Product of the Day: Mysteries & More mousepad.

An appropriate mousepad from the Mysteries & More Bookstore in Nashville, TN.

The many sides of Robert Louis Stevenson.

Robert Louis Stevenson
at age 25. NYPL

The online exhibition "Robert Louis Stevenson, 1850–1894" from the University of South Carolina Libraries Rare Books and Special Collections includes this great cover from Stevenson's "The Body Snatcher" (1884), artwork from various editions of The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as some interesting material on the relationship between Stevenson and poet W. E. Henley. Also featured are two portraits of Stevenson (posted here and here) by John Singer Sargent, who told Henry James that Stevenson was "the most intense creature I had ever met."

John le Carré at the movies.

Sean Connery in
The Russia House

You can still listen online to the episode "John le Carré at the Movies" from WQXR's Movies on the Radio program. Soundtracks covered include the 1979 and 2011 versions of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Spy Who Came In from the Cold; The Russia House; and Quincy Jones's score for The Deadly Affair.

Richard Marsh's Judith Lee, continued.

There's been a lot of interest in my review of Richard Marsh's hard-to-find Judith Lee stories (1912–16) since it appeared as part of Patti Abbott's series on Friday's Forgotten Books. Now Black Coat Press has issued The Complete Adventures of Judith Lee. According to editor Jean-Daniel Brèque, the edition includes the stories collected in Marsh's Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (1912) and The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916), as well as "The Barnes Mystery" (a 1916 story from the Strand magazine). This is welcome news for fans of early female sleuths and Marsh.

Update, 1-22-16. There's another new edition of Judith Lee stories from Valancourt Books, edited by Minna Vuohelainen (Edge Hill University, UK)

How Vertigo nearly became Cry from the Rooftop.

Lists of Note features proposed alternative titles for Alfred Hitchcock's Vertigo. (My Madeleine? Sounds like a riff on Proust.)

New podcast: Why I Really Like This Book.

University of Ghent professor Kate Macdonald, author of the John Buchan companion that I edited, has started Why I Really Like This Book, a podcast that highlights neglected works. Two recent episodes focus on thriller author Dornford Yates (whose work has been reprinted by House of Stratus) and Erskine Childers's Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone work The Riddle of the Sands (new edition available from Penguin; Macdonald introduced an earlier edition).
(Hat tip to Neglected Books)

Happy birthday, Jules Feiffer.

James Finley and Evan Crump
in the Amer Century Theatre
production of Little Murders.
Photo by Dennis Deloria

Cartoonist and playwright Jules Feiffer was born today in Bronx, NY, in 1929. His play The White House Murder Case (the First Lady is murdered against a backdrop of an unpopular war—read Vietnam) has been produced in San Jose and Chicago. Arlington, VA's American Century Theatre is staging Feiffer's dark comedy Little Murders through February 11, which deals with the violence surrounding a dysfunctional family.

Inner Sanctum debuts, January 1941.

Richard Widmark, left, gets
physical on the Blue Network.
NYPL

The Museum of Broadcast Communications notes that this month in 1941, the radio program Inner Sanctum (with a signature squeaking-door opening) debuted on the Blue Network (later ABC) with "The Amazing Death of Mrs. Putnam." The producer was Himan Brown, who went on to produce the CBS Radio Mystery Theatre and numerous other series. Several episodes of Inner Sanctum can be downloaded from the Internet Archive, including "Make Ready My Grave" starring Richard Widmark.

Our man in Appomattox.

Grant:
general, president, spymaster?
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div.

In this podcast, the Spy Museum's Mark Stout talks to William Feis, author of Grant's Secret Service: The Intelligence War from Belmont to Appomattox.

What might have been: Collins and Drood.

Wilkie Collins,
ca. 1880–90.
Library of Congress,
Prints & Photos Div

The Wilkie Collins Society has issued Addenda and Corrigenda 7, a selection of previously unpublished or hard-to-find letters, including one that confirms that Collins was asked to complete The Mystery of Edwin Drood after the death of his friend Charles Dickens and another that records Collins's reaction to Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. The publication is available free to society members and for a modest £5 (approx. US$8) to nonmembers, which can be paid via PayPal; contact Paul Lewis for details.

