The Murder Mystery Hotline II Transcript

Caroline: Over the almost seven years that I have been making Shedunnit, I have seen over and over again that a really considered and specific book recommendation can be a way of demonstrating care and affection. So many of the lists and suggestions that appear out there in the wider world are general and generic, frequently just picking already popular titles from a small pool of well-known authors. Those that do try to focus on the period of crime fiction that I cover, the golden age of detective fiction, tend not to stray beyond the obvious either. As much as I love and revere Agatha Christie, I don't think we need much help discovering her work at this point.

Back in 2023, I made an episode that sought to marry these two ideas: showing my appreciation for my most dedicated listeners via very specific book recommendations, and sharing these with my whole audience so as to demonstrate the wide variety of detective fiction that is out there for those who choose to look for it. The popularity of this period and genre has continued to grow since. There have been plenty more reprints and rediscoveries.

And so, I think it is only right that I reopen the Murder Mystery Hotline.

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Welcome to Shedunnit. I'm Caroline Crampton.

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Here's how this works. A few weeks ago, I opened up the hotline to members of Shedunnit Book Club so that they could put in their very specific book requests. This could be anything — a particular setting, or type of author, or, as you'll hear later, the desire to find stories that mention one particular musical instrument. Then, with all the requests gathered, my production assistant Leandra and I brought all of our knowledge and research skills to bear, with the results that you will hear today.

If you'd like to be able to submit a request for a future murder mystery hotline episode, become a member of the Shedunnit Book Club today at shedunnitbookclub.com/join. As well as the chance to take part in episodes like this, members get ad free episodes, extra audio content and access to a marvellous community that reads a different murder mystery together every month. See all the benefits and sign up at shedunnitbookclub.com/join.

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I think we have our first caller!

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Gill: Hello, Shedunnit, this is Gill calling into the murder mystery hotline with a request please for books that feature a lighthouse, either as a location or as a pivotal plot point.

Caroline: That's a great place to start us off, but that's not all Gill had to say...

Gill:  Also, I'd like to say there's been a murder and also that there are dead bodies. So that's for all the accent fans. Thank you.

Caroline: I hope my fellow Glaswegian accent fans enjoyed their treat, thank you Gill. Now, to this question of lighthouses in detective fiction. We've come up with three possiblities for this: one from the nineteenth century, one from the golden age of detective fiction, and one recent novel that very consciously references interwar crime fiction.

The first option is The Lighthouse by Wilkie Collins. Collins, as listeners who remember the episode I did back in 2021 about "The First Whodunnit" will know, is best known to crime fiction fans today as the author of 1868's The Moonstone. This novel marries Gothic elements with an early example of a police detective in fiction, as Sergeant Cuff attempts to untangle a case that involves the theft, several times over, of a famous diamond. The Lighthouse is an earlier work, a two-act play from 1855 that Collins based on an earlier short story he had written after seeing the famous Eddystone Lighthouse, which lies off the coast of Cornwall to the south of Plymouth.

This is a fascinating little play about three lighthouse keepers who are trapped for weeks as bad weather keeps their supply vessel from being able to reach them. As the claustrophobia and hunger worsen, the three men start inadvertently sharing secrets, including the fact that one of them was involved in a crime years ago. Although not strictly a detective story, this play is a neat little thriller with some locked room and crime elements. It also has a rather fun performance history, because it was first put on in an amateur production at Charles Dickens' London home, Tavistock House, with Wilkie Collins, Dickens himself and the painter Augustus Egg in the cast.

Our second lighthouse option is Deathblow Hill by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, which was first published in 1935. Atwood Taylor was an American author from Boston who wrote dozens of mysteries in the golden age style that is today more identified with the UK than the US. Although she started publishing in the early 1930s, right when the noir style associated with the likes of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammitt was becoming popular in her country, she favoured a less frenetic, more gently puzzle-based approach to crime fiction. She is also notable for setting her crime fiction away from the big American metropolises that had been favoured by other writers in the past. Her 24 novels about her amateur detective Asey Mayo are largely set in and around Cape Cod, a coastal area of Massachusetts popular then as now as a location for very posh summer homes. Mayo is known in the books as "the Codfish Sherlock". Deathblow Hill is the sixth Asey Mayo novel and sees him called into investigate a murder at the old Howes Homestead — a home that incorporates a now-defunct lighthouse! The inhabitants take in summer boards to make extra income and a couple of them even get to stay in rooms in the lighthouse itself. I think this could be a great option for Gill — definite lighthouse involvement, as well as a well-plotted golden age style mystery detected by a competent amateur sleuth.

