Dear listeners,

We have arrived at our final reading update of 2025! I hope you have enjoyed getting this monthly peek into what Leandra and I are reading while we are working on Shedunnit, and have been inspired to pick up a book or two yourself as a result. We're finishing strongly, with a mixture of classic literature, fantasy and, of course, crime fiction for you.

If you're interested in more reading content from us, I'll be doing my full round-up of every book I've read on my personal newsletter at the end of December — you can sign up for that here. Leandra is also talking about what she's read this year and her reading goals for next year on her YouTube channel.

Caroline Has Read: The Mystery at Orchard House by Joan Coggin

In December 2024, the Shedunnit Book Club selected as its monthly book Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggin. Both the book and the writer were brand new to me, and so was the series detective, Lady Lupin. I found this village Christmas mystery delightful, with the ditzy debutante Lupin simultaneously settling into her new role as an ordinary vicar's wife and trying to solve the murder of her husband's unpleasant curate.

I was thus very pleased to see that Galileo Publishers had this summer republished another of Joan Coggin's four Lady Lupin mysteries: The Mystery at Orchard House. This one was originally published in 1946 and is set on the eve of World War Two, three years after her marriage. This time, Lupin is not in her home village, but staying at a hotel in the Kent countryside for a two-week rest cure after being ill with influenza. She's there in spring, when the daffodils and apple blossom is out, so I think this would be a nice book to read at that time of year (we talk of summer mysteries and wintry/Christmas ones, but how many other seasons are represented?). Of course, during Lupin's stay at the hotel — which is run by an old friend who recently inherited it as a manor house and is now Making It Pay — she is drawn into the detection of crime via several petty thefts and an attempted murder. She's as scatterbrained and disorganised as ever, but remains charming and a fundamentally moral person, making her a good figure to follow through the mystery. The plot probably wouldn't win any awards for great originality or innovation, but since I tend to care more about quality of writing, character and setting anyway, this did not trouble me.

I'm taking part in Kate Jackson's "Reprint of the Year" awards this year, and this is the second of the two titles that I'm proposing for the prize. (The first was Not To Be Taken by Anthony Berkeley, read my thoughts on it here.) Do head over to Kate's blog and vote for it if you also enjoyed The Mystery at Orchard House this year! Joan Coggin is exactly the kind of writer I would never have discovered if it weren't for Galileo's republication of her mysteries, and I am very grateful to them for putting it out.

Caroline Will Read: The Documents in the Case by Dorothy L. Sayers and Robert Eustace

This is the next title coming up in the Green Penguin Book Club series! I'm looking forward to re-reading this co-written epistolary mystery (especially after doing a whole episode about this format, Death on Paper, earlier in the year). It's Sayers' only full-length novel not to feature Lord Peter Wimsey and the only one that she worked on with someone else. The episode will be out in the second half of January, so that's your deadline if you're reading along with me.

Leandra Has Read: Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen

This was my first time reading Northanger Abbey. A friend gifted me a copy not long ago, and what finally motivated me to pick up this classic was the upcoming 250th anniversary of Jane Austen's birth. She was born on the 16th of December 1775, sharing a birthday with my father actually! Unbeknownst to me at the time of reading Northanger Abbey, this title was celebrating an anniversary of its own. Five months after Austen's death in July 1817, her brother and literary agent, Henry, published Northanger Abbey and Persuasion in a single volume in December of that year.

Catherine Morland was an absolute delight, and I loved the brief moments in which the narrator breaks the fourth wall to address the reader throughout our heroine's adventure. The book's tone reminded me of I Capture the Castle and Arabella, two other titles I have thoroughly enjoyed in the past. The most fascinating element of Northanger Abbey for me, however, was its rocky journey toward publication. Initially, it seemed as though it would be Austen's first published work, sold to Crosby & Co in 1803 for £10. The London bookseller proceeded to sit on the manuscript for over a decade as Austen published Sense & Sensibility, Pride & Prejudice, and so on. In 1816, the bookseller sold the book back to Henry for the amount they originally paid Austen, and the author jumped immediately into revisions. She died before she was able to finish the novel to her exact liking, but I would rather have some version of this story than none at all! It's officially my favourite Austen to date.

Leandra Will Read: A Tangle of Time by Josiah Bancroft

In December, I always have the goal of ending the year strongly with as many "easy win" reads as possible. That leads to a lot of mood-reading! Recently, my mood led me to start the sequel of Josiah Bancroft's fantasy mystery novel, The Hexologists, and it feels wonderful to be back with this sleuthing couple, Isolde and Warren Wilby. This time around, Is and War are investigating the mysterious death of an artist who reached out to Is not longer before she died. I'm excited to see just how much of the art world we see in this mystery. If you enjoy fantasy mysteries like The Witness for the Dead or the Sherlockian reimagining The Tainted Cup, then I highly recommend you add The Hexologists to your TBR. Hopefully I will be able to say the same for its sequel!

