Brother Orchid (1940).

When gangster Edward G. Robinson goes up against aspiring mob boss Humphrey Bogart, he is wounded and is cared for by the brothers in a monastery, whose livelihood is threatened by the criminals.

Eudora Welty and mystery.

Eudora Welty, 1980.
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div.

The 2019 Eudora Welty Conference, which will be hosted by the College of Charleston on February 21–23, will include the February 22 panel "Welty and Mystery," with the following presentations:

Eudora Welty’s Career in Mystery Fiction. Harriet Pollack (College of Charleston)

Chester Himes, Harper Lee, Eudora Welty: The Civil Rights Movement on a Crime Fiction Continuum. Jacob Agner (Univ of Mississippi)

Murder, Mystery, and Motivation: Eudora Welty’s The Optimist’s Daughter and Agatha Christie’s The Body in the Library. Sarah Ford (Baylor Univ)

Wanted Dead Or Alive: Last Years’ Dead Branches. Rebecca Mark (Tulane Univ)

“The Writer as Detective Hero”:  Eudora Welty and Her Late Fiction. Suzanne Marrs (Millsaps College)

I would imagine the relationship between Welty and Kenneth Millar (aka Ross Macdonald) will be discussed, including Welty's famous review of Macdonald's The Underground Man. Further details can be found in Meanwhile There Are Letters: The Correspondence between Eudora Welty and Ross Macdonald, ed. Marrs and Tom Nolan (Macdonald's biographer).

Feb 23 event at Berkeley on Urdu spy fiction.

The House of Fear by Ibne Safi

On February 23, the Institute for South Asia Studies and the Berkeley Urdu Initiative will host UC Berkeley lecturer Gregory Maxwell Bruce, who will discuss Urdu spy fiction such as works by Ibne Safi (1928–80, pseudonym of Asrar Ahmad). Read more about the event.

The Unfaithful (1947).

Zachary Scott, Ann Sheridan, and Lew Ayres
in The Unfaithful (1947)

In The Unfaithful, Ann Sheridan claims that she killed an intruder in self-defense, but evidence emerges that she was more than well acquainted with the dead man. Lew Ayres, Zachary Scott, Eve Arden, and Jerome Cowan costar. The film is based on "The Letter" by Somerset Maugham (compare with the Bette Davis version), with a screenplay by David Goodis.

"Her Last Adventure" (1952).

Based on the 1925 story of the same name by Marie Belloc Lowndes (The Lodger, etc.), this 19 August 1952 episode of Suspense features a wealthy bride beginning to wonder about the fate of her husband's prior fiance. Costars are Arlene Francis and Lloyd Bridges. Steve Haste states in Criminal Sentences that the Patrick Mahon case is the basis for the story; the married Mahon killed his pregnant girlfriend Emily Kaye in 1924 and was hanged.

Note that there is a new collection of Lowndes's short stories, A Monstrous Regiment of Women, that is edited by past Clues contributor Elyssa Warkentin and is published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing.

Green's The Step on the Stair enters the public domain.

House diagram from The Step on the Stair

The Tisch Library of Tufts University notes that one of the books that entered the public domain on 1 January 2019 is The Step on the Stair by Anna Katharine Green, which involves the murder of a wealthy man and a hidden will. "Admirable craftsmanship," deemed the World's News of Sydney, Australia.

"Lullaby" (1953).

In this 3 October 1953 episode of Revlon Mirror Theatre adapted from "The Hummingbird Comes Home" by Cornell Woolrich, a blind woman (Agnes Moorehead, in her TV debut) suspects her son (Tom Drake) of involvement in robbery and manslaughter. Lee Marvin costars.

Paretsky to receive Fuller Award.

On May 9 at the Newberry Library, Sara Paretsky will receive the Fuller Award for lifetime achievement from the Chicago Literary Hall of Fame. The event is free and open to the public.

Charlie McCarthy, Detective (1939).

Edgar Bergen, Constance Moore, and Charlie McCarthy
in Charlie McCarthy, Detective

In the comic Charlie McCarthy, Detective, Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd, and Edgar Bergen are on the case when shady magazine publisher Louis Calhern is murdered. Robert Cummings costars. Charlie sings, "I'm Charlie McCarthy, Detective . . . they call me the Slap-Happy Sleuth." Despite Charlie's assertions, it's Edgar who does most of the detecting in the film.

Students create a class murder-mystery game.