My third possibility is a contemporary crime novel, The Murder Game by Tom Hindle, first published in 2023. This is a book very much in the recent Richard Osman tradition, which takes some elements of golden age detective fiction — in this case, the gathering of an assorted group of characters in a remote hotel — and transplants them to the modern era. Most importantly for our purposes, the seaside village where this all takes place is overlooked by a lighthouse on a cliff, and the proposed redevelopment of this lighthouse is a major force in the book's plot. So, if you're after a lighthouse in the 21st century, this could be a good option.

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Oh, there's someone else calling the hotline.

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Vernee:  Hi, Caroline and Leandra. This is Vernee Samuel longtime Shedunnit listener and first time caller to the murder mystery hotline. Like many of us, I love reading books set in places I know I'm particularly drawn to crime novels set in London or Oxford that these are the only two places I've lived. But my parents were originally from Sri Lanka and my husband was born in Derry, Derry slash Londonderry as they used to say.

I wondered if you could find me some golden age fiction that references one or other of these places? Both in the same novel might be a bit of a stretch. Thanks and good luck.

Caroline: Now, this is an excellent request that I'm sorry to say we haven't been able to fulfil very well, and I hope that listeners are going to be able to help us do better. Leandra and I drew a complete blank when looking for golden age detective fiction that is set in or references Sri Lanka, and we also struggled with Derry-Londonderry too. The closest we got is a 1930 novel by Freeman Wills Crofts, Sir John Magill’s Last Journey, which is at least set in Northern Ireland, if not the specific city that you requested. As listeners might know, Crofts was from Ireland and worked there as a railway engineer until he moved to England in 1929 and embarked on a full time writing career. Sir John Magill’s Last Journey sees his series detective, Inspector French, called in to collaborate with the Royal Ulster Constabulary on the disappearance and presumed murder of an Irish linen millionaire. There's even a pivotal scene set at Cavehill, which is a big cliff overlooking Belfast. As with lots of golden age detective fiction, it's interesting to read books like this for the snippets of contemporary social history one can pick up as well for the mystery — in this case, the perspective of an Irish writer who had recently moved to England on the state of politics and policing in the north. I'm afraid that's all we have for you so far, Vernee, but I'm hopeful that the Shedunnit listeners will be able to help us discover something better matched to your original request.

Speaking of Ireland, this seems like a good moment to take a look at a request that has arrived in writing from Ciara (keera):

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Ciara asks: Are there any golden age detection novels set in Ireland?

There are, but not very many. I've already mentioned Sir John Magill’s Last Journey by Freeman Wills Crofts, which sees Inspector French go to Ulster in Northern Ireland, and he returns there in 1936's Man Overboard!, which reuses some of the same characters. Then in 1939's Fatal Venture French investigates a case that involves some maritime hijinks on a cruise around the coast of the UK and Ireland, culminating in the discovery of a body in a lonely cove near Cork. That's all we've been able to find for fiction from the 1930s set in Ireland. I mentioned her on the last Murder Mystery Hotline episode in connection with a request about horticulture, but the work of Sheila Pim fits here too — she published a sequence of four novels set in an Irish village beginning in 1945 with Common or Garden Crime and ending with A Hive of Suspects in 1952.

Then in the 1950s we have two authors who seem to be writing golden age style fiction set in Ireland. Nigel Fitzgerald, an Irish actor, based a series of books around a duo of Garda detective Inspector Duffy and actor-manager Alan Russell. Fitzgerald published a dozen mysteries between 1953 and 1967, all published by Collins — who also published, among others, Agatha Christie. His first, Midsummer Malice blends a few different tropes, including a seemingly psychotic killer, a handy theatre troupe and some local toffs in a castle. I've also heard good things about The Student Body, which is a locked room mystery set in a Dublin college.

Also in the 1950s we have the three crime novels of Eilís (eye-leesh) Dillon: Death at Crane’s Court, Sent to his Account, and Death in the Quadrangle. The first two books are set on the coast, one in Wicklow and the other in Galway, and the third at a college in Dublin.

Finally, I want to mention a standalone novel by Nicholas Blake, which was of course the pseudonym the poet Cecil Day Lewis. He was born in Ireland and, after his family moved to England, returned there often for holidays. His 1968 novel The Private Wound was his last book before his death in 1972. It's set in a remote area of the west of Ireland, and its dramatic, romantic plot is supposed to have been based on events from his own life three decades earlier. It's not a golden age detective novel by any stretch of the imagination, but it is a haunting thriller set in Ireland, authored by someone who started out writing crime fiction in the golden age style during the interwar period.

After the break: chocolate, harps, China and more.

