Davies on A Great Borrower and a Great Originator, and Also, Perhaps, a Great Lender @horacefuller @NeroWolfePack

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University Law School; The Green Bag, has published A Great Borrower and a Great Originator, and  Also, Perhaps, a Great Lender, at The Gazette–The Journal of the Wolfe Pack, Fall 2021, at 3. Here is the abstract.

This is the full, annotated, original version of a paper that was delivered as a toast to Rex Stout at the The Wolfe Pack's Black Orchid Dinner (on Zoom) on December 5, 2020. The abbreviated toasty version was published (without footnotes), on pages 3 to 5 of the Fall 2021 issue of The Gazette — The Journal of the Wolfe Pack. The paper argues that contrary to conventional wisdom, Rex Stout did NOT borrow from Agatha Christie when he wrote his first Nero Wolfe detective story; rather, it was more likely Christie who borrowed from Stout.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

ICYMI: Lisa Hopkins on Shakespeare Allusion in Crime Fiction (Palgrave, 2016)

ICYMI: Lisa Hopkins, Sheffield Hallam University, has published Shakespeare Allusion in Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here from the publisher's website is a description of the book's contents.

This book explores why crime fiction so often alludes to Shakespeare. It ranges widely over a variety of authors including classic golden age crime writers such as the four ‘queens of crime’ (Allingham, Christie, Marsh, Sayers), Nicholas Blake and Edmund Crispin, as well as more recent authors such as Reginald Hill, Kate Atkinson and Val McDermid. It also looks at the fondness for Shakespearean allusion in a number of television crime series, most notably Midsomer Murders, Inspector Morse and Lewis, and considers the special sub-genre of detective stories in which a lost Shakespeare play is found. It shows how Shakespeare facilitates discussions about what constitutes justice, what authorises the detective to track down the villain, who owns the countryside, national and social identities, and the question of how we measure cultural value.

Del Gobbo on Unreliable Narration in Law and Fiction @danieldelgobbo

Daniel Del Gobbo has published Unreliable Narration in Law and Fiction, 30 Canadian Journal of Law and Jurisprudence 311 (2017). Here is the abstract.

This article revisits long-standing debates about objective interpretation in the common law system by focusing on a crime novel by Agatha Christie and judicial opinion by the Ontario High Court. Conventions of the crime fiction and judicial opinion genres inform readers’ assumption that the two texts are objectively interpretable. This article challenges this assumption by demonstrating that unreliable narration is often, if not always, a feature of written communication. Judges, like crime fiction writers, are storytellers. While these authors might intend for their stories to be read in certain ways, the potential for interpretive disconnect between unreliable narrators and readers means there can be no essential quality that marks a literary or legal text’s meaning as objective. Taken to heart, this demands that judges try to narrate their decisions more reliably so that readers are able to interpret the texts correctly when it matters most.

Murder on the Orient Express Returns To the Big Screen

In anticipation of the new version of Murder on the Orient Express, Entertainment Weekly's Tina Jordan offers this guide to Agatha Christie's novels.

Murder on the Orient Express, which stars Johnny Depp, Judi Dench, Penelope Cruz, Michelle Pfeiffer, and many other stars, is directed by Kenneth Branagh, who also plays Hercule Poirot. A famous earlier version appeared in 1974; it starred Albert Finney as Poirot, with such luminaries as Lauren Bacall, Tony Perkins, Ingrid Bergman, and Jacqueline Bisset, and that oh-so-1930s score by Richard Rodney Bennett. This new film, due in theaters November 10, will have to go a long way to beat that version, which I watched over and over; that score still sings in my head.

There have also been versions for TV in 2001, 2010 (as part of the David Suchet Poirot series), and 2015 (a Japanese version).

Agatha Christie's "The Murder of Roger Ackroyd" In Graphic Form @ComicsGrid @nytimesbooks @

Via @ComicsGrid

From the New York Times: Agatha Christie's classic The Murder of Roger Ackroyd, distilled into a pithy graphic format (by LeUyen Pham) (I do love pith).

When There's Toxin in the Text: Some Cites To Agatha Christie's Uses of Poisons in Her Mysteries

I should have published this post yesterday, on the anniversary of Agatha Christie's birth, but no harm, no foul, so to speak.

As you may know, Mrs. Christie worked in a hospital dispensary during the First World War, where she first learned a great deal about drugs--and poisons, and she used that information to great advantage in her many mystery novels. Fiction and pharmaceuticals worked quite well for her, from her very first publication, The Mysterious Affair at Styles. A good many of her works deal with some kind of poison as a weapon of death, as scholars point out.

