As Scott Bettencourt writes enthusiastically in Film Score Friday, John Cameron's score to The Mirror Crack'd (dir. Guy Hamilton, 1980, based on the Agatha Christie novel, featuring Angela Lansbury as Miss Marple, Elizabeth Taylor, and Rock Hudson) will soon be issued by Caldera. For more information or to listen to some clips, go here.
The hardworking Nathan Ashman (University of East Anglia) nabbed the Edgar in the Best Critical/Biographical category for his book James Sallis: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction (I edit the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction). The many works of the multitalented Sallis (an author and poet active in both mystery and sci-fi) include his novel Drive (filmed with Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan), his Lew Griffin series, and his biography of African American mystery author Chester Himes.
The Sallis companion is currently on sale at McFarland.
Clues: A Journal of Detection 43.1 (2025) has been published; see below for abstracts. Contact McFarland for a hard copy issue or a subscription.
Update, May 26, 2025: Kindle, Nook, and GooglePlay versions of the issue are now available.
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Introduction: Insight into Messy Truths
Caroline Reitz (John Jay College of Criminal Justice/CUNY Graduate Center)
Ukrainian Crime Fiction: Trends, Themes, Traditions
Svitlana (Lana) Krys (MacEwan University, Canada)
This article traces the development of crime fiction in Ukraine: its origins in the gothic literary movement, main authors, historical memory and colonial traumas, role as an instrument of Ukraine’s cultural diplomacy, limited presence in the Soviet era, and proliferation following Ukraine’s independence.
Sympathy for the Devil: Failed Catharsis and Universal Guilt in Agatha Christie's Curtain
Emilie Laurent (Université Clermont Auvergne, France)
Reading Christie's Curtain as a depiction of an ideological battle between good and evil, this essay analyzes the novel as a manipulation of the reader’s moral judgment that dissolves the genre’s over-optimistic promise of restoration social order and generates anxiety about a possible guilt located within the
reader’s self.
Dangerous Skepticism and the Challenge of Acknowledgment in Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow
Christine Hamm (University of Bergen, Norway)
This essay argues that crime fiction can encourage readings of literature that differ from those criticized by Rita Felski (2015) as outcomes of a “hermeneutics
of suspicion.” Tracing motivations for and effects of skepticism at the plot level, Nordic noir such as Smilla’s Sense of Snow promotes acknowledgment rather than “critique.”
Pie in the Sky: Political Readings of Dashiell Hammett’s “Faith”
Jacob A. Zumoff (New Jersey City University)
This essay examines “Faith,” a short story by Dashiell Hammett unpublished in his lifetime, exploring its relationship to detective fiction, proletarian fiction, and literary modernism. The story’s setting suggests a left-wing perspective yet resists easy political categorization, contributing to our understanding of Hammett’s evolving literary approach to detective fiction and complex relationship to left-wing politics and modernism.
A Woman Agent in the Male World of the Cold War Spy Novel:
The Case of Len Deighton’s Fiona Samson
Howard Mason
This essay discusses Len Deighton’s Fiona Samson, a female agent with strong character traits who is working for the West during the Cold War. Samson’s womanhood and femininity, as well as her love of husband and family, eventually take precedence over her agency as a professional intelligence officer.
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| Cover of 2015 Omnibus ed. (in French) of Allingham's The Crime at Black Dudley |
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| Elizabeth Foxwell (left) and Peter Lovesey, Malice Domestic VIII, 1996. |
Peter teamed up with fellow writer Edward Marston (aka Keith Miles) to write the light-hearted "The Corbett Correspondence," which pays tribute to Deeck, skewers Corbett, and was nominated for an Agatha Award. It is written as a series of letters between "Agent No. 5" and "Agent No. 6," and I understand that Peter and Keith faxed pieces back and forth to each other as their working method.
Peter was beloved not only for the quality of his work but also for his generosity and keen sense of humor. Malice Domestic attendees will recall his song with writing advice such as "You must make all the characters ugly and mean / And start Chapter 1 with an autopsy scene." He was always up for contributing a short story or a nonfiction piece (as he did for Mystery Scene, when I was asking authors for reflections on their first sale for the magazine) and participating in an event (I once organized a mystery panel at Georgetown University with Peter and Miriam Grace Monfredo). I corresponded with him for years, was privileged to have called him a friend, and will miss him greatly.
On The Magic Book podcast, Rebecca Josephy (Oakland Univ) talks about the collection she edited, Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction: Essays on Intersecting Modes of Mystery (McFarland, 2025), on the use of magic and magicians in mysteries, including discussion of impossible crimes and supernatural elements. It analyzes this subgenre's nineteenth-century roots and features reflections on writers such as Canadian-born author Grant Allen (An African Millionaire), Japanese writer Edogawa Ranpo, and American magician-author-editor-illustrator Clayton Rawson. Josephy, a French literature and detective fiction specialist, contributes an essay on gentleman thief Arsène Lupin, created by Maurice Leblanc.