That's us for now! What are you planning on reading over the next few weeks? If you get some downtime over the festive period, do you line up a particular kind of book, or just see what you might receive as gifts? Let us know by replying directly or by leaving a comment to join the conversation with other readers.

Until next time,

Caroline

Some book links 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,

This is seventh time December has rolled around during the time I've been making Shedunnit, which means that I've had plenty of opportunity to think about festive and wintry themes in murder mysteries. And, with the exception of 2022 (when I lost my voice because I had Covid!), each year I have made a different episode about how the authors of the golden age of detective fiction handled this in their fiction. I've looked at everything from the publishing phenomenon that was the Christie for Christmas to the surprisingly large number of fictional corpses that show up dressed as Father Christmas. I thought I was done! Surely, I said to myself, there can't be anything left to say about the phenomenon of the Christmas mystery.

But then, while I was reading the Shedunnit Book Club's book for December — The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers — I suddenly realised that there is a very important part of the traditional Christmas celebration that I have never addressed. The food! That book isn't particularly forthcoming on what Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter eat during their rural Norfolk Christmas, but the mere mention of the cold roast beef and trifle they have at the vicarage on Christmas Eve was enough to give me inspiration. My research assistant Leandra and I sent to work, scouring our memories and our bookshelves for the most interesting examples of Christmas food in murder mysteries. The resulting episode, A Christmas Feast, has just landed in your podfeeds this morning and I hope you will enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.

For the full line-up of Christmas food related books and stories you'll have to get into the episode proper, but while I have you hear I thought I might just highlight three slightly less well-known titles that you might want to have a look at over the next couple of weeks.

I re-read An English Murder at top speed while I was making this episode and marvelled anew at how incredibly good it is. It's technically a post golden age detective novel, being published in 1951, but in a way this makes it even better because Cyril Hare is able to play with the reader's expectations of the form. A country house, a tense Christmas dinner, family members with political differences — there's a lot to enjoy here.

Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggin was the Shedunnit Book Club's reading selection for December 2024 and we all ended up enjoying this sprightly village Christmas mystery.

Crime at Christmas by C.H.B. Kitchin was a book I hadn't read for many years but it has plenty to recommend it, not least its wry first-person narrator. I would also recommend this one to anyone who enjoys either stories set in Hampstead (niche, but a little mini-genre, I promise) or books that bring out the nuances of class snobbery in the interwar years.

That's it for me on the subject of Christmas for this year. Will I be inspired to make another festive episode in 2026? We'll all find out together... That isn't all from Shedunnit this year, though. There will be another newsletter next week with some reading recommendations from myself and Leandra, and then on the 24th an extra-special green penguin episode drops, so make sure you're looking out for that.

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,

As fans of golden age detective fiction, we have lots of reasons to feel grateful to Anthony Berkeley. The success of his crime fiction during the interwar period assisted in propelling the genre to new heights of popularity. He created highly visible examples of mystery tropes that we now consider standard: the amateur sleuth, the first-person howdunnit, and the multiple solution mystery. Plus, he was a co-founder of the Detection Club and an influential reviewer of detective fiction. He might not be one of the most famous or well-read authors from this period today, but he did a great deal to ensure its longevity.

In this capacity, he has cropped up a fair bit on Shedunnit over the years. When we were doing research in the archive for this newsletter, I was surprised to see that almost all of the episodes devoted to Anthony Berkeley also feature Martin Edwards — current president of the Detection Club, long time friend of Shedunnit, and a keen Berkeley fan. When I first started making the show, I was relatively unfamiliar with Berkeley's work and unsure of becoming better acquainted with it, having been put off by the unsavoury misogyny on display in his 1926 novel The Wychford Poisoning Case. I had read that book because of its connections to the Florence Maybrick case (an early subject of the show) and wasn't especially anxious to spend much more with its author. But Martin convinced me that there was much more to Anthony Berkeley as an innovator in the field of interwar detective fiction and I persevered. And thank goodness I did! Some of the most thrilling "he did what?!" moments that I've had when reading crime fiction have come from his books. He may not have had a Christie-esque long career, but he certainly packed in the surprises.

Back in 2020, Martin was my guest for an episode titled The Psychology of Anthony Berkeley, in which he freely acknowledged that Berkeley can be a hard author to love:

"I think that Berkeley is one of those writers who will always be a bit of a Marmite writer. He's just a bit of a Marmite individual, I think. You like him a lot or you don't really get him. And I think that that was probably true in the thirties. It's certainly true now. But I think if you're interested in ingenuity, clever ideas, a touch of darkness because there's certainly a touch of darkness in his personality that comes through in books."