Chandler to Hitchcock, Strangers on a Train.

Farley Granger (left) and
Robert Walker
Strangers on a Train (1951)

In time for today's birthday of Patricia Highsmith: Letters of Note features a stormy letter from Raymond Chandler to Alfred Hitchcock regarding Chandler's screenplay of Strangers on a Train.

Chesterton, Greene, et al: Bloomsbury auction results.

E. C. Bentley, from
The Bookman 37 (1913)

There was a mixed bag of results for the Jan 12th Bloomsbury bibliophile auction, although it seems that works by Graham Greene continue to do respectably at auction. The mystery-related items included the following:

• Strand magazine vols 1–16, 1891–98, which contain the Adventures and Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (illust. Sidney Paget): £100 (approx. US$153).

• E. C. Bentley, Trent's Last Case (1913), with G. K. Chesterton's The Wisdom of Father Brown (1914) and some Agatha Christie works, £110 (approx. US$168).

• Raymond Chandler, 1st English ed. of The Big Sleep (1939), £260 (approx. US$400).

• G. K. Chesterton, 1st ed. of The Man Who Was Thursday (1908), £60 (approx. US$92).

• Graham Greene, 1st ed. of The Third Man and The Fallen Idol (1950), £240 (approx. US$368).
(Hat tip to PhiloBiblos)

Ngaio Marsh this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

A lethal country house party requires Inspector Alleyn's investigation in Ngaio Marsh's A Man Lay Dead (1934), which airs this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Go here for the schedule or to listen; episodes usually may be heard online for up to a week after broadcast.

"Let's be careful out there."

The first episode of Hill Street Blues, "Hill Street Station," debuted today in 1981. Although the Museum of Broadcast Communications credits it with affecting every TV cop show ever since, sharp-eyed observers note more than a passing influence on the TV series of Ed McBain's 87th Precinct.

Happy half-century, Jasper Fforde.

Jasper Fforde, author of the rollicking Thursday Next series (most recently One of Our Thursdays Is Missing) and the nursery crime series (The Fourth Bear, etc.) turns 50 today.

Joyce Porter on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

The untidy Inspector Wilfred Dover of British mystery writer Joyce Porter is featured this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra. Go here for the schedule or to listen online; episodes generally may be heard for up to a week after broadcast. Several of Porter's mysteries have been reprinted (introduction to the Dover short story collection by Robert Barnard).

Irene Adler, cross-dresser.

Gayle Hunnicutt as Irene Adler
in "A Scandal in Bohemia"
(Adventures of
Sherlock Holmes, 1984)

There's an interesting discussion by Constance Crompton of Irene Adler's cross-dressing in "A Scandal in Bohemia" in the new issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies.

Neglected Books on Christopher Morley.

Christopher Morley
Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Div.

The Neglected Books blog discusses Christopher Morley's Human Being (1932). Morley, instrumental in the founding of the Baker Street Irregulars, is best known for Kitty Foyle (1939), but I've enjoyed his novels featuring a bookseller, Parnassus on Wheels (1917) and The Haunted Bookshop (1919), as well as his essays (collected in various volumes such as Pipefuls, 1920) and his sense of humor (such as his spoof of Henry James).

"We had been talking at dinner of the extraordinary number of grievous deaths of well-known authors that had happened that year. . . . [T]here was Dunraven Bleak, the humorous essayist, who was found stark (in both senses) in his bathtub; and Cynthia Carboy, the famous writer of bedtime stories, who fell down the elevator shaft. . . . [T]he detective bureau insisted that in some unexplainable manner she must have fallen up the shaft; but as Dulcet pointed out at the time of the Authors' League inquiry, the body might have been carried upstairs after the accident. Then there was Andrew Baffle, the psychological novelist, whose end was peculiarly atrocious and miserable, because it seemed that he had contracted tetanus from handling a typewriter ribbon that showed signs of having been poisoned."—Christopher Morley, "The Curious Case of Kenelm Digby," Tales from a Rolltop Desk (1921).

Elisabeth Saxnay Holding in ebook format.

