"I never can remember what years are, what dates are.  You know, I get mixed up....what we've really got to do is to get at the people who are like elephants.  Because elephants, so they say, don't forget."  Mrs. Oliver in Elephants Can Remember "Did her mother kill her father or was it the father who killed the mother?" Mrs. Burton-Cox in Elephants Can Remember death in Durford Wood I. Based on a comment from my old mystery fan internet pal Nicholas Fuller (I think we first "met" 25 years ago, when he was young and I was, well, somewhat shy of middle-aged), I researche ..read more

"I was really thinking of elephants....what we really have got to do is to get at the people who are like elephants.  Because elephants, they say, don't forget."--Ariadne Oliver in Elephants Can Remember (1972) Earlier this year I devoted some time to considering later novels by Agatha Christie and the sharp decline that manifested itself in her work in the late Sixties, becoming a near collapse by the early Seventies.  On my rereads I really noticed it with By the Pricking of My Thumbs (1968), the first of two geriatric Tommy and Tuppence mysteries, reviewed by me here.&n ..read more

Today I am most pleased to announce that Dean Street Press is reprinting the Antony Maitland detective fiction of Anglo-Canadian mystery writer Sara Woods (1916-1985), aka Eileen Mary Lana Hutton Bowen Judd.   I. As the decade of the 1960s approached, the work of the quartet of English Crime Queens most associated with the between-the-wars Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, still seemed to be going relatively strong.   To be sure, one of these murder monarchs, Dorothy L. Sayers, was now dead, having expire ..read more

The Night Digger (1971) is one of those downbeat, deglammed crime films that proliferated in the seedy and sexploitive Seventies.  At first blush you might think it's as far removed as imaginable from a bright, cheery, escapist Agatha Christie murder confection like Evil under the Sun, recently reviewed by me here, but the script is by British fiction writer Roald Dahl, so you might expect a few sardonic curveballs along the way--and you indeed get them.   into the night Dahl wrote the screenplay for the film expressly for his wife, the great American actress Patri ..read more

Agatha Christie's single greatest period as a mystery writer, in most people's estimation I would imagine, extended from 1932, with the publication of Peril at End House, the Crime Queen's first Hercule Poirot mystery in four years, and 1944, with the sinister Supt. Battle mystery Towards Zero, one of my personal Christie favorites.  Let's list the crime novels she published in these years: Peril at End House 1932 (Poirot and Hastings) Lord Edgware Dies 1933 (P and H) Murder on the Orient Express 1934 (P) Why Didn't They Ask Evans? 1934 (non-series) Three Act Tragedy 1935 (P) Death in the ..read more

Note from the Passing Tramp: I reviewed Eddie Muller's revised edition of Dark City for an academic journal in 2022. Below you will find the original, uncut version of the review.   Eddie Muller’s Dark City: The Lost World of Film Noir was originally published in 1998 and reissued in revised and expanded form in 2021 by Running Press in association with Turner Classic Movies.  Described in the book’s author blurb as “the world’s foremost authority on film noir,” Eddie Muller also hosts Noir Alley on Turner Classic Movies and is the founder and president of the Film Noir Foundat ..read more

Back in the 1980s I think my Mom joined a book club of some sort and received as a "free gift" something called The Agatha Christie Bedside, Bathtub and Armchair Companion (1986).  How many people actually read the book while soaking in the bath, I don't know.  I don't believe I ever read any of it in the bath, but I certainly did read it.   In it there was an introduction by Julian Symons, who was everywhere in the mystery world in those days, where among other things he listed his favorite Christies (the only one of the list which I remember now was The Pale Horse, w ..read more

Charlie Chan's Murder Cruise (1940) was the sixth film starring Sidney Toler in the title role of the great Chinese detective; five more Toler Chans were made before Fox dropped the franchise in 1942, so it came midway in the Toler series.  It was the second Chan film based on Earl Derr Biggers' penultimate Charlie Chan novel, Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), recently reviewed here.   Susie Watson (Cora Witherspoon) gets a shock The first film adaptation, which retained the book's title, premiered back in 1931 and starred Toler's predecessor Warner Oland; it was, indeed ..read more

Are there enough world tour mysteries to create a subgenre?  At the moment the only two, separated by nearly half a century, that I can think of are Charlie Chan Carries On by Earl Derr Biggers and The Small World of Murder by Elizabeth Ferrars.  And even the latter is a bit of cheat because the main characters travel by plane from England to Australia, stopping off in Mexico, Fiji and New Zealand.  Then there are a couple of nice murders--or unnatural deaths shall we say--and the surviving main characters return to London, where the brief, violent climax of the tale occurs.&nb ..read more

378 million copies sold  Coronet Magazine did another illustrated article on mystery writers in 1956, eighteen years after the first one.  Six of the "masters" were the same, while three were new.  All are listed below, with scans from the article. Erle Stanley Gardner Agatha Christie Mickey Spillane NEW John Dickson Carr NEW Rex Stout NEW Frances and Richard Lockridge Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manfred B. Lee) Lots of emphasis on family life, or in Erle's case his secretaries.  The thirty-eight-year-old Spillane is shown teaching his chi ..read more