Erin Blackmore writes more about Dame Agatha's real life knowledge and her use of it in her literary career in her essay for JSTOR Daily, Agatha Christie, Pharmacist.

More about poison in Agatha Christie from The Guardian, here from The New Yorker, HubPages, and Wired.

A New Version of "Witness for the Prosecution" May Be Headed For the Screen

Ben Affleck may remake Witness for the Prosecution for Fox, according to the Hollywood Reporter.  Billy Wilder famously made the Agatha Christie short story into a hit film in 1957; it starred Tyrone Power, Charles Laughton, Elsa Lanchester, and Marlene Dietrich. Diana Rigg and Beau Bridges starred in a 1984 adaptation for television (Dame Diana taking the Marlene Dietrich role. There was also another 1949 television version.

Below, a selected bibliography on Witness for the Prosecution and the law.


Chase, Anthony, Lawyers and Popular Culture: A Review of Mass Media Portrayals of  American Attorneys, 11 Law and Social Inquiry 281 (April 1986). 

Corcos, Christine Alice, Legal Fictions: Irony, Storytelling, Truth, and Justice in the Modern Courtroom Drama,  25 U. Ark. L. Rev. 503 (2003).

Papke, David Ray, Conventional Wisdom: The Courtroom Trial in American Popular Culture:  Essay, 82 Marquette Law Review 471 (1999). 

Papke, David Ray, American Courtroom Trial: Pop Culture, Courthouse Realities, and the Dream World of Justice, 40 South West Texas Law Review 919 (1999).

Singer, Eliot A., The Whodunit as Riddle: Block Elements in Agatha Christie, 43 Western Folklore 157 (July 1984).

Links available if you are a subscriber to Hein Online or JSTOR.

Two Books On Golden Age Detective Fiction

Two books of interest, which I learned about from the blog crossexamining crime

(now listed in the blogroll).

Megan Hoffman, Gender and Representation in British Golden Age Crime Fiction (Palgrave Macmillan, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

This book provides an original and compelling analysis of the ways in which British women’s golden age crime narratives negotiate the conflicting social and cultural forces that influenced depictions of gender in popular culture in the 1920s until the late 1940s. The book explores a wide variety of texts produced both by writers who have been the focus of a relatively large amount of critical attention, such as Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Margery Allingham, but also those who have received comparatively little, such as Christianna Brand, Ngaio Marsh, Gladys Mitchell, Josephine Tey and Patricia Wentworth. Through its original readings, this book explores the ambivalent nature of modes of femininity depicted in golden age crime fiction, and shows that seemingly conservative resolutions are often attempts to provide a ‘modern-yet-safe’ solution to the conflicts raised in the texts.

Link to chapter one. 

Merja Makinen,  Agatha Christie: Investigating Femininity (Palgrave, 2006). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

Christie's books depict women as adventurous, independent figures who renegotiate sexual relationships along more equal lines. Women are also allowed to disrupt society and yet the texts refuse to see them as double deviant because of their femininity. This book demonstrates exactly how quietly innovatory Christie was in relation to gender.

Link to the Introduction. 

Women Detectives In Fact and Fiction: A New Book by Erika Janik

Erika Janik has published Pistols and Petticoats: 175 Years of Lady Detectives, in Fact and Fiction (Beacon Press, 2016). Here is a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

In 1910, Alice Wells took the oath to join the all-male Los Angeles Police Department. She wore no uniform, carried no weapon, and kept her badge stuffed in her pocketbook. She wasn’t the first or only policewoman, but she became the movement’s most visible voice. Police work from its very beginning was considered a male domain, far too dangerous and rough for a respectable woman to even contemplate doing, much less take on as a profession. A policewoman worked outside the home, walking dangerous city streets late at night to confront burglars, drunks, scam artists, and prostitutes. To solve crimes, she observed, collected evidence, and used reason and logic—traits typically associated with men. And most controversially of all, she had a purpose separate from her husband, children, and home. Women who donned the badge faced harassment and discrimination. It would take more than seventy years for women to enter the force as full-fledged officers. Yet within the covers of popular fiction, women not only wrote mysteries but also created female characters that handily solved crimes. Smart, independent, and courageous, these nineteenth- and early twentieth-century female sleuths (including a healthy number created by male writers) set the stage for Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple, Sara Paretsky’s V. I. Warshawski, Patricia Cornwell’s Kay Scarpetta, and Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone, as well as TV detectives such as Prime Suspect’s Jane Tennison and Law and Order’s Olivia Benson. The authors were not amateurs dabbling in detection but professional writers who helped define the genre and competed with men, often to greater success. Pistols and Petticoats tells the story of women’s very early place in crime fiction and their public crusade to transform policing. Whether real or fictional, investigating women were nearly always at odds with society. Most women refused to let that stop them, paving the way to a modern professional life for women on the force and in popular culture.