Joan Bennett and James Mason
in The Reckless Moment
(1949, adapt. of Holding's
The Blank Wall)

Persephone Books has an ebook version available of Elisabeth Sanxay Holding's The Blank Wall (1947); print edition also available. This book by Holding—a favorite author of Chandler—features a woman who finds herself under suspicion in the death of her daughter's boyfriend.

Happy 95th birthday, Helen Eustis.

Edward Albert in
The Fool Killer (1965)

Helen Eustis—author of the Edgar-winning The Horizontal Man (1946) and The Fool Killer (1954), friend of Carson McCullers, and ex-wife of Smith poet-professor Alfred Young Fisher—turns 95 today in New York City. Eustis is one of two living writers on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list of essential mysteries (the other is Dorothy Salisbury Davis). The Best Mysteries of All Time series of Reader's Digest issued a new edition of The Horizontal Man this year. (post updated to reflect correct age from Eustis's son)

Chan, music in noir in Choice's Outstanding Academic Titles, 2011.

In the inevitable "best of" lists that appear toward the end of the year, Choice: Current Revews for Academic Libraries has selected its outstanding academic titles for 2011. The mystery-related ones include:

• Yunte Huang, Charlie Chan: The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History

• Robert Miklitsch, Siren City: Sound and Source Music in Classic American Noir

Preliminary info, Camilleri companion (ed. Foxwell)

McFarland has posted some preliminary details on Andrea Camilleri: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, no. 5 in the series I edit for the publisher. University College London's Lucia Rinaldi is the author, and the book is tentatively slated for release in summer 2012.

Camilleri, a mega-bestseller in his native Italy and quite popular in other countries as well, created Sicilian inspector Salvo Montalbano, who has been featured in a

DVD from
Detective Montalbano
series

long-running television series, Detective Montalbano.

His novels have been shortlisted several times for the British Crime Writers Assn's International Dagger. As there are few resources available on his work in English, this companion should be useful to fans and scholars alike.

Update, 4-5-12.  Andrea Camilleri: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction is now available from McFarland.

Info on Harvard's sci-fi collection.

Cover from Nightmare Tales
(1892) by Helena Blavatsky,
part of Harvard's sci-fi
collection

Harvard has provided further details on the 3000-volume science fiction collection within Houghton Library's Modern Books and Manuscripts Collection. Two covers on the Web site are Anthony Boucher's Rocket to the Morgue (which has thinly disguised versions of Robert Heinlein, Hugo Gernsback, and L. Ron Hubbard) and Fredric Brown's What Mad Universe.

Also see this cover from Nathan Schachner's Space Lawyer (a joke must be lurking somewhere in there).

Collins/Dickens/Gaskell tale, BBC Radio 4 Extra.

Illustration of
Elizabeth Gaskell, NYPL

For the Christmas issue of Household Words in 1858, Wilkie Collins, Charles Dickens, Elizabeth Gaskell, and Adelaide Ann Procter teamed up to write "A House to Let" featuring episodes in the history of a desolate house. BBC Radio 4 Extra is airing a version this week; episodes usually may be heard for up to a week after broadcast.

Bah, humbug.

Illustration by
John Leech for
"A Christmas Carol"
1845

You can hear an excerpt from Dickens's "A Christmas Carol" read by noted actor Richard Briers in a podcast from Vintage Books.

The two Ronnies: Radio mysteries w/Ronald Colman, Ronald Reagan.

Ronald Colman, NYPL

Among the latest highlights posted online at the National Radio Hall of Fame: the 1945 Suspense production of "August Heat" (the future fates of two men intertwine, from the 1910 short story by W. F. Harvey) featuring Ronald Colman and the 1938 Warner Brothers Academy Theatre production of "One Way Passage" (Ronald Reagan as a killer en route to the gallows).

Green for Greene: Book fetches $24K.

As PhiloBiblos noted, a first edition of Graham Greene's Rumour at Nightfall (1931) garnered £17,000 (about US$24,500) at Bloomsbury's Dec 14 auction. Greene viewed the Conrad-influenced Rumour, in which a journalist hunts for an outlaw in Spain, as a very bad novel and refused to reprint it after its 1932 US edition. (Factoid of the day: According to a NYT review of Greene's The Name of Action [1931], Greene was related to Robert Louis Stevenson.)

