On "Hoover Heads," the blog of the Herbert Hoover Library and Museum, Thomas F. Schwartz has written a series of posts on First Lady Lou Henry Hoover and President Herbert Hoover as mystery fans.  The friendship of the Hoovers with author Mary Roberts Rinehart. Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 1. (Margery Allingham, Dashiell Hammett, Ellery Queen, Dorothy L. Sayers, S. S. Van Dine) Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 2. (The Detection Club) Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt 3. (Margery Allingham, Dashiell Hammett) Mystery writers read by the Hoovers, pt. 4. (Lawrenc ..read more

Sisters in Crime is offering grants for up to $500 to buy books to support research projects that contribute to understanding of the role of women or underrepresented groups in crime fiction. Potential candidates must be US citizens or legal residents of the United States or must be conducting research on US authors. The application deadline is April 30, 2024 ..read more

The 2024 recipient of the George N. Dove Award for contributions to the serious study of mystery, detective, and crime fiction is British author, editor of Crime Time magazine, essayist, journalist, and commentator Barry Forshaw. The Dove Award, named for mystery fiction scholar George N. Dove, is presented by the Detective/Mystery Caucus of the Popular Culture Association; the chair of the Dove Award Committee is Rachel Schaffer (Montana State University Billings). Past Dove recipients include Frankie Y. Bailey (University at Albany, SUNY), Martin Edwards, Douglas G. Greene, P. D. James, Chr ..read more

Crime fiction sheds a light on different cultures and societies, as well as challenges assumptions about gender, class, race, and ethnicity. By luring students into thinking that popular fiction is an easy read, an increasing number of language teachers have used crime fiction to teach both foreign languages and cultures. At the same time, crime fiction instructors have expanded their syllabi to include texts in translation that tackle important issues such as gender violence, environmental concerns, and racism. This Clues Teaching Forum invites short essays that address the following questi ..read more

Tim Brinkhof in JSTOR Daily discusses the role of gardening in mysteries with citations from Marta McDowell's new Gardening Can Be Murder, including mentions of such works as Agatha Christie's Sad Cypress and Stephanie Barron's The White Garden (involving Vita Sackville-West's famous gardens at Sissinghurst Castle) and the possibility that Wilkie Collins' Sergeant Cuff in The Moonstone is the first gardening detective ..read more

China Daily discusses a new series on China's Central Television, Judge Dee's Mystery, which includes 17 cases based on the works of Dutch diplomat Robert van Gulik. Van Gulik had first translated an 18th-century Chinese work featuring Judge Dee (the real Judge Dee dates to the 7th century AD) and went on to write further cases for Judge Dee to solve.  Zhou Yiwei plays Judge Dee, and Li Yunliang directs the series. China Daily reports that Netflix is picking up the series (Netflix lists it as debuting on March 16 ..read more

Wilkie Collins. NYPL. As we enter the bicentennial year of Wilkie Collins' birth, public historian Katherine Hobbs discusses in Smithsonian Magazine how Collins' legal background informed his novels dealing with the inequities of women's place in Victorian society and criticism that always seemed to put him behind Charles Dickens, his friend and sometime rival, despite Collins' ground-breaking contributions to detective and sensation fiction ..read more

Eugène-François Vidocq. NYPL Over on the Public Domain Review, Daisy Sainsbury delves into the legend of Eugène-François Vidocq (1775–1857), the head of the Sûreté whose tumultuous life included a criminal past and work in law enforcement, forensics, private investigation, and prison reform. He also achieved literary fame as the author of wildly popular memoirs ..read more

Just out from McFarland and Co. is James Sallis: A Companion to the Mystery Fiction, the latest volume in the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction series that I edit. The author is University of East Anglia's Nathan Ashman. Sallis—who might be best known for Drive (adapted into the film with Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan) and his series with PI Lew Griffin—has an intriguing, cross-genre career that encompasses poetry, mystery, and sci-fi, as well as a highly regarded book on author Chester Himes and long experience as a critic (here are some samples). He's even appeared in a film with fe ..read more

I've been slow to discover Hallmark's Jane Mysteries series based on K. K. Beck's novels with Jane da Silva, a sleuth who tackles difficult cases (A Hopeless Case, Amateur Night, Electric City, Cold Smoked). One TV movie has been produced to date: • "Inheritance Lost" (based on Beck's A Hopeless Case)   There is a 1994 TV movie, Shadow of Obsession, with Veronica Hamel that was an adaptation of Beck's stalker novel Unwanted Attentions (a novel greatly admired by Elizabeth Peters ..read more