Dear listeners,

Part of what makes reading classic murder mysteries so enjoyable is the glimpse it offers into a world that is so unlike the one we inhabit today. Nothing makes the interwar "golden age" of detective fiction feel more alien to me than the ubiquity of servants. Butlers, nannies, maids, cooks, gardeners — these are stock figures of the genre, all now long vanished from contemporary domestic life.

Servants are very useful to the detective novelist as witnesses, since their encyclopaedic knowledge of their household and employers makes any anomaly immediately stand out to them. They are ubiquitously present in the house, too, meaning that they are frequently used to provide alibis or create the "impossible" conditions of a crime. Lest we forget, in Death and the Dancing Footman Ngaio Marsh had said footman doing the popular 1930s dance "Hands, Knees, Boomps-a-Daisy" in the hall in order to establish that nobody could have entered a room to commit a murder.

In fact, making the servant the culprit worked so well that S.S. Van Dine banned it in his "Twenty Rules for Writing Detective Stories", published in 1928. He wrote:

Servants – such as butlers, footmen, valets, game-keepers, cooks, and the like – must not be chosen by the author as the culprit... It is a too easy solution. It is unsatisfactory, and makes the reader feel that his time has been wasted.

Writers mostly followed this dictum, although they did continue to weave servants into their fiction in other interesting ways. What has intrigued me the most over my years of reading in this genre, though, is the way in which detective fiction reflects the changing nature of the servant profession over the first half of the twentieth century. Agatha Christie was at the forefront of this, documenting the so-called "servant problem" through her fiction. From the elderly and loyal parlourmaid Dorcas in The Mysterious Affair at Styles to the extreme competence of Lucy Eyelesbarrow decades later in 4.50 from Paddington, this knotty tangle of psychological, economic and class issues is all there in the work. And you can hear all about it on the latest episode, The Servant Problem.

But that's not all that I have to share with you today. This episode marks also marks the start of the Shedunnit Pledge Drive. This is the annual event where I ask listeners to support the future existence of the show by joining the Shedunnit Book Club. As in previous years, I'm aiming to add 100 new members by the end of the Drive, which will enable me to meet the costs of making the show for another year.

As a thank you to all those who belong to the Shedunnit Book Club, I'm giving them an early preview of a brand new podcast I'm making:

Each episode of Today in Murder Mysteries tells a story from the history of classic crime that occurred on its date of release. What was Agatha Christie doing on 12th October 1912? Why was 9th November 1936 such a significant date for Dorothy L. Sayers? These are the kinds of questions I'm answering in this podcast. Each episode is short — ten minutes or less — and the hope is that it allows us to zoom in on all kinds of fascinating crime fiction tales.

At the moment, there is no public release or launch planned for this show, but members will get to hear the first 12 episodes of Today in Murder Mysteries over the course of the Pledge Drive! So far, I've released once about Agatha Christie, one about a lesser-known Detection Club member, and tomorrow there will be one about Angela Lansbury. Join now if you'd like to hear these and more. And of course, help to fund Shedunnit for another year.

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you).

Dear listeners,

Alfred Hitchcock is a name that has come up a lot over the years that I have been making Shedunnit. There's never been sufficient cause to make a full episode about him — nor do I have the relevant cinematic expertise — but I thought it might be interesting here to explore his connections, both tangential and substantial, to the golden age of detective fiction.

One of my earliest Shedunnit encounters with the great film director came when I was making the episode about Edith Thompson in early 2019. Thompson, of course, was convicted of the murder of her husband in December 1922 and executed in January 1923, even though there was no direct evidence connecting her to the death and the actual killer, Thompson's lover Frederick Bywaters, insisted to his dying day that she had known nothing of his planned violence. Many observers felt that it had been Thompson's morality and tastes (she liked romance novels) that had been on trial in the dock rather than her actions. The case inspired a number of fictional works, including Messalina of the Suburbs by E.M. Delafield and A Pin to See the Peepshow by F. Tennyson Jesse. 

Alfred Hitchcock was personally connected to Edith Thompson, having been a pupil at her father's dance school when he was a child and friends with her sister Avis. He apparently considered making a film about Edith's demise a number of times, but never actually did. Perhaps a more assiduous film historian than me can unearth the reason why not. There are strong hints of the story in his 1950 film Stage Fright, though, the plot of which revolves around a flamboyant actress, her lover, and her murdered husband. Hitchcock supposedly also explored the possibility of making a film based on another real-life crime that has featured on Shedunnit: that of Adelaide Bartlett and The Pimlico Poisoning Mystery. In this instance, he dropped the project because he felt his Bartlett-inspired love triangle idea was too similar to the 1962 François Truffaut film Jules and Jim.

