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