Students in the Texts and Gender, Detective Fiction course (ENG 3250), taught by Angela Gili at Hawai'i Pacific University, served as investigators in the fictional murder of Poppy Body, lead editor at Pandora Press. Faculty and staff members as well as administrators were suspects and witnesses. Drawing on various subgenres of mystery covered in class, students created game characters and developed clues. Read more here on the course and the game.

Mapping detective fiction.

The project Digital Cartographies of Spanish Detective Fiction at Grinnell College of assistant professor of Spanish Nick Phillips and undergraduate student Margaret Giles involves creating visual representations of investigations in Spanish detective fiction via the mapmaking program Carto. Authors covered include Carme Riera, Manuel Vázquez Montalbán, Juan José Millás, and Julio Muñoz Gijón.

Experiment Perilous (1944).

In Experiment Perilous, psychiatrist George Brent begins to ask questions after his traveling companion turns up dead, and a wife (Hedy Lamarr) is suspected of being unbalanced.  The film is directed by Jacques Tourneur, and costars include Paul Lukas.

Spain's Holmes society celebrates 25 years.

El Periódico notes the 25th birthday of El Círculo Holmes, the Sherlock Holmes society based in Barcelona.

Illustration by Sidney Paget from The Memoirs of Sherlock
Holmes. Wellcome Collection

 

Japan's contributions to the mystery genre.

The Early Cases of Akechi Kogoro
by Edogawa Rampo
(pseud. of Taro Hirai), 2014

In the Japan Times, Mark Schreiber discusses the contributions of Japanese writers to the mystery genre, including Edogawa Rampo, Seishi Yokomizo (covered in Clues 32.2, 2014), and Seicho Matsumoto, and some fascinating precursors such as Honcho Oin Hiji (Parallel Cases from under the Cherry Tree, 1689) that describes the cases of prominent judge Itakura Shigemune.

"Who Killed Julie Greer?" (1961).

In this episode of the Dick Powell Show written by Frank Gilroy, Powell stars as millionaire inspector Amos Burke (see Gilroy's later Burke's Law with Gene Barry), who investigates the murder of dancer-model Julie Greer (Carolyn Jones). The rest of the cast includes Ralph Bellamy, Edgar Bergen, Lloyd Bridges, Jack Carson, Dean Jones, Edward Platt, Ronald Reagan, Mickey Rooney, and Kay Thompson (known for Funny Face and her Eloise children's books).

"The Story of All Writers."

Mary Roberts Rinehart, 1926. Library
of Congress, Prints and Photographs Div.

You can read Mary Roberts Rinehart's "Writing Is Work" on the Saturday Evening Post Web site, which she published in the 11 March 1939 issue. Despite her long success as an author, Rinehart wrote, "Even today my wastebasket sees far more words of mine than the public ever does, and it is only twelve years since, with a novel half completed, I walked downstairs to the furnace and burned the whole thing. . . . .At the end of a nine-hour day . . . I may have to soak my right hand in hot water for some time, and my head feels as though it is filled with mush."

"Detective Waiting" (1971).

Richard Beckinsale in "Detective Waiting"

In this 14 September 1971 episode of Armchair Theatre, unpopular young detective Lewis (Richard Beckinsale, father of Kate) has a lot to prove to his skeptical colleagues when he is assigned the task of getting the goods on a slippery criminal. The screenwriter is Ian Kennedy Martin (The Saint, The Sweeney).

Pinkerton in illustration.

Jeremy Holmes (West Chester University) is one of the participating artists in the Society of Illustrators exhibition "The Original Art" at the Museum of American Illustration in New York City. The exhibition includes his illustrations for the children's book by Marissa Moss, The Eye That Never Sleeps: How Detective Pinkerton Saved President Lincoln (2018). Some of Holmes's illustrations for the book can be seen here.

The best of Grant Allen.

Grant Allen.
NYPL

Author Brian Busby, series editor for Canada's Ricochet Books that is reissuing vintage noir works by Canadian writers, discusses his choices for the best books of Canadian-born mystery author Grant Allen (1848–99), who was attended on his deathbed by physician friend and neighbor Arthur Conan Doyle. Calling Allen "a writer of great imagination . . . [with] memorable characters and . . . a dab hand at clever, intricate plots," Busby acknowledges that he is still working his way through Allen's oeuvre. However, some of his picks are The Devil's Die (1888), the prize-winning What's Bred in the Bone (1891), and Hilda Wade (1900, Allen's work with a nurse sleuth completed posthumously by Conan Doyle).

The Guilty (1947).

Based on the story "He Looked Like Murder" (1941) by Cornell Woolrich, The Guilty features Bonita Granville as twins; a murder; and suspects that include the other twin, a veteran, and a lodger in the home of the women's mother.