Dear listeners,

Summer holidays are coming to an end at Shedunnit HQ and I'm excited about the planning I've been doing for the next few months of podcasting. I think there are some good episodes coming up between now and the end of the year.

Meanwhile, it's time for another book recommendation newsletter, in which I and Shedunnit production assistant Leandra offer you a peek into our personal reading experience while we are working behind the scenes on the show. You can catch up with the last edition here and share your own reading plans in the comments here.

Caroline Has Read: The Lighthouse by P.D. James

This is now the fourth P.D. James book I've read — I think — and I'm still yet to fall under her spell. Which is a shame, because I really want to! A lot of people I trust and admire speak very highly of her work, and she was such a major figure in late twentieth century crime fiction that I've always felt that I must be missing out. I picked up this 2005 mystery in a charity shop and was charmed by its setting on a fictional island off the coast of Cornwall. After being privately owned by the same family for centuries, the island is now operated by a trust as a completely private retreat for high profile politicians and other people for whom security issues mean they can never relax.

The discovery of a body amidst this secretive atmosphere requires Adam Dalgliesh and his team to be choppered in to solve the crime. It's all very dramatic, with lots of crashing waves and high cliffs. A promising premise indeed. But the mystery didn't play fair to my mind, nor were the motives or characters well established. The way the story was told felt very "of its time" in a moderately unpleasant way, as did some of the major plot elements, which is not something I usually find frustrating in a book published only twenty years ago. Unless I find a very compelling reason to do otherwise, I'm not sure I'll be picking up another P.D. James book.

Caroline Will Read: Penhallow by Georgette Heyer

My project of reading all Heyer's detective fiction in order for an episode coming later this year continues. I've now arrived at 1942's Penhallow and I'm excited to get stuck into this one because it appears to be one of her most polarising books. Some people I've discussed this reading project with grimaced when I mentioned it, while at least one other lit up and said that this was quite probably the only one worth rereading. I'm interested to see which side of the divide I end up falling on...

Leandra Has Read: A Case of Mice and Murder by Sally Smith

Back in January, Caroline mentioned in the newsletter that one of her Christmas presents was A Case of Mice and Murder by Sally Smith, and that she had finished the book by 26th December. Colour me intrigued! Unfortunately, the book wouldn't be published in the US until July 2025, so I was forced to have patience, but it was certainly worth the wait. 

I thoroughly enjoyed following our sleuth, Gabriel Ward, as he juggled his responsibilities as a barrister with the new task of investigating the murder of the Lord Chief Justice of England. Ward's demeanour and idiosyncrasies made him quite endearing, and I loved the relationship he built with the young, determined Constable Wright. Readers also get two mysteries for the price of one! Not only is Ward investigating a murder, but he finds that one of his own cases involving the authorship of a well-loved children's book, Millie The Temple Mouse, has a mystery of its own.

I didn't read this book within 24 hours like Caroline, but it wasn't for lack of trying!

Leandra Will Read: How to Seal Your Own Fate by Kristen Perrin

In this sequel to How To Solve Your Own Murder, we return to the idyllic English village of Castle Knoll. After solving the murder of her great aunt, Annie Adams finds herself with writer's block and a cryptic message from local fortune-teller Peony Lane. Within hours of her meeting with Annie, Peony is found dead. Now, Annie must uncover the truth behind a car accident back in 1967, hoping it holds the answers to the fortune teller's death in the present.

Last year, I read the first book in the Castle Knoll Files series, and I was not impressed. Dual timelines and village settings in a narrative are usually good signs that I will enjoy a story, but I found the characters to be a bit flat and the mystery more simplistic than I would have liked. Some might now be wondering why I plan to pick up How To Seal Your Own Fate. Well, I've realised that I have a tendency to abandon authors after one lacklustre reading experience, and I am challenging myself to give more second chances. Even though I didn't enjoy How To Solve Your Own Murder as much as I predicted, I also saw potential for the series to get stronger as the author becomes more accustomed to her own characters and the art of writing mysteries. 

For fans of How To Solve Your Own Murder, I leave you with the following alternative recommendation: One Puzzling Afternoon by Emily Critchley. As with the former, this mystery has a dual timeline, but our amateur sleuth is eighty-four-year-old Edie who seeks to uncover what happened to her best friend back in 1951.

