Dear listeners,

The clocks have gone back here in the UK, the evenings are drawing in, and the wind has certainly been howling. This can only mean one thing: it's time for Shedunnit to once more zoom in on the intersection of the supernatural and detective fiction. I have officially broken out the Halloween artwork, look:

This time, I'm looking closely at the work of one particular author: Ngaio Marsh. She wrote 32 mysteries and is probably best known for the many occasions where she set a fair play puzzle plot in the world of the theatre (she was also a stage director herself). However, my guest for this episode — the writer Alex Clark — makes an excellent case that Ngaio's great talent was for bringing the gothic into the whodunnit. And once I'd spent some time with Alex's suggested reading on this topic, I had to agree. Books like Surfeit of Lampreys, Death in Ecstasy, Spinsters in Jeopardy, Off With His Head and Vintage Murder are absolutely overflowing with witches, cults, creepy castles and cursed objects. In all of my reading of her before, I couldn't believe that I had overlooked Marsh's status as the queen of gothic crime.

This episode also marks the start of another very important season for the podcast: the Shedunnit Pledge Drive. This is the annual event where I make the case for why you should help to support the future existence of the show (and get some lovely bonus stuff while you do it). This podcast is completely independent, with no publisher backing or funding it, so paying all of the costs involved in making it falls to me. I have a few streams of income for the show, including distribution fees (mostly from BBC Sounds, yay), adverts (not sadly very lucrative at my size/level of non-celebrity), affiliate sales (when you buy a book from one of our links, we get a very tiny percentage for referring you), and the Shedunnit Book Club, the paid membership scheme that runs alongside the show.

The Book Club is by far the biggest contributor. By far. And that is the case because wonderful listeners who are in a position to make a contribution, do so, year after year. Because of them, I'm able to keep the vast majority of what I make free for everyone to listen to, and to turn down more egregious and invasive kinds of advertising. It also enables me to keep annoying plugs and requests for money to a minimum — I only do this once a year, and I'd like to keep it that way.

The goal for the Pledge Drive is the same as it always is: to add 100 new paying members to the Shedunnit Book Club before the drive ends on 15th December. Adding these new members helps me to offset cost rises, assist with inflation since I haven't ever put the prices up, replace those members who have cancelled in the last year, and so forth. 

There are lots of great benefits to being a member, including early and ad-free listening to the whole show, access to the book club community where we read a different golden age mystery together each month, bonus episodes where I do deep dives on those books, and, at the higher levels, audiobooks that I make of crime short stories. Plus, for the Pledge Drive, we have two additional, limited time benefits just if you join during this period. The first is the gift offer — if you join, you get an annual Amateur Sleuth membership worth £50 to give away to a friend, completely for free (so you could team up and get a 2 for 1 deal!). And we've also made a tool to help you find your next mystery to read — you answer a few questions, and it gives you a recommendation based on your preferences. All done with my expertise, no AI in sight. Members at the highest level, Seasoned Detective, also the get the chance to get a custom personal recommendation from me that I'll research for you.

So if you're in a position to help out and keep the show going for another year, I hope you will join us in the Shedunnit Book Club now! Your support is very, very much appreciated.

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.

Dear listeners,

There has been a lot going on chez moi, which is why I haven't been sending the Shedunnit newsletter as often as I would like. But earlier this month I got to do something very special because of the podcast and I wanted to tell you a bit about it.

I went to Torquay to take part in the 2026 Agatha Christie Festival! And I took almost no photographs of anything, which is how you know I had a really good time. Although I did wake up very early on the morning of my events and go for a walk by the sea, so we do have a couple of shots of that:

I started my busy festival day recording something with Mark Aldridge and Gray Robert Brown for one of their podcast projects, which you'll get to hear in a couple of months' time. I don't go to events like this very often, but whenever I do I'm struck by how nice it is to be in the physical presence of people I otherwise only experience as disembodied voices on the internet.

This year marks the fiftieth anniversary of Sleeping Murder, the final Miss Marple novel (the one she wrote in the early 1940s and then kept on ice until after her death, which I covered in this podcast episode from way back in 2021). My first festival event was panel held in honour of this milestone, alongside Professor Michelle Kazmer from Florida State University and the historian Rachel Trethewey, with the journalist Sarah Ransome in the chair. The festival was kind enough to let me record it, so you can all listen on the brand new episode that just came out today.

Everyone say "thank you Euan" to my podcast editor, Euan McAleece, who did a wonderful job of making a live recording from an echoey stone barn so lovely and listenable. Also, hello to the listeners who came along and spoke to me afterwards. Your desire to have your photographs taken with me made me feel, briefly, like I was Hudson Williams or something.