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Before I take some more calls, I did just want to touch on the question of book availability. Some of the books I'm talking about here will be easy to get your hands on, either because they've had multiple editions down the decades or because they have been recently reissued. Some of them, however, will not be — books that went out of print and faded into obscurity quickly, meaning that you either need to get very lucky in a secondhand bookshop or have a lot of money to spend with a book dealer. In some cases, it's possible to get creative and find a digital facsimile of a rare title on archive.org or via a library, or use your area's inter library loan system to get your hands on a rare copy, or go to a copyright deposit library like the British Library or the National Library of Ireland. Personally, I quite enjoy this kind of hunt, but not everybody does. I'm not talking about hard-to-obtain books because I want to frustrate anyone, of course, but rather because it's interesting to know about these books even if we can't read them right now. More and more golden age detective fiction is coming back into ready availability all the time, too, so sometimes a bit of patience pays off in the end.

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Aha, we have our next caller.

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Judy:  Hi Caroline, this is Judy. I'm just about to go out and buy Easter eggs and it occurred to me, obviously there are a lot of golden age mysteries with chocolates in them, but are there any specifically with Easter eggs?

Caroline: Judy is quite right, there are a lot of chocolates in interwar crime fiction — I made a whole episode about that in 2022 titled Death By Chocolate. But what about Easter chocolate particularly?

Well, even though chocolate Easter eggs were apparently quite common in the UK from the 1870s onwards, I have yet to find an instance of one in golden age detective fiction. However, we did find some mysteries set around Easter that might be of interest to Judy and others keen on exploring how that festival was portrayed in this genre. The 1956 John Bude novel A Telegram from Le Touquet is set at Easter, with protagonist Nigel Derry heading to a country house party hosted by "his enigmatic and unpredictable aunt Gwenny" to celebrate the season. The following year, Rex Stout published a story in Look magazine titled "The Easter Parade Mystery" that is about Nero Wolfe's planned theft of an orchid a woman is wearing as a corsage to an Easter Sunday service, only for her to be murdered on the church steps. The fun thing about this mystery is that the magazine published four photographs of the crime scene alongside the story with the information that it was possible to deduce the identity of the murderer from the pictures, so that readers could try and discover the solution for themselves. The title of the story was shortened to "Easter Parade" when it appeared Stout's 1958 short story collection And Four To Go, and sadly not all editions reproduce those photographs.

Again, not chocolate, but during her research Leandra also discovered that Norway has a long and proud tradition of reading crime fiction during Easter called Påskekrims (paw-skuh-krim), which translates literally as "Easter crime". Forgive my terrible pronunciation. This tradition dates back to 1923, when authors Nordahl Grieg and Nils Lie teamed up to write a crime novel set at Easter, a period when Norwegians traditionally spend time at rural cabins in remote places. Their comic mystery features an attack on a night train in Bergen at Easter time by a group of students, who ski to a remote area on the line where there are only cabins around to commit their crime, believing they will get away with it because there are no police nearby. The book became a runaway success thanks to a genius marketing move by Nordahl Grieg's brother Harald, who put an advertisement in a national newspaper the Sunday before Easter that looked like a headline news story about the train robbery. Indeed, it looked so real that many readers believed it had really happened, missing the small text at the bottom declaring it to be only an advertorial for a new book. The book was a big hit, with a silent film adaptation following in 1928. Ever since, crime fiction has been an important Easter tradition in Norway, with new books released for the festival. Consuming crime stories via radio and TV at this time is popular too, as are mystery games and puzzles. It's not chocolate, but it is a fascinating Easter crime fiction tradition!

Next, we have a request that came in writing from Hannah.

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Hannah asks: I would be interested if there are mysteries out there where someone plays the harp. I play and love it, so I was pleasantly surprised to find a Mary Fitt mystery recently where one of the characters is a harpist, Love from Elizabeth. It got me to wondering if there are other mysteries with harpists in them.

There certainly are! The American psychologist and crime writer Charles Daly King wrote a short story titled "The Episode of the Vanishing Harp", which as the title might suggest, is a locked room mystery about the disappearance of a valuable and ancient harp. That story can be found in the 1935 collection The Curious Mr Tarrant. Also in short story form, we have "The Case of the Tragedies in the Greek Room", which involves an ancient Athenian harp. That story is by Sax Rohmer, who was better known as the creator of master criminal Fu Manchu. It appeared in his 1920 collection Dream Detective, and more recently in the British Library Crime Classics anthology Miraculous Mysteries.

And then we have two film suggestions — neither are strictly crime fiction, but could be fun nonetheless. The Bishop's Wife from 1947 starring Cary Granta and Loretta Young has an important harp plot element, as does The Burmese Harp, a Japanese film from 1956. This one is set during the second world war and a harpist who is being held as a prisoner of war take a central role in the plot.