This is certainly the view that I've come to (and I do really like Marmite, so that tracks). Perhaps it's because Berkeley was a somewhat troubled, dark individual that he was able to be so interesting and original in his murder mysteries. His prickly personality didn't stop his work from being a hit with his fellow crime writers, who knew flair when they saw it, as Martin explained later in that same episode:

"Well, I think as a crime writer, he was hugely admired. Agatha Christie, I think, particularly admired his detective novels and she was a big fan. Dorothy L Sayers, too in the early days, although I also think that their personal relationship, had a few setbacks during the 1930s. He was a difficult customer and Dorothy probably wasn't the easiest either. So they had a slightly mixed time as friends. But I think that generally there is a huge amount of critical admiration for his work."

Berkeley took this mutual admiration and turned it into something concrete that endures to this day — The Detection Club. Martin explained how it came about in the episode devoted to the Club's history:

"His idea at that time was that detective novelists really didn't know each other socially at all, they were all working in isolation. And he thought it would be good to get together with fellow writers, and talk about matters of mutual interest, whether it was real life crimes of the day, whether it was their dealings with publishers or anything else... And the dinners were apparently a big success. And arising out of that success, he felt that it would be a good idea to form a social club that would meet a number of times a year to have dinner and essentially just chat and chat into the night. And so the club was was proposed. Dorothy L Sayers was amongst those who was an enthusiastic supporter, and she became very much a prime mover, but also Agatha Christie. Ronald Knox and a good many other leading lights of the day came on board.

By the end of the decade, though, Berkeley would have stopped writing detective fiction for good. His final work in the genre was published in 1939 and he did not ever return to pen more. How did Berkeley go from the enthusiastic co-founder of the Detection Club at the start of the 1930s to someone who never published a mystery again by the end of the decade? Martin has some ideas:

"I think were probably a mix of reasons. He said that he wasn't making enough money from the crime fiction. I'm slightly sceptical about that as an excuse. I think he lost his gusto. He wrote a letter in the late 50s or early 60s to a writer called George Bellairs, who's also published in the British Library series. And he said to Bellairs, in that letter, hang on to the gusto. Believe me, it goes and I think that that came from the heart. I think he just lost his enthusiasm, the desire, the energy that had kept him working very frenetically almost in the second half the twenties and through the 1930s when he did write a lot of books. And then I suspect mainly because of issues in his personal life, he just lost that zest and maybe had an extreme case of writer's block — that's been suggested to me by a family member. That was the impression that that person had. And it's hard to tell because he was quite secretive. But I think that one way or another, he lost his enthusiasm for writing fiction. Although he continued to enjoy reading it."

I've been very lucky that the years I have been working on Shedunnit have also coincided with a burgeoning reprint culture for golden age detective fiction. So many more books are now readily available than when I started the show back in 2018, among them many major Anthony Berkeley titles. If you would like to explore his bibliography, you no longer need to be very wealthy or very lucky in the secondhand bookshops or both. Several of these have appeared from the British Library Crime Classics imprint with introductions by Martin (and in the case of The Poisoned Chocolates Case, an entirely new additional ending to the story). Today, I want to draw your attention to one that was republished just this year, Not To Be Taken.

I'm delighted to be taking part in Kate Jackson's "Reprint of the Year" awards over at her blog this year, and this is the first of two titles that I'm going to be proposing.

Not To Be Taken is a standalone village poisoning mystery that first appeared in book form in 1938, having first been serialised as a competition mystery in John o' London's Weekly. Longtime listeners will know that I love a competition mystery, and did a whole live show about them at the International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay a few years ago (listen to that here). As someone who adores the trivia and ephemera of the golden age almost as much of the books themselves, I loved that that this reprint also included Berkeley's original "report" on the competition entries as an appendix. No one person got the full solution completely correct, so he ends up dividing the prizes between a few promising contenders. Being able to read his commentary on the construction of the mystery and its clueing added greatly to my enjoyment of the book once I had finished it.

Although there are plenty of indicators in this book that we are in the late 1930s, rather than the halcyon days of the 1920s, in some ways this book was a return to familiar subject matter for Berkeley. It concerns an arsenic poisoning that is originally recorded as a natural death from gastric complication, only for an exhumation and investigation to be undertaken at the request of the deceased's brother. There is no prominent or recurring detective; rather the book is narrated by a local Dorsetshire farmer, Douglas Sewell, who diligently documents the toxic spread of gossip and suspicion through a small community. Those who are familiar with Berkeley's ability to write with drama and excitement — think Malice Aforethought or The Poisoned Chocolates Case — might find the tone of this book surprisingly subdued. But you just have to wait: it all makes sense in the end!

Both because of the cleverness of the story's construction and because the book includes the extra Berkeley material, I think Not To Be Taken is an excellent candidate for Reprint of the Year. If you agree, keep an eye on Kate's blog so that you can vote when the time comes! I'll be along with my second nomination in two weeks. Meanwhile, I hope you feel inspired to try or revisit some Anthony Berkeley, either via the podcast or by picking up one of his books.

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).