin to think the unthinkable about their mysterious tenant (out in March); and Baroness Emmuska Orczy's Lady Molly of Scotland Yard (1910), where Lady Molly and her maid, Mary Granard, put "the test of feminine investigation" to unsolved crimes (out in May).
In the Symphony Space series Selected Shorts: A Celebration of the Short Story, Isaiah Sheffer reads Ed McBain's "Improvisation" (2005) in which a pickup in a bar has distinct consequences. Go here for information on the program.
Recent additions to BFI Screenonline: A look at The Wicker Man (1973), a rather odd thriller featuring recently departed actor Edward Woodward as a police sergeant; the 1959 noirish adaptation of Robin Maugham's The Rough and the Smooth by The Killers and The Spiral Staircase director Robert Siodmak; and Carol Reed's 1959 adaptation of Graham Greene's Our Man in Havana.
The online "Beauty for Commerce" exhibition at the University of Rochester features some beautiful book cover and spine designs from the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Some examples include:
There's been a flurry of recent publicity for The Year in Lebowski Studies that features essays on the Coen Brothers' 1998 film The Big Lebowski, which has distinct parallels to Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep. To wit:
I was curious about their U.S. equivalents, so I looked at the Publishers Weekly bestseller lists for 1909 and 1910, and found mostly names that are not prominent on today's literary landscape. The possible exception, and the only mystery writer to appear on these lists—Mary Roberts Rinehart, for The Man in Lower Ten (1909) and for The Window at the White Cat and When a Man Marries (both 1910). Irish novelist Katherine Cecil Thurston does appear on the 1910 list for Max, but she's best known for the thriller John Chilcote (1904), which was the basis for The Masquerader (1933) starring Ronald Colman.
Modern readers might be bemused to see A Modern Chronicle by one Winston Churchill on the 1910 list, but this is the American novelist Churchill, not the budding politician. The Canadian retired clergyman Basil King shows up both in 1909 (for The Inner Shrine) and 1910 (for The Wild Olive). The sentimental The Trail of the Lonesome Pine by Theodore Roosevelt friend John Fox Jr. appears on both the 1908 and 1909 PW lists. Hoosier George Barr McCutcheon appears on the PW lists from 1904 to 1909 (the latter for Truxton King), but he is perhaps best known for Brewster's Millions (1902) and also wrote Anderson Crow, Detective (1920). Britons Charles Norris Williamson and Alice Muriel Williamson appear on the 1910 list for Lord Loveland Discovers America; Alice wrote the mystery A Woman in Grey (1898).