Next we have another request in writing, from Francesca:

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Francesca says: I really love Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee series, and I would like to know if there are any golden age novels with a Chinese setting, character or artifact.

In terms of Chinese characters, we found a couple of options. The first is the Charlie Chan series by Earl Derr Biggers, which begins with 1925's The House Without a Key. Charlie Chan is a Chinese-American police detective based in Honolulu. The character also appeared in many films, beginning with a now-lost silent adaptation of that first novel in 1926. Another option is Juanita Sheridan’s Lily Wu novels — there are four of these, beginning with The Chinese Chop pubished in 1949. Lily Wu is a Chinese American amateur detective. I haven't tried these yet myself, but I've read some glowing reviews, including by past guest Kate Jackson, so I have high hopes for them. For a contemporary option that picks up on the books Francesca already mentioned, you might be interested in The Murder of Mr Ma by John Shen Yen Nee and S.J. Rozan, which is a new novel just published last year that reimagines van Gulik's Judge Dee character.

As for Chinese artefacts, we have three options for you, all from the golden age. The Kennel Murder Case by S.S. Van Dine from 1933 features a crucial piece of broken Chinese porcelain. The Agatha Christie short story "The Adventure of Western Star" from 1923 is about a diamond with mysterious links to China. And The Chinese Orange Mystery by Ellery Queen from 1934 features, as well as a bizarre impossible crime, the theft of some valuable Chinese postage stamps.

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Now, I want to read two requests that we sadly weren't able to find any books or stories for, in the hope that listeners can help fill in the gap. The first comes from Christian:

He says: The archives are replete with golden age novels that revolve around Christmas in one way or another. But what about Hanukkah, or other Jewish holidays? Not having something like Herclue Poirot’s Shavuot (shuh-VOO-oht) is a genuine missed opportunity by Christie, but maybe someone else gave us something like The Yom Kippur Murders.

I agree with Christian, the lack of golden age mysteries featuring Jewish celebrations is glaring — although given the antisemitism sometimes found in the crime fiction of this era, perhaps not that surprising. There are some more modern mysteries that fit this bill, including some instalments in the Peter Decker/Rina Lazarus series by Faye Kellerman and a couple of Harry Kemelman's Rabbi Small books, but nothing from the interwar period that we have yet found. If you know of one, get in touch!

And then lastly, we have a request so specific that I was desperate to satisfy it, since it seems to so perfectly embody the extremely niche spirit of the murder mystery hotline. It comes from Christine:

My request is a book in which one of the characters is a member of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty. You could do a lot of damage with a dumb bell…

The Women’s League of Health and Beauty was a mass keep fit movement in the UK that first become popular in the 1930s, and I agree with Christine that like other communal or group activities it seems to offer plenty of opportunities for mysterious goings on. Miss Pym Disposes by Josephine Tey, of course, amply demonstrates the potential for crime in women's physical education. However, we have yet to find a mention of the Women’s League of Health and Beauty in a golden age murder mystery. If you do ever see one, be sure to let me know.

That's all I have for you from the murder mystery hotline today. I hope it has satisfied some of your extremely specific book yearnings, and that you are excited to read something I mentioned today. Or if not, I hope that you are at least impressed by the seemingly infinite variety offered by golden age detective fiction. Lighthouses, harps, Chinese stamps — it really has it all.

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This episode of Shedunnit was written, produced and narrated by me, Caroline Crampton.
You can find a full list of the books and sources used in the making in this episode at shedunnitshow.com/murdermysteryhotlineii. I publish transcripts of every episode including this one; find them all at shedunnitshow.com/transcripts.

If you enjoyed this episode and you’d like to have me answer your call to the murder mystery hotline in the future, the best way to do that is the join the Shedunnit Book Club — this is the paid membership scheme that runs alongside the podcast and which gives you access to extra episodes as well as the satisfaction of knowing you’ve helped the show stay on the air. Find out more and sign up at shedunnitbookclub.com/join. Later this summer, there will be a murder mystery hotline bonus episode where I answer more requests, so you should sign up now if you'd like to hear that And if you have a recommendation to make in response to any of the requests you heard today, get in touch via email on shedunnitnewsletter@gmail.com and I'll feature any interesting ones in a future edition of the Shedunnit newsletter. That, by the way, is now the principal way that I communicate with listeners outside the podcast, since we made the happy decision a few months ago to stop doing social media. If you'd like to receive the newsletter, sign up at shedunnitshow.com.

Shedunnit is edited by Euan McAleece. Production assistance and research for this episode from Leandra Griffith. Member support for the Shedunnit Book Club from CC McLoughlin.

Thanks for listening.