• Review of Magic, Magicians and Detective Fiction in Mythlore, vol. 43, no. 2 (2025).
• Read about Josephy's earlier Clues article, "A Study in Daniel: Tracing the Biblical Origins of Sherlock Holmes" (38.1, 2020)
Kansas Public Radio's Film Music Friday pays tribute to Gene Hackman, who died in February, including the score for The French Connection (1971; director William Friedkin, composer Don Ellis, screenwriter Ernest Tidyman [author of Shaft]).
J. C. Bernthal, author of Agatha Christie: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, will discuss the life, work, and enduring popularity of Christie as well as his experiences as a Christie fan and challenges in writing the book on the Mar 14 episode of The Best Part of the Book, McFarland and Co.'s podcast. I edit the companion series.
Take 25% off the Christie Companion with coupon code BESTPART on the McFarland website.
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.
Various venues will be hosting The Silence of Snow: The Life of Patrick Hamilton, a one-man show with actor Mark Farrelly as the talented but troubled playwright-author of works such as Rope, Angel Street (aka Gaslight), and Hangover Square.
• Petersfield Museum (Petersfield, UK), Apr. 17, 2025
• Hope Mill Theatre (Manchester, UK), Apr. 25–26, 2025
• The Swallow Theatre (Whithorn, Scotland), Oct. 3–4, 2025
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| Conductor Leonard Slatkin, ca. 2015. Wikimedia Commons |
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| R.C. Sherriff. NYPL |
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| On the set of Odd Man Out, w/James Mason, left; cameraman Russell Thompson (looking through viewfinder); director of photography Robert Krasker (seated); and director Carol Reed (at right). |
The latest episode of Kansas Public Radio's Film Music Friday on Warner Brothers films includes selections from The Maltese Falcon (1941).
Other companion volumes that have previously been nominated for an Edgar are James Ellroy (by Jim Mancall) and Ian Rankin (by Erin E. MacDonald, also a Macavity Award nominee).
Some controversy having arisen in a literary journal as to whether I have written as many books as Edgar Wallace, I asked the British Museum people to tell me how many books I have published. I have just had their reply—233.
Awful!
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| Nicol Williamson as Sherlock Holmes in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution (1976) |
• The New Investigations of Inspector Maigret
• The World of Bond and Maigret (a 1964 dialogue between Ian Fleming and Simenon; link to booklet)
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| Alex Raymond: An Artistic Journey— Adventure, Intrigue, and Romance by Ron Goulart |
The Actors Theatre of Indiana will be presenting Whodunit: The Musical from January 31 to February 16, 2025, at Allied Solutions Center for the Performing Arts' Studio Theater in Carmel, IN. Written by Ed Dixon, the musical is based on Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1908) and Rinehart and Avery Hopwood's subsequent successful play The Bat (1920). Bodies begin dropping amid skullduggery at a house in Connecticut.
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| Sheridan Le Fanu. |
In Film Score Friday, Scott Bettencourt provides news of new releases of a La-La Land anniversary edition of John Barry's scores for the James Bond films The Man with the Golden Gun (1974) and Moonraker (1979), as well as a Music Box remastered score by Bernard Herrmann for the 1973 film Sisters (dir. Brian De Palma, starring Margot Kidder and Charles Durning).
• Clips from The Man with the Golden Gun score plus order information
• Clips from the Moonraker score plus order information
• Clips from the Sisters score plus order information
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| Margot Kidder in Sisters (1973) |
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| Edward G. Robinson in The Red House (1947) |
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| Edgar Allan Poe. NYPL |
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| Dashiell Hammett Yank 30 Nov 1945 |
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| Wilkie Collins |
The Wilkie Collins Society has made available online The Collected Letters of Wilkie Collins, complete with annotations. Among the fascinating content:
• Prosecutor Nathaniel C. Moak used plot points from Collins' The Moonstone as part of his argument in court (he was unsuccessful; letter of 21 Aug 1883, ref. no. 3110).
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| Anna Katharine Green |
On October 27, the Somerville Theatre (MA) will show the silent film The Bat (1926), directed by Roland West; it is based on the play by Mary Roberts Rinehart and Avery Hopwood, which adapted Rinehart's The Circular Staircase (1908). A live score by Jeff Rapsis will accompany the film.
On November 1, AFI Silver Theatre (MD) will show the film with live musical accompaniment by Ben Model. Undercrank Productions has released a digital restoration of the film on DVD with a score by Model.
