‘Tis the season to be jolly, so I’m delighted to welcome Kate from CrossExaminingCrime back to my Golden Age detective fiction podcast so that we can discuss those who have sought to be not quite so jolly about our chosen enthusiasm.

The notion of criticising criticism flouts the very conventions of logic and reasoning upon which the Golden Age was built — surely vilifying someone for having an opinion, and dismissing it for being their personal opinion, is itself a matter of opinion and therefore easily dismissed — but the focus of this episode is the notion of where the recurrent themes for which the genre comes under fire came from. Cardboard characters, bloodless corpses, the stain of being ‘popular’ literature — we’ve encountered these criticisms and more, and surely their longevity means they must have some basis in truth, right? Today we shall attempt to find out.

Well, we will a bit, because the difficulty of talking about this sort of topic is that you always end up on some sort of tangent that might be related or might just be fun. Either way, there’s definitely some stuff in here to agree with, some stuff to disagree with, and it’ll hopefully pass a companionable 73 minutes at the end of a year that, frankly, could have been kinder to practically everyone on the planet.

You can listen to the podcast on iTunes here, on Spotify here, or by using the player below. 

My thanks to Kate for the time and research she put into this, to Jonny Berliner for the music, and to anyone out there who continues to take an interest in this podcast. I undertook this with the intention of it providing some distraction from the demands of 2020, and I sincerely hope that it has done that to one degree or another.

Should you wish to track down any of the texts mentioned in the above, I provide a potentially incomplete list here:

• Crime Fiction: A Very Short Introduction (2015) by Richard Bradford
• Howdunit? (2020) ed. Martin Edwards
• Raymond Chandler Speaking (1962) ed. Dorothy Gardiner and Kathrine Sorley Walker
• Crime in Good Company: Essays on Criminals and Crime Writing (1959) ed. Michael Gilbert
• Murder and Manners: The Formal Detective Novel (1970) by George Grella
• Talking About Detective Fiction (2009) by P.D. James
• Deadlier than the Male: An Investigation into Feminine Crime Writing (1981) by Jessica Mann
• Crime Fiction: The New Critical Idiom (2005) by John Scaggs
• The Technique of the Mystery Story (1913) by Carolyn Wells

If anything is missing, let Kate or me know and we’ll provide what information we can. More In GAD We Trust in a fortnight to usher in 2021; in the meantime, stay safe.

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All episodes of In GAD We Trust can be found on the blog by clicking here.

We’re all prone to speculate at times about how wonderful it would be to discover a previously-unpublished work by a beloved Golden Age author, and for today’s podcast episode Tony Medawar rejoins me to tempt you with two forthcoming collections of hard-to-find material from two of the genre’s titans — John Dickson Carr and Freeman Wills Crofts.

The Island of Coffins collects Carr’s scripts from the radio show Cabin B-13 and The 9.50 Up Express is a smorgasbord of obscure and unusual stories — one very unusual — that span the career of Crofts, and, since there’s been so much disruption to all normal services this year, it’s fair to assume that Crippen & Landru will be publishing these two collections in the opening months of 2021.

Until then, allow Tony to whet your appetites as we discuss some of what you can expect to find in these two volumes, plus some hints at what the future might hold for forgotten and misplaced mystery stories from the genre’s Golden Age (the author names tagged below should give you some hints there). Also, get a possible preview on some contents of future Bodies from the Library volumes, be sure to admire the artistry Tony employs when I ask him about the difficulty of including stories that aren’t any good — evasion worthy of a politician, I think you’ll agree — see if you can help with any of the missing stories he’s still trying to track down for posthumous collections, and wonder at the legitimate connection a roller skating rink has with the topic under discussion.

You can listen to the podcast on iTunes here, on Spotify here, or by using the player below. 

Thanks are due to Tony both for his time in recording this and his continued efforts on behalf of GAD nerds everywhere, to Jonny Berliner for my eerie music, and to those of you who continue to take an interest in this podcast endeavour. Here’s hoping these final few weeks of the year are treating you all well, and that those close to you are as safe and happy as can be hoped.

More In GAD We Trust in a fortnight, but expect a podcast-related announcement tomorrow…

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All episodes of In GAD We Trust can be found here.

This year’s celebrations of the centenary of Hercule Poirot’s debut and, arguably, the dawn of the Golden Age of Detection have obviously been overshadowed by wider events, but there’s still much to celebrate — not least of which is a new book about Poirot from Mark Aldridge.

Agatha Christie’s Poirot: The Greatest Detective in the World (2020) covers the full career of Christie’s little Belgian from his debut in The Mysterious Affair at Styles (1920) all the way through to the forthcoming Kenneth Branagh-starring adaptation Death on the Nile (2020). And, in that century, there’s a lot of career to cover: not just Christie’s novels and short stories, but also the plays, televisations, comics, video games, and radio dramas that have sprung up as the character’s stature has grown.