Margaret Millar this week on Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Encore.

Joan Hackett in "Beast in View"
Alfred Hitchcock Hour

Margaret Millar's Edgar-winning Beast in View (1955) is featured this week on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour on Encore. Joan Hackett and Kevin McCarthy star. (YouTube clip here)

Hallmark Hall of Fame: Quo vadis?

Stephanie Zimbalist in
"Caroline?"
Hallmark Hall of Fame, 1990

The Paley Center for Media's Rebecca Paller laments the decline of TV's Hallmark Hall of Fame and provides a look back at some of its major highlights (including clips from Amahl and the Night Visitors and Ibsen's A Doll's House with Julie Harris and Christopher Plummer).

Edmund Wilson's rejection note.

Edmund Wilson
ca. 1936, NYPL

Critic Edmund Wilson has a notorious place in mysterydom as the author of "Who Cares Who Killed Roger Ackroyd?" and continued his crankiness through this note sent to anyone who asked him for anything (part of the new blog Lists of Note).

BBC Radio 4 Extra: Xmas w/the Detectives.

Thomas Hardy, NYPL

This week, BBC Radio 4 Extra features four tales read by Tom Conti that take place during the Christmas season: Arthur Conan Doyle's "The Blue Carbuncle," Thomas Hardy's whodunit "The Thieves Who Couldn't Stop Sneezing," Dorothy L. Sayers's "The Necklace of Pearls," and G. K. Chesterton's "The Flying Stars." Go here for the schedule or to listen; episodes usually may be heard online up to a week after broadcast.

(And here is Anthony Gardner on the intriguing stories behind Hardy's Christmas cards)

John Creasey: "Could you write more?"

DVD of Gideon's Way 
TV series, 1960s

Among the gems in Writing Detective and Mystery Fiction (ed. A. S. Burack, 1945) is John Creasey's "Could You Write More?". He should know; it's estimated that Creasey (1908–73) published upward of 500 books. His works include the Gideon series, including Gideon's Day (1955)— important novels in the evolution of the police procedural.

In the piece Creasey states, "Nine out of ten writers, I am sure, could write more" (139) and provides 15 rules to show how this may be accomplished. Here is a sample (pp. 141–42):

• "Rule 1. Work to rule, not to mood. Work through moods."

• "Rule 4. Drill yourself to acquire neatness and system at the desk. Everyone can."

"Rule 6.  Be punctual. If you were going to an office to work for a boss, you would be. So be your own boss."

"Rule 9. Do your research after you have written your story and not before. . . .You will be surprised about how much you know about your subject . . . and this will enable you to write practically all you need to write. But some of your facts will need checking. This can be done easily, and you will know exactly what you are looking for."

Happy birthday, William McGivern.

Janet Leigh and Robert Taylor
in Rogue Cop
(writ. William McGivern, 1954)

William McGivern, best known for The Big Heat (1953), was born today in Chicago in 1922. He served as president of Mystery Writers of America in 1980 and penned some 25 books over the course of his career. His screen credits include films such as the John Wayne cop vehicle Brannigan (1975) and the Lee J. Cobb TV series The Young Lawyers (1970–71). Dorothy B. Hughes considered The Big Heat, which received an Edgar for Best Motion Picture, one of the best mysteries of 1953. McGivern died in 1982.

Update. On Dec. 28, 2011, The Big Heat (dir. Fritz Lang, 1953) was added to the National Film Registry.

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.

Happy birthday, Louisa May Alcott.

Louisa May Alcott, NYPL

Louisa May Alcott was born today in 1832 in Germantown, PA. Although she achieved literary and lucrative success with Little Women (1868–69) and its sequels as well as provided a role model for millions of women with the restless and ambitious Jo, she took a great deal of pleasure in penning her pseudonymous "blood-and-thunder" tales (see, for example, Behind a Mask: The Unknown Thrillers of Louisa May Alcott; I wrote a few entries on these in the Louisa May Alcott Encyclopedia and discuss her thrillers in "Lady and the Dark" in Deadly Women). She also provided a penetrating look at caring for the wounded during the Civil War in her autobiographical Hospital Sketches (1863). You can support the educational programs at Orchard House—her home in Concord, MA—here.