Hitchcock loved to adapt existing source material, often using novels or plays as the basis for his films. And quite a few of these came from writers we know and love from the golden age of detective fiction. Here are a few of the highlights:

• Murder! (1930) is based on the 1928 novel Enter Sir John, which was written collaboratively by Detection Club members Clemence Dane and Helen Simpson. Although Dane didn't have any hand in adapting their novel for the stage, she did go on to become the first British woman screenwriter to win an Oscar for her work on Perfect Strangers (1945).
• Number 17 (1932), a vanishing corpse mystery combined with a jewel heist thriller, is based on a play by J. Jefferson Farjeon. Farjeon is best known to mystery readers today as the author of Mystery in White, the unlikely bestseller that helped early on to solidify the reputation of the British Library Crime Classics imprint.
• The Man Who Knew Too Much (1934) is not a mystery at all but rather a spy thriller. And it isn't based on a mystery novel either. But Hitchcock did name it after G.K. Chesterton's 1922 book of detective stories, because he had bought the rights to a few of them and was thus allowed to repurpose the title.
• Young and Innocent (1937) is based on the 1936 novel A Shilling for Candles by Josephine Tey. I personally love this novel, as someone who has written a whole book about the River Thames, and I hope it gets one of Penguin's snazzy reprints (like The Franchise Affair) one of these days. I am available to write the introduction, should anyone fancy it!
• The Lady Vanishes (1938) is, of course, based on the Ethel Lina White novel The Wheel Spins. The Shedunnit Book Club read and greatly enjoyed this book last year, and members can listen to a bonus episode I made about it here.
• Suspicion (1941) is based on Before the Fact by Francis Iles, a pseudonym used by Detection Club co-founder Anthony Berkeley. I'm only sorry Hitchcock didn't film the other Iles novel, Malice Aforethought, too. I have a suspicion (sorry) that his take on that twisty howdunnit would have been very good indeed.
• Finally — and this is a bit of a stretch, I will admit — Rear Window (1954) is based on "It Had to Be Murder", a short story by the American crime writer Cornell Woolrich. And where have we heard from Woolrich before on Shedunnit? Why, on the In The Dentist's Chair episode from September 2024, because he is also the author of the 1934 short story "Death Sits in the Dentist's Chair", which is an attempt to set an impossible crime in a dental surgery. I think I must read more Cornell Woolrich short stories, he clearly had a gift for the form.

I hope you find something new to listen to, read, or watch there. I certainly did while putting this together: I enjoyed the opening half-hour of Murder! while eating my lunch, in fact. I would recommend it!

Until next time,

Caroline

P.S. An exciting Shedunnit announcement is coming next week, so keep an eye out for that.

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you).

Dear listeners,

Inspiration comes from the most unlikely places. Given all of the time that I spend reading the words that are inside books, it slightly took me by surprise when it was the image on the front of this one that gave me the idea for this episode:

This is a facsimile edition of The Seven Dials Mystery by Agatha Christie, published in 2010 by HarperCollins as a replica of the original 1929 hardback version put out by Collins. This illustration of the shadowy "seven dials" members with their special hoods on has been stuck in my mind ever since I first saw it. It's simultaneously absurd — they have clocks on their heads! — and clearly very serious and mysterious.

I've thought about this picture often over the years, as I've been researching episodes about The Detection Club and reading books like Six Against The Yard with the Shedunnit Book Club. At least one incarnation of "The Rules" prohibits the inclusion of secret societies in detective fiction, yet mystery writers seemed to have loved both belonging to these groups and writing about them. Why? I tried to find out in today's new episode.

There are a few other episodes you might like to visit or revisit after hearing this one that expand on the topics discussed. They are:

• The Rules
• The Detection Club
• The People's Pathologist
• The Four Just Men (Green Penguin Book Club 9)
• The Poisoned Chocolates Case (Green Penguin Book Club 5)

Today I also have additional delights for you beyond just a new episode of Shedunnit! As part of the podcast’s partnership with BBC Sounds, the team there asked me to write an Agatha Christie quiz. You can pit your wits against it now here. I hope it proves fun rather than infuriating.

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. Links to Blackwell’s are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you).