After the panel, I headed for the Grand Hotel with a group of Shedunnit Book Club members to have tea. Again, it was excellent to put faces and voices to the people I otherwise only talk to online. We ate sandwiches, drank a lot of tea and shared unbroadcastable opinions about recent TV and film adaptations... Then I pulled out the two entire bags of spare detective novels I had brought to pass on and enjoyed watching them find new homes.

Then it was back to the barn for my evening event — the festival's fundraiser, "A Gameshow is Announced". The first half took its format from the BBC Mastermind quiz, with some very brave Christie experts taking their turn in the famous chair to answer questions. I felt like I learned some things about quiz tactics (if you ever have to do this, make sure your specialist subject is narrow rather than broad). Then it was time to take to the stage for my part of the evening.

This took the form of a fiendishly difficult quiz devised by Kemper of All About Agatha. Two teams of four faced off University Challenge style, with buzzers and everything. I feel like I got a few good answers in, but I spent most of the event feeling extremely unprepared and confused. Especially on the questions about niche Christie adaptation trivia. Jamie Bernthal-Hooker (star of early Shedunnit episode Queer Clues) really thrived there and ended up leading his team to victory. John Curran, myself, and the rest of our teammates retreated to the hotel bar to recover our dignity. I will do more revision before the next time...

The gameshow officially wrapped up the festival for another year and the next morning I got on the road for the long drive back north. To keep things going a bit longer, though, I did put the audiobook of Sleeping Murder on in the car and managed to get through the whole thing before I arrived. As it happens, the version I was listening to was read by Stephanie Cole, the beloved actor in many things including Cabin Pressure who recently died. I would recommend it, she really nailed both Miss Marple and the New Zealand accents, it's a delightful performance.

I hope you enjoy the live episode from the festival, and that I get to see you at one of these in the future.

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.

Dear listeners,

I'm hoping that today's new episode will prompt you to air some of your own opinions, or perhaps pick up a novel you haven't read in a while: in it, I'm discussing the ten Agatha Christie novels that I think are "underrated" compared to the rest of her work. Will you agree with my selections?

Of course, Christie herself is the furthest thing from underrated. But some of her books are so culturally dominant, constantly being re-adapted and re-mixed, that I feel like they can eclipse some of the rest. Once you've listened, let me know what you think. As long as what you think is that Murder in Mesopotamia deserves all the flowers. In a nice coincidence, the Re-Readers group from the Shedunnit Book Club is currently revisiting The Sittaford Mystery, which was another of my selections. Sign up or log in to join them.

Speaking of Christie, the British Library have just announced the book that will be accompanying their new exhibition about her. It's called Agatha Christie: A World of Mystery and three of the essays it contains are by me! Here's some details of the other contributors, from the Bookseller story:

I've been working with the British Library on some other things related to the exhibition too, so there will hopefully be more on this in near the future.

I tend to get more excited these days about audio adaptations of detective fiction than I do about screen ones. I'm not totally sure why — maybe it's just because I've been a books-on-tape obsessive since I was a small child. Anyway, I am eagerly anticipating the new full-cast version of The Murder at the Vicarage, which comes to Audible on 13th August. Toni Collette is playing Miss Marple, a casting choice I would not have predicted (mostly since Collette is Australian) and I'm keen to hear what she does with the role. Also very intriguing to me: Kit Harington as the book's narrator, the Reverend Leonard Clement. If you'd like to brush up on the book again before you listen, you might like to revisit the discussion that Leandra and I had on Shedunnit about it last year.

Continuing in the finest tradition of the 1930s, the Detection Club is doing another collaborative book project. The Detection Club Murders, lead by Martin Edwards, has just found a publisher. The full list of authors taking part is still to be announced, as is the publication date, but Martin says they will be writing it in "an original way". Hopefully Shedunnit can get more details about the process closer to the time... Refresh your memory on past Detection Club books by listening to the Round Robin episode from 2019.

This is an interesting essay about what might happen now that the first Miss Marple and Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain in the US. What the writer rather overlooks, though, is that copyright rules vary widely by country. In America, most of the time the copyright term is determined by the publication date of the work, meaning that books come into the public domain year by year as time passes. In the UK, though, the law is focused on the author's death — "life plus seventy years" is the colloquial way those of us who have to care about these things describe it. This means that here, Agatha Christie's work won't enter the public domain until the start of the year 2047, because she died in 1976. Since her estate is based in the UK, I think this is an important factor in how her legacy will be shaped over the next twenty years, with big works freely available to use in America but not in her country of origin.

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.