More about Alice (Stebbins) Wells (1873-1957) here.

Readers Take On a Challenge: Designing Covers For Christie's Mysteries

The Guardian asked its readers to design book covers for Agatha Christie's mysteries. Here are some of the results.

Updating Agatha Christie

The Agatha Christie estate, led by Mathew Pritchard, Dame Agatha's grandson, is plotting to re-invigorate the brand by livening up the writer's traditionally "cosy" stories with lots of murders--apparently more than she originally wrote. And with a lot more violence. According to this story from the Guardian, the first reboot will feature Tommy and Tuppence Beresford, Agatha's "partners in crime," and will be much more adventure-packed than the version which starred James Warwick and Francesca Annis some years ago. To follow: remakes of the novels Murder on the Orient Express and And Then There Were None, both of which have been made before, as quite successful films (Murder (1974) starring Albert Finney and a lot of other Hollywood icons including Jacqueline Bisset, Lauren Bacall and Sean Connery, and And Then There Were None (1945) starring Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, and Louis Hayward.

Meanwhile, on the occasion of Dame Agatha's 125th birthday, food writer Anne Martinetti created a number of recipes mentioned in Christie's novels as linked to murder.  Anyone up for a piece of "Delicious Death" from A Murder Is Announced?

Detecting Murder

Martin Edwards has published The Golden Age of Murder (Harper Collins, 2015), available both in hardcover and as a e-book.  Here's a description of the contents from the publisher's website.

A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors’ darkest secrets.

 

Another interesting book about a group that does somewhat the same thing is Michael Capuzzo's The Murder Room (Gotham, 2011), about the Vidocq Society, named for Eugene Francois Vidocq, the criminal turned detective who founded the Surete, France's first expert official detective bureau.

His Final Bow

PBS will begin airing the last season's adaptations of Agatha Christie's Poirot novels on July 27. After a quarter of a century, we will say adieu to our old friends Poirot, Hastings, Miss Lemon, and Superintendent Japp. While PBS will not offer the final episode, "Curtain," in which Poirot solves the ultimate case of his career, you can see it as well as all the others at acorn.tv (subscription required). The episodes will be released on DVD later this year.

BBC To Air New Versions of "Partners In Crime" and "And Then There Were None" In 2015

The BBC has contracted with the Agatha Christie estate to bring new adaptations of the married couple whodunits Partners in Crime and the "locked room" (on an island) classic And Then There Were None to the small screen. David Walliams (Little Britain, Come Fly With Me, Britain's Got Talent) will star as Tommy Beresford in Partners in Crime, and in the new version of And Then There Were None. An earlier version of Partners in Crime made for ITV starred Francesca Annis and James Warwick and dramatized only book 2. Earlier versions of And Then There Were None include Rene Clair's 1945 film starring Barry Fitzgerald, Walter Huston, and Louis Hayward, the CBS/Seven Arts/WB 1965 version starring Hugh O'Brian version (which uses the altered Christie title Ten Little Indians as well as And Then There Were None), and the 1974 version (also using the title Ten Little Indians) starring Charles Aznavour, Maria Rohm, and Adolfo Celli (Corona Filmproduktion).

More here from the Guardian, here from the Daily Telegraph.

Agatha Christie, Literary Critic

The used book site abebooks.com features a post about fictional detectives here. Blogger Beth Carswell notes what the Guardian calls author Agatha Christie's "waspish" 1945 critique (for the Ministry of Information) of literary sleuths, discussed last year.

Criminal Writers

From the Guardian: a podcast discussing Agatha Christie's views on her own work, the work of two new crime writers, Attica Locke and Tanya Byrne, and J. K. Rowling's new novel for adults. 

In Agatha Christie's Own Voice, a Window On the Last Third of Her Life

Julie Bosman writes in the New York Times about a cache of tapes found recently featuring Agatha Christie's own voice and discussing a number of issues close to her heart, including whether Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot were ever likely to meet. Her grandson Mathew Prichard discovered the recordings in one of his grandmother's former homes. Read more here.