Dick Francis on BBC Radio 7.

Dick Francis's Enquiry will air on Saturday, November 15, on BBC Radio 7. Click here for the schedule or to listen.

Happy birthday, Anna Katharine Green.

Anna Katharine Green—a pioneering and hugely popular mystery author in her day for numerous works including The Leavenworth Case (1878); The Doctor, His Wife and the Clock (1895); and The Golden Slipper and Other Problems for Violet Strange (1915)—was born today in Brooklyn in 1846. She graduated from Ripley College (VT) in 1866, making her one of the earliest female college graduates in the United States. In 1884, she married actor Charles Rohlfs, who later designed a successful line of furniture.

The Leavenworth Case sold more than a million copies in Green's lifetime and was studied at Yale Law School for its treatment of circumstantial evidence. Green introduced spinster detective Amelia Butterworth in That Affair Next Door (1897), who is often considered a prototype of Christie's Miss Marple. Green died in 1935.

Her son Roland Rohlfs (1892–1974; shown at left) became a test pilot for Curtiss and broke several aviation records.

"Crime must touch our imagination by showing people, like ourselves, but incredibly transformed by some overwhelming motive."—Anna Katharine Green, "Why Human Beings Are Interested in Crime," American Magazine 87 (Feb. 1919): 38–39, 82–86. Qtd. in Barbara Ryan, "Anna Katharine Green," Nineteenth-Century American Fiction Writers. Detroit: Gale, 1999.

Andrew Greeley injured.

Author Andrew Greeley, 80, best known for his Blackie Ryan novels, has been injured in a fall and is currently listed in critical condition. Further details here.

Technical difficulties.

The Bunburyist is on hiatus until my DSL service is restored sometime next week.

A 1921 murder at Syracuse University; Pan Am Flight 103.

In "SU in the Headlines," Syracuse University remembers Dean John Herman Wharton, who was shot and killed by Prof. Holmes Beckwith on April 2, 1921; Wharton had just fired Beckwith. After shooting Wharton, Beckwith killed himself. Rumors of ghostly gunshots circulated around campus years later.

Syracuse also remembers Pan Am Flight 103 after 20 years (Syracuse, with one of the largest study abroad programs in London, lost 35 individuals over Lockerbie, Scotland, in the bombing of the flight).

Take ice cream, plus one B-17...

American ingenuity in World War II:

According to a 1943 New York Times article . . . American airmen stationed in Britain "place prepared ice-cream mixture in a large can and anchor it to the rear gunner's compartment of a Flying Fortress. It is well shaken up and nicely frozen by flying over enemy territory at high altitudes." — Anne Fadiman, "Ice Cream," At Large and At Small 56

From what I heard about the average temperature inside my father's B-24 (aka "Willie the Wolf"), I believe it.

Daphne du Maurier, John Creasey, James Sallis this week on BBC Radio 7.

This week, BBC Radio 7 features Daphne du Maurier's The House on the Strand, John Creasey's detective The Toff, and James Sallis's The Eye of the Cricket. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

Archaeologist Shuman's new suspense standalone.

Contract archaeologist Malcolm Shuman has turned his hand to a suspense standalone, The Levee, issued this month by Academy Chicago Publishers. Shuman has published several archaeological mysteries (sometimes under the name M. K. Shuman), such as Past Dying and The Meriwether Murder.

Audio clips of Sara Paretsky, Laura Lippman, Valerie Wilson Wesley.

Over at Chicago's Open Books Radio, there is new audio posted from interviews with Sara Paretsky and Laura Lippman by Booklist's Donna Seaman. Other interviews of potential interest include Valerie Wilson Wesley.

Michael Connelly tonight on Thacker Mountain Radio.

Author Michael Connelly appears on Mississippi's Thacker Mountain Radio on WUMS "Rebel Radio" 92.1 tonight at 6 pm CDT; the program will be rebroadcast on Saturday at 7 pm CDT on Mississippi Public Radio.

Happy birthday, Fredric Brown.

Fredric Brown, Edgar winner for The Fabulous Clipjoint (1947) featuring the sleuthing Ambrose Hunter and his nephew Ed, was born today in Cincinnati in 1906. He was well known for his writings in the pulps, and a few of his works were adapted for the screen: "Madman's Holiday" became the film Crack-up (1946), The Screaming Mimi became a film for Columbia (1958), and "Arena" became an episode of Star Trek. He also wrote for Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

"We ain't great. We're just some guys from Jersey."

This week, Overlook Press publishes in paperback P. F. Kluge's Eddie and the Cruisers; this whodunit features the mysterious demise of a charismatic lead singer and the disappearance of studio tapes. It spawned a 1983 film with Michael Paré and Tom Berenger as well as a top 10 single by John Cafferty and the Beaver Brown Band ("On the Dark Side"). Its sequel, Eddie Lives, Kluge calls "a talent-free embarrassment."