So, here’s your chance to listen to Mark’s story of how the book came about, how and why he decided to structure it as he has — chronologically, rather than by medium — the decision to avoid spoilers in his summations of each undertaking, the importance of checking up on the received wisdom of the stories we’ve all heard trotted out about Christie over the years, how Hercule Poirot is essentially Batman, and much more besides.

You can listen to the podcast on iTunes here, on Spotify here, or by using the player below. 

Thanks go to Mark for his time, and indeed the years that went into collating and writing the material for the book, to HarperCollins for my first ever review copy of a book, to Jonny Berliner for my theme music, and to you at home, as ever, for your continued interest in this endeavour.

On a Christie theme, don’t forget that there’s still time to vote for which title — The Murder of Roger Ackroyd (1926), Cards on the Table (1936), or Sparkling Cyanide (1944) — you’d like Brad, Moira, and I to discuss in January, but the window is closing. The poll will be open until the end of the month, and the winner announced so as to give anyone who wishes to read along the time to so do.

Hope you’re all keeping safe and well; more podcast in a fortnight.

~

Previous episodes of In GAD We Trust can be found here.

You thought this podcast was nerdy before? You ain’t seen nothin’ yet. Today we welcome the GADisphere’s own Scott K. Ratner, and things get taxonomical…

Scott is at the top of my list of GAD fans who I wish would start a blog so we could find all his writings in one place because, as those of you know him from the Golden Age Detection Facebook group and the vastly insightful comments he leaves on so many blogs, he’s one of the genre’s keenest critics and always has plenty to say. As such, the opportunity to get his thoughts on the reason detective stories are so appealing, and to examine the key precepts of deception in the genre, was not something I was going to pass, up.

And, when you’re done here, be sure to check out his play about a play you may’ve heard of, Kill a Better Mousetrap, and then see who can answer his question about the movie Death in High Heels (1947) adapted from the Christianna Brand novel of the same name. I say I’d edit his query out, but since I can’t help him I figured one of you probably could. And get ready for me preparing to set Scott loose on his favourite topic of all time — fair play — sometimes in 2021…

You can listen to the podcast on iTunes here, on Spotify here, or by using the player below. 

Thanks go, of course, to Scott for his time and insight, to you for listening and continuing to take an interest in this undertaking, and to Jonny Berliner for the music.

More trusting in GAD in two weeks, and make sure you’ve cast your vote to decide which Agatha Christie novel Brad, Moira, and I are going to be talking about in January — details here — because I’ll be closing the poll at some point in November [INSERT WITTY U.S. ELECTION ALLUSION HERE].

All previous episodes of the podcast can be found here; I’ll be back on Tuesday on the non-controversy of Ronald Knox’s ‘No Chinamen’ rule. In the meantime, stay safe, wash your hands, phone your mother.

The time has come again for some nerdy Golden Age Detection podcasting, and James Scott Byrnside is here to oblige with a discussion about some of the tropes we know and love from GAD fiction

After all, if you’re gonna have a discussion about tropes in detective fiction, you might as well have it with someone who has used them and so has an additional perspective on the why of tropes. Since James has already published two books — here are my thoughts on Goodnight Irene (2018) and The Opening Night Murders (2019) — and his third The Strange Case of the Barrington Hills Vampire (2020) is due out in the next week, and since all three are predicated on a firm love of the building blocks of classic era detection, he’s probably picked the perfect topic, hein?

So, prepare for…well, I’d hate to spoil any of the surprises, but, much like a classic novel of detection, you can certainly count on a few topics of conversation where James and I are involved: why Christianna Brand is so great, the joy of impossible crimes, the variable quality of Ellery Queen, shade being thrown at G.K. Chesterton…all this and more awaits! And are we back on the In GAD We Trust streak of references to the movies of Alfred Hitchcock? Roll up, roll up and see.

You can listen to the podcast on iTunes here, on Spotify here, or by using the player below. 

My thanks to James for his time and insight, to Jonny Berliner for the music, and to you for listening and playing along at home. These are always fun to record, and it’s lovely to be back having nerdy conversations about this kind of thing again. That someone else might also listen to it and get some enjoyment out of it is really something of a bonus. All I need to do now is find a way for this to pay my rent and I’m set for life…

Here, as promised, is Noah’s Golden Age of Detection Drinking Game. I have a feeling I may also have promised links to something else, too, so remind me of what that was if I did. It’s been a long week.

More podcast in a fortnight, when Moira, Brad, and I shall engage in a spoiler-filled discussion about The Murder at the Vicarage (1930) by Agatha Christie. So get it read and get ready for some…let’s be honest, gentle agreement. Tea and scones at twelve paces, everyone.

Stay safe!