Over on the blog Black Gate, Will Murray discusses "The Diamond Wager" (1929)—a Detective Fiction Weekly short story about a gentleman thief long thought to be written by Dashiell Hammett, but Murray makes a strong case for the WWI Navy veteran, journalist, and WWII OSS agent Samuel Lungren Dashiell (1891–1949) as the author.
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| Dashiell Hammett Yank 30 Nov. 1945 |
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| Journalist Samuel Lungren Dashiell, from his 1919 passport application. |
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| Arthur Conan Doyle. NYPL |
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| Georges Simenon, 1966. Anefo, Dutch National Archives |
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| Bison Books edition of Eberhart's The Mystery of Hunting's End |
Discussion questions and other resources are offered such as an introductory video by Nebraska Wesleyan University's Rick Cypert, author of America's Agatha Christie: Mignon Good Eberhart, and a link to Mystery House (1938), a film based on the novel.
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| Feminist Press ed. of The G-String Murders |
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| Anna Katharine Green, n.d. NYPL. |
Introduction: Detective Fiction and Borders
MANINA JONES (Western University, Canada)
The guest editor of this theme issue of Clues provides
an overview of the issue, including essays on Saradindu Bandyopadhyay, Carlos
Bulosan, Agatha Christie, Calling All Cars, Criminal Minds: Beyond
Borders, Japanese crime fiction, Ausma Zehanat Khan, Henning Mankell, China
Miéville, Miguel Pajares, and David Heska Wanbli Weiden.
Crimes at the Maritime Border: Miguel Pajares’s Aguas de
venganza [Waters of Revenge]
SILVIA RUZZI
This essay analyzes Miguel Pajares’s Aguas de venganza [Waters of
Revenge, 2016], delving into the representations of the Mediterranean Sea
as a constructed lawless maritime border where crimes are unpunished; revenge
occurs; and official explanations of border casualties interact with a
narrative of border crimes, public negligence, and injustice.
Policing Mobilities and Boundaries: A Study of Henning Mankell’s The Dogs of Riga and Firewall
ARATRIKA MANDAL and SOMDATTA BHATTACHARYA (Indian Institute of
Technology-Kharagpur)
This article examines the representation of racism and immigration and the ways
they transform borderline and bordered space into criminal space in two popular
Swedish crime novels by Henning Mankell. In Mankell’s Firewall and Dogs
of Riga, negotiations between individuals and borders realize the
interaction between state apparatuses and technology, potentially destabilizing
the physical and the virtual border.
The Geopolitics of Passing in Carlos Bulosan’s All the Conspirators
SYDNEY VAN TO (UC Berkeley)
Carlos Bulosan’s mid–twentieth-century noir novella All the Conspirators stages a conflict between guerrillas and collaborators in the postwar Philippines, illustrating a “geopolitics of passing” that examines the triangulation of borders through acts of racial, ideological, and imperial passing. Through the trope of passing, the transgression and eventual reconstitution of these borders is shown to be an alibi for the expansion of U.S. empire.
Embodied Borders: Countering Islamophobia in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s Crime Fiction
PILAR CUDER-DOMÍNGUEZ (University of Huelva, Spain)
This essay draws from critical race and affect studies in addressing how the police officer Esa Khattak in Ausma Zehanat Khan’s crime fiction embodies race and faith differences within the Global North and thus helps bring attention to bear on the rise of anti-Muslim feelings within allegedly plural liberal democracies.
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| Wilkie Collins. NYPL. |
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| Ida Lupino. |
China Daily brings word that the National Museum of Classic Books in Beijing is hosting an exhibition on Sherlock Holmes until November 2, including crime scenes from the Holmes canon and a late-19th-century Chinese newspaper that printed Holmes tales translated into Chinese. 
Sherlock Holmes by
Sidney Paget
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| Illustration of Orson Welles to advertise The Lives of Harry Lime, ca. 1951 |
Listen to Black Museum episodes here.
Listen to The Lives of Harry Lime episodes here.
From May through August, DeKalb (IL) Public Library is hosting the free monthly program "The Golden Age of Film Noir and Its Novels," discussing key novels and showing clips from their film adaptations. Authors featured include Dashiell Hammett (May 27), James M. Cain, W. R. Burnett, and Cornell Woolrich.
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| Columbo exhibition artwork by Jam Bookshop owner and illustrator David Ziggy Green |
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| Anne Perry, left, and Elizabeth Foxwell. Photo by Dean James. |
Anne and I were friends for some 30 years, stemming from early Malice Domestic conventions (she introduced the Malice Domestic 6 anthology and contributed to Murder, They Wrote II, both of which I coedited). I was a devoted fan of her Victorian mysteries with Thomas and Charlotte Pitt, as well as her other Victorian series with eventual private inquiry agent/river police officer William Monk and nurse Hester Latterly (I presented a paper on Hester at a Popular Culture Assn conference that was eventually published in Clues 22.2, 2001). We also shared an interest in World War I (she wrote five mysteries set during the war—one character, Joseph Reavley, was based on her grandfather, who had been a military chaplain during the war). Always up for new challenges, she also penned two fantasy novels, Tathea and Come Armegeddon; the novel The Sheen on the Silk set in 13th-century Constantinople; a series with photographer and spy Elena Standish; a series with the Pitts' son Daniel; and annual mysteries set around Christmas. In recent years, she was living in Los Angeles, because she was learning about screenwriting and was interested in seeing more of her works on screen after The Cater Street Hangman, the first in the Thomas and Charlotte Pitt series, was adapted and shown in the UK and on A&E in the US in 1998. It starred Eoin McCarthy, Keeley Hawes, and John Castle. Anne appears in a cameo role—look for her in a scene set outside of a church. She told me that donning the various layers of Victorian garments was an educational experience. Although Anne hoped that this production would lead to further adaptations of other novels in the Pitt series, this did not occur. Over the years, there were nibbles about adaptations of the Monk series—Anne was especially excited about the prospect of Gabriel Byrne playing Monk, and she thought the actor Jonathan Hyde would make a fine Monk—but these did not pan out.
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| Anne, right, in The Cater Street Hangman. |
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| The Security Pacific Bank Bldg, which housed Marlowe's office as the "Cahuenga Bldg." Wikimedia Commons. |
Michele E. Buttelman in Santa Clarita Valley [CA]'s The Signal discusses "California Literary Locations," which include the office site of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe, Musso & Frank Grill (mentioned in The Long Goodbye), and the Greystone Mansion (possibly the model for General Sternwood's estate in The Big Sleep).
Here's an interesting project: artist Daniel Moore is creating a detective story through the use of public domain images such as 1920s movie stills.