Happy birthday, Enid Bagnold.

Enid Bagnold (aka Lady Roderick Jones) was born today in Rochester, UK, in 1889. Best known for National Velvet (1935), she also wrote poetry and plays such as the Tony-nominated The Chalk Garden (1955). During World War I she was fired from her job as a nurse when she published A Diary without Dates (1918), a moving and sometimes scathing account of her time at the Royal Herbert Hospital, and her service as an ambulance driver for the FANY (First Aid Nursing Yeomanry) is reflected in her novel The Happy Foreigner (1920).

Ian Fleming, Daphne du Maurier this week on BBC Radio 7.

Ian Fleming's Casino Royale and Daphne du Maurier's Jamaica Inn are two of the works featured this week on BBC Radio 7. Go here for the schedule or to listen.

Vintage radio commercials, including "Lucky Beer."

Online at the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland, you can listen to various audio clips from radio commercials of the late 1950s and early 1960s, such as "Top Value Stamps (1960)—Only 15,000 books get you a split-level ranch house in New Rochelle!" and "Ingram Gasoline (1958)—98 octane! What did people drive in 1958, Indy Cars?"

Jay Gatsby and Lew Archer.

There's an interesting article posted online, "Ross Macdonald's Marked Copy of The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald: A Study in Influence," by Robert F. Moss. In it, Moss compares and contrasts Jay Gatsby and Lew Archer and the lives of Fitzgerald and Macdonald; he also discusses Macdonald's annotations in The Portable F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. Dorothy Parker), which suggest that Macdonald was seriously studying the craft of Fitzgerald's writing. The article also includes photographs of two pages of Macdonald's notes.

Chandler: Producers have "the morals of a goat."

From the Atlantic archives: a pungent piece by Raymond Chandler, "Writers in Hollywood" (November 1945), in which he discusses the writer's lot in Tinseltown and the atmosphere of a film as "an endless contention of tawdry egos." Wonderful prose.

Pulp fiction poster art by students.

The University of Buffalo is featuring a fun online exhibit "Student Poster Art: Pulp Fiction and Pop Culture at UB."

About the photo: 2008 poster by Katherine Muto.

Freeling: Allingham's Tiger in the Smoke is "deplorable trash."

I picked up Nicolas Freeling's Criminal Convictions: Errant Essays on Perpetrators of Literary License (1994), but found little within that I could embrace. Anthony Berkeley Cox's The Poisoned Chocolates Case? "Arid." Dashiell Hammett? "A bad writer." He likes Sayers's Gaudy Night and The Nine Tailors (the latter is called "a sunny, happy work of immense charm"). He is preoccupied throughout with the question of crime and metaphysics, an argument that I found difficult to follow, and likening the writer to an artist or musician. There is a good chapter on Conan Doyle ("Why worry if Doctor Grimesby Roylott—marvellous name—has brought his snake all the way here [and kept it in a safe, poor thing] expressly to bite young girls with financial expectations?"). The estimation of Margery Allingham's The Tiger in the Smoke as "deplorable trash" was the final straw.

I shall have to stick with the grace and thoughtfulness of Michael Gilbert and Vincent Starrett, methinks.

The brave new world of new media.

I thought I'd give new media a whirl, so some of my historical mystery short stories are now available in Sony ebook format:

• Two with Alice Roosevelt Longworth and FDR ("Come Flit by Me," set in TR's White House, and "Alice and the Agent of the Hun," where Alice hunts for a WWI German spy at a home of future Hope Diamond owner Evalyn Walsh McLean)

• Two with Bunbury, my sleuth in a Bath chair ("A Roman of No Importance" and "Lady Windermere's Flan"; to complete the Wildean motif, Mr. Wilde makes an appearance in "No Importance")

• "Keeper of the Flame," which won first prize in the Cape Fear (NC) Crime Festival Short Story Contest and is set in a remote Maine lighthouse

• "Unsinkable," which takes place on the Titanic

More info about the short stories' original print publication here.

I've had a great deal of fun casting Alice Roosevelt (1884–1980) as detective. She was brilliant (her light reading was Greek philosophers), rebellious, politically shrewd, and extremely well connected; she also could handle a gun (thanks to her energetic father). She liked the racetrack and a good game of poker, and her book Crowded Hours (1933, ed. Max Perkins) is interesting reading. I've often wished that she had run for office like her friend Ruth Hanna McCormick, but there were aspects of politics that she found unappealing. She was usually maligned for her cruel imitation of her cousin Eleanor and her less-than-helpful public comments during FDR's administration, but this could be viewed as retaliation for FDR and ER's actions during her half-brother Ted's New York gubernatorial campaign in the 1920s.

About the photo: Alice Roosevelt, ca. 1902. Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division, reproduction no. LC-USZC2-6251