That's what we've got coming up reading-wise. What are you planning to read this month? Let us know by replying directly or by leaving a comment to join the conversation with other readers. If you'd like to follow our reading adventures in between these posts, I (try to) publish monthly reading updates on my blog/newsletter and Leandra documents what she's reading on her YouTube channel.

Until next time,

Caroline

Links to Blackwells are affiliate links; if you make a purchase at this retailer the price remains the same for you but the podcast receives a small commission for referring you.

Dear listeners,

Today, we're going deep on a single, very important book. This book:

The Murder at the Vicarage, Miss Marple's first novel-length case, from 1930. The occasion? Simply that I realised that it had been a long time, too long, since I had encountered Agatha Christie's Miss Marple, as opposed to the many, many adaptations and reincarnations of her that have appeared since. We read this book in the Shedunnit Book Club back in April and it quite took me by surprise. I had forgotten how much of the original character gets lost when it is reinterpreted by other people and in other formats. It was time, I decided, to rediscover Miss Marple. I wanted, as far as possible, to read this book in the same way that someone arriving to it fresh in 1930 might have done.

And so, that's what you can hear in today's new episode — my reflections on properly rereading this book for the first time in a long time, and all that it has to tell us about what this character was to go on to become.

Of course, The Murder at the Vicarage was not the first time Christie committed Jane Marple, spinster detective, to the page. Her very first appearance was in a short story titled "The Tuesday Night Club", published in The Royal Magazine in December 1927. This was part of a set of six stories serialised in that publication, running monthly from December 1927 until May 1928. Six more monthly Miss Marple stories followed in the Story-Teller Magazine, the following year, beginning with "The Blue Geranium" in the December 1929 issue. Another, a one-off, came out in Nash's Pall Mall Magazine in November 1931. Those thirteen short stories were then collected in an anthology titled either The Tuesday Night Club or The Thirteen Problems, depending on where and when you were buying it, which came out in the UK in 1932 and in the US in 1933.

But unless you happened to catch one or all of these magazines at the time, for a reader in 1930 The Murder at the Vicarage could well have been your first meeting with Miss Marple. What might that have been like?

The initial reviews of The Murder at the Vicarage offer some clues. Harold Nicolson in the Daily Express said: "I have read better works by Agatha Christie, but that does not mean that this last book is not more cheerful, more amusing, and more seductive than the generality of detective novels." The New York Times was distinctly irritated by Miss Marple and "the local sisterhood of spinsters that is introduced with much gossip and click-clack". The reviewer continued: "A bit of this goes a long way and the average reader is apt to grow weary of it all, particularly of the amiable Miss Marple, who is sleuth-in-chief of the affair." I find the take in the Times Literary Supplement most telling. That reviewer noted that "It is Miss Marple who does detect the murderer in the end, but one suspects she would have done it sooner in reality."

This speaks to something that truly surprised me upon this return to The Murder at the Vicarage. Miss Marple simply isn't in it very much! The novel is narrated in the first person by the vicar of St Mary Mead, Leonard Clement. Because the murder is discovered to have taken place in his house, and because of his institutional status in the village, he is given a lot of access to the investigation — he is present when suspects are interviewed and the scene is examined, and so on. Miss Marple, meanwhile, pops in for tea occasionally or leans over her garden wall to make her contribution. It is not until the climactic sequence that we see her take anything approaching action, and even then this is all filtered through Clement's point of view. As that TLS reviewer hinted, it does at times feel a little like we've travelled a needlessly long way to arrive at the obvious conclusion, which is that Miss Marple was right all along.

Agatha Christie had her doubts, too. Writing decades later in her autobiography, she said: "Reading Murder at the Vicarage now, I am not so pleased with it as I was at the time. It has, I think, far too many characters, and too many sub-plots. But at any rate the main plot is sound." I agree with her, but I still think the novel is wonderfully good. It contains so much and yet the prose never feels heavy nor is the reader feel over-burdened with information. The 1930s was to see the publication of some of Christie's best work — Murder on the Orient Express, The A.B.C. Murders, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None all appeared in the next nine years — and I think you can see her trying out ideas in The Murder at the Vicarage that would later come to fruition.

I hope you enjoy reconsidering this book with me. Although I was surprised by some aspects of it, I am more sure than ever that it is a brilliant piece of writing.