Celia Fremlin this week on Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Encore.

Gena Rowlands in "The Lonely
Hours," Alfred Hitchcock Hour

A distinct treat is coming up for fans of Celia Fremlin's Edgar-winning The Hours before Dawn (1959)—this week, Encore is showing the Alfred Hitchcock Hour adaptation, "The Lonely Hours," starring Gena Rowlands. (Also can be seen via YouTube)

Happy birthday, W. R. Burnett.

John Garfield in
Nobody Lives Forever
(writ. W. R. Burnett, 1946)

W[illiam]. R[iley]. Burnett, author of the hard-edged classics Little Caesar (1929), High Sierra (1940), Nobody Lives Forever (1943), The Asphalt Jungle (1949), and several other novels, was born today in Springfield, Ohio, in 1899. His scripts include the films The Getaway, This Gun for Hire, The Racket, and The Great Escape as well as episodes of the TV series Naked City and The Untouchables. MWA named him a Grand Master in 1980; he died in 1982. Stark House Press has reissued Burnett's It's Always Four O'Clock (1956) and Iron Man (1930).

50 years of The Phantom Tollbooth.

The Philadelphia Library celebrates the 50th anniversary of Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (illus. Jules Feiffer, 1961) with the author.

U-Chicago's Popular Literature Collection.

Univ of Chicago Library's Special Collections finished an inventory last year of its Popular Literature Collection, which includes about 2000 paperbacks and science fiction magazines, some with lurid

Portrait of Anthony Berkeley Cox
by George Morrow
from Jugged Journalism (1925)

covers. Now, finally, the finding aid is online. Books in the collection include Trial and Error (1945 ed.; film 1941) by Anthony Berkeley [Cox], Death in the Blackout (1946) by Anthony Gilbert, Of Tender Sin (1952) by David Goodis, The Rope Began to Hang the Butcher (1944) by C. W. Grafton (father of Sue), Bimini Run (1952) by E. Howard Hunt (yes, the Watergate figure), Dread Journey (1947) by Dorothy B. Hughes, Wall of Eyes (1943) by Margaret Millar, and She Faded into Air (1941) by Ethel Lina White (best known for The Lady Vanishes). Some covers from the collection are posted here.

"The demons were kept in the trap."

Wilson Library, Dartmouth, ca. 1900
Library of Congress

Larry T. Nix on the Library History Buff Blog provides a rousing account of the attempt to take Dartmouth's student literary society library by force in 1817.

James Bond's WWII influences.

Nicholas Rankin discusses his new book Ian Fleming's Commandos, which focuses on Fleming's WWII unit that later provided many elements of the James Bond novels, on the Faber & Faber blog The Thought Fox (video included).

Star Trek: No "space suits ... for hostile planet surfaces."

Star Trek cast members and Gene Roddenberry with
NASA officials and shuttle prototype Enterprise.
NASA photo, 1976

Harvard's Houghton Library has acquired "The Star Trek Guide," a publication that was distributed to Star Trek writers, and it's a hoot. "Captain would not hug pretty Yeoman on the Bridge of his vessel." Oh really? However, the curious phenomenon of fatalities of landing party members who wear red shirts is left unaddressed  ("Ensign So-and-So, go look behind that rock"). There are explanations for the term stardate and why so many Class-M planets were visited, as well as an answer to the question "Are you people on LSD?"

Happy birthday, Van Wyck Mason; writer, WWI and WWII veteran.

"Not a dull page in any of his works."
—critic Jay Lewis on Van Wyck Mason, Other Men's Minds 39

Francis Van Wyck Mason—pulp writer, historical novelist, creator of investigator Hugh North, captain in World War I wounded at Verdun, and colonel with Allied Supreme HQ during World War II—was born today in Boston in 1901. North, who is usually involved in cases with government implications, debuted in Seeds of Murder (1930) and appears in 26 other novels and several short stories. A Mason story was adapted as The Spy Ring (dir. Joseph H. Lewis, 1938) with Jane Wyman. Mason died in 1978.

Ian Fleming considers a title.

Ian Fleming, NYPL

Letters of Note features a letter from Ian Fleming proposing titles for his next book after Live and Let Die.