Rinehart made millions from The Bat. Review of the film from the 19 Jun 1926 Edmonton [Canada] Journal: "persistently challenging audiences to identify the arch criminal behind the stirring trail of mystery" ... a "peppery melodrama." The 16 Aug 1908 Baltimore Sun wrote regarding The Circular Staircase, "The story is well and vigorously written, the plot, barring a few inconsistencies, first-class, the dénouement unforeseen and the characters vivid and interesting."
As Scott Bettencourt reports in Film Score Friday, there are two releases of potential interest:
• 60th anniversary edition of the score to the James Bond film Goldfinger (1964, composed by John Barry, La-La Land)
• Score to The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999, composed by Gabriel Yared, Music Box)
On August 19, a new blue plaque was unveiled at Newbanks Cottage, the former residence of British mystery writer E. C. R. Lorac (aka Edith Caroline Rivett, 1894–1958), in Aughton, UK (about 10 miles north of Liverpool). Mystery author Martin Edwards provides some details on the event on his blog; see also his blog post on an earlier exhibition about Lorac's work.
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| Illustration from E. C. R. Lorac, "Remember to Ring Twice," MacKill's Mystery Magazine, Sept. 1952 |
Introduction: BIPOC Female Detectives in a Global Context / Sam Naidu
The guest editor discusses the rationale for and content of this Clues theme issue, including articles on the TV series Brooklyn Nine-Nine and the work of Eleanor Taylor Bland, Oyinkan Braithwaite, K’im Ch’aehŭi, Maria L. M. Fres-Felix, Pauline Hopkins, Tiffany D. Jackson, Vaseem Khan, Angela Makholwa, Marcia Muller, BarbaraNeely, Nnedi Okorafor, and Kwei Quartey.“Or my name ain’t Venus Johnson”:
The Birth of Pauline Hopkins’
Black Female Detective in Hagar’s Daughter
Andrea Tinnemeyer
Pauline Hopkins’ Hagar’s Daughter (serialized 1901–03) meditates on detective fiction’s potential to offer agency and self-created potential for a Black woman in Jim Crow times. The result is a liberating use of genre that not only celebrates the prowess of its detective, Venus Johnson, but also affirms the knowledge that flows from Black women and their communities.
Night Girl and the Nate-Rock:
Material Feminisms and Double Consciousness
in BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam
Lisa Koyuki Smith (CUNY Graduate Center)
This study focuses on BarbaraNeely’s Blanche on the Lam (1992), exploring Neely’s material feminisms avant la lettre, their connection to W.E.B. Du Bois’s articulation of double consciousness, narratological understandings of the detective genre, and narratives of racial passing that express the discursive and material complexity of race relations in the United States.
Listen to the Silence:
Reconsidering Race in Marcia Muller’s Sharon McCone Hard-boiled Detective Novels
Alexander N. Howe (University of the District of Columbia)
This article examines the development of the Native identity of Marcia Muller’s female private eye, Sharon McCone. McCone initially is identified with one-eighth Shoshone heritage. In Listen to the Silence (2000), McCone learns of her adoption and the membership of her birth parents in the Shoshone Nation. The series’ second half explores McCone’s Native identity, and contemporary Native experience, with increasing nuance and detail.
“You are a Symbol, Persis”: The Complexity of Postcolonial and Feminist Progress in Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House Series
Sophie-Constanze Bantle (University of Freiburg, Germany)
Vaseem Khan’s Malabar House series presents 1950s India as rife with opportunity and difficulty. Post-independence feminist and postcolonial emancipation is portrayed as a complicated and ongoing process, mirrored in discussions around Persis’ status as a symbol. Persis combats her society’s social problems, providing an example of agency in the face of oppression.
Austin Wood in The Advocate discusses a pair of bald eagles—dubbed Nick and Nora after Dashiell Hammett's Nick and Nora Charles—at White Rock Lake in Texas.
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| Georges Simenon. |
Other maps of potential interest:
• The Raymond Chandler Map of Los Angeles
• Agatha Christie's England
• John le Carré's London
• The World of Patricia Highsmith
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| "Top o' the world": James Cagney in White Heat (1949) |
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| Anna Katharine Green. NYPL. |
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| Charles Rohlfs. |
Catching up on Film Music Friday episodes from Kansas Public Radio, there's an episode on composer Bernard Herrmann, including excerpts from his scores for Psycho and North by Northwest.
Fan of the theremin? There's an episode on it, including an excerpt from Spellbound.
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| Prof. Leon Theremin with his eponymous device, 1928. NYPL |
Also of interest: Glasser's score for The Big Caper (with Rory Calhoun and James Gregory, 1957)