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,

We're approaching the middle of August, which where I am in the world is peak summer — the days are still long, the school holidays are still going, and the weather is warm. So for today's trip into the Shedunnit archives, I thought we would look at episodes that have explored how mystery writers use summer in their books.

The "Murder in a Heatwave" episode from 2023 seems like a good place to start. Here's what guest Cecily Gayford had to say about the narrative potential of a rising temperature:

"I think there's a kind of narrative heightening that happens in heat waves. They intensify things and in literary novels that often is used as a device to bring the narrative to a fever pitch. But I think in crime fiction, it's often used as a way to suggest that someone's gonna really lose it. And that makes sense to us because everyone's had that experience of thinking, I'm so hot, something has to give. I cannot bear my family anymore. I cannot bear this tube carriage. I think the boiling over metaphor is a good one, right? You're kind of heating what might have otherwise been a stable situation until something dramatic happens. And then at the end there's going to be a thunderstorm and everything will be resolved."

It was also interesting to look back on the "Murder on Holiday" episode, in which I reflected on some of the reasons why summer holiday travel is a frequent inclusion in golden age murder mysteries:

"One theory about why detective fiction was so popular between the two world wars has to do with the general exhaustion and ennui caused by global events. I’ve talked about this on previous episodes — the idea put forward by the scholar Alison Light is that whodunnits are a kind of 'convalescent literature', ideal for reading while recovering from trauma. Since travel, often to a place with good air like a seaside or mountain resort, was a regular prescription by late nineteenth century doctors, it follows that mysteries set in these places would fit in well with this idea of crime fiction as a tool for recovery and escape.

One book that came up in that episode that I hadn't thought about in this context in a while is The Singing Sands by Josephine Tey:

As I said in the episode, this book is a good example of the "convalescent" type of holiday mystery. In it, Tey's sleuth Inspector Alan Grant takes a sleeper train to Scotland to recuperate after a breakdown.

"Although it was published long after the actual golden age years — it came out in 1952 — Tey’s crime writing remained fairly steeped in the prevalent traditions of the 1920s and 30s. Grant is planning a relaxing break staying with friends and fishing, but when he gets off the train at his destination, one of the other passengers is found to be dead. Even then, Grant resists the temptation to jump straight back into work and continues with his plans, only to find that he’s picked up the dead man’s newspaper and there are some cryptic clues written on it. From that point on, the detective can’t leave the case alone, even though he’s not officially engaged on it. Tey’s novel is as much a meditation on the isolating effects of illness as it is a whodunnit, and Grant’s travels around the Highlands are key to unravelling both strands of the book."

Another common setting for a summer holiday mystery is the hotel. I've actually had cause to think about this particular trope quite a lot recently, because (only partly on purpose) the Shedunnit Book Club has ended up reading two books back to back that are set in hotels: The Feast by Margaret Kennedy last month and then The Cellars of the Majestic by Georges Simenon this month.

Here's what I had to say about hotel holiday mysteries back in 2023:

"Hotels and resorts are an excellent way of defining the limits of a story, meaning that a detective can get to know all the possible suspects in a social setting. Plenty of books work on this basis — Agatha Christie’s A Caribbean Mystery and At Bertram’s Hotel, for instance, or Dorothy L. Sayers’ Have His Carcase, in which Harriet Vane stays at the excellently named Hotel Resplendent in a small English seaside town after finding a body on the coast nearby. Death in Clairvoyance by Josephine Bell has a neat twist on this, with the murder taking place at a masked ball at a seaside hotel. Bell’s regular detective David Wintringham and his wife are on holiday and decide to attend the party, at which one of six identiacaly costumed clowns is killed. The ball essentially makes a circle within a closed circle, creating even more of a challenge for the sleuth."

Have His Carcase is a book that I don't instantly reach for when I want a summer holiday mystery, but I should — it certainly fits the bill.

Although this cover doesn't exactly scream "glamorous seaside holiday", there are plenty of details about the hotel where Harriet Vane stays while working on this impossible beach crime case.

A few other episodes you might like to revisit to keep the summer cheer going a little longer: Cricket and Crime, Death Under Par, All at Sea and Death Sets Sail On The Nile.

Happy holidaying, happy summering, happy reading and happy listening to you all.

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).