Patricia Highsmith on the Alfred Hitchcock Hour, Encore.

Dean Stockwell in "Annabel"
Alfred Hitchcock Hour

A quadruple whammy in this week's episode of the Alfred Hitchcock Hour on Encore: "Annabel" is adapted from This Sweet Sickness by Patricia Highsmith, the screenplay is by Robert Bloch (Psycho), the star is Dean Stockwell, and the director is Paul Henreid. (It also can be viewed via YouTube.)

Ernest Bramah this week on BBC Radio 4 Extra.

This week on BBC Radio 4 Extra, Ernest Bramah's blind detective and coin collector Max Carrados looks into forgery and murder in The Tales of Max Carrados (1914). Go here for the schedule or to listen; episodes usually may be heard for up to week after broadcast.

Friday's Forgotten Books: Judith Lee (1912–16), by Richard Marsh.

I did not propose to sit still [...and] allow those three uncanny beings, undisturbed, to work their evil wills.
—Richard Marsh, "Conscience" (1913)

"He had me by the throat before I had
even realized that danger
threatened." Illustration from
"Mandragora" by Richard Marsh
Washington Herald 1 Mar. 1914

Judith Lee is a "teacher of the deaf and dumb"—in other words, she can read lips. This skill tends to embroil her in trouble. In "The Man Who Cut Off My Hair," Lee encounters jewel thieves; the reader might be annoyed that Lee is enraged by her unwanted haircut rather than the robbery of an elderly man. In "Conscience," Lee connects cryptic utterances with two murders and takes action to avoid further deaths. In "Matched," Lee looks into the case of a bride who has vanished. In "Auld Lang Syne" she thwarts a bombing. In "The Miracle," Lee prevents a prospective marriage based on fraud. In "Isolda," Lee steps in to flout a fraudulent fortuneteller. In "Uncle Jack" she bests an American con man. In "The Restaurant Napolitain," Lee confronts agents of the Mafia. In "Mandragora," she works to free an innocent man from prison.

Lee does not always act wisely (as in "The Restaurant Napolitain" when she faces the bad guy—alone—and tells him she knows he has murdered someone). In some respects, she may resemble Anna Katharine Green's Violet Strange (The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange, 1915).

Richard Marsh (aka Richard Bernard Heldmann, 1857–1915) is best known for The Beetle, which outsold Bram Stoker's Dracula in 1897. His grandson was the horror writer Robert Aickman (1914–81). Few copies of Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (1912) and The Adventures of Judith Lee (1916) exist in U.S. libraries, and the sole copy of The Adventures of Judith Lee on abebooks is priced at more than $1200. I am hoping that Valancourt Books, which has been reprinting Marsh's works, will eventually get to Judith Lee.

Via the Library of Congress' Chronicling America project I downloaded 10 of the Washington Herald versions of the Judith Lee stories that are collected in Judith Lee: Some Pages from Her Life (unfortunately, "Was It Luck or Chance?" was not entirely legible). As an aid to those who may wish to read these stories, I have uploaded the readable copies to my Web site; the links on the story titles in this blog post will take readers to them.

Update, 1-22-16. There's a new edition of Judith Lee stories from Valancourt Books, edited by Minna Vuohelainen (Edge Hill University, UK)

Canada Literary Tour: No mystery.

Grant Allen

I must confess to irritation that "Canada: A Literary Tour" on the Library and Archives Canada Web site has absolutely no mention of Canadian mystery contributions to its literary landscape. Not even Grant Allen (b. in Kingston, Ontario, in 1848)—grandson of the fifth Baron Longueuil (the only Canadian barony), friend of Arthur Conan Doyle, and creator of some of the earliest female fictional detectives (Lois Cayley, Hilda Wade). Surely multiaward-winning Louise Penny contributes substantially to a rendering of Quebec?

Brock University has a great Crime Fiction Canada resource. Perhaps the Crime Writers of Canada will compile their own mystery map of Canada.

"Crime Unseen" exhibition, Chicago.

Chicago's Museum of Contemporary Photography is staging the exhibition "Crime Unseen" until January 15, 2012, that features the camera's role in documenting crimes. There is some mention of the roles of detective fiction and movies.