Victorian Killer Plants and Other Dangers: A Special Issue of Green Letters @samlwalton

Via Samantha Walton, Bath Spa University:

Dr. Samantha Walton and Dr. Jo Walton, University of Sussex, have co-edited a special edition of Green Letters, which presents articles on Victorian killer plants; Christie's herbal poisons; interwar rural nostalgia; detection in the American West; Bengali ecocrime; Scandinavian folk horror; and new perspectives on conservation as a form of noir detection.

More here, including the open access introduction.

From The Hollywood Reporter @THR, News That a Series About the Original For Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe Is In the Works From the CW

Via @THR, news that the CW Network @TheCW is developing a private investigator show called Marlowe  that, although it will be set in 1937, will use stories from today. The premise: the main character is the original for Raymond Chandler's famous fictional PI, Philip Marlowe. Here's an L.A. Times story about Samuel Marlowe, the man who began detective work in twenties L.A.  It looks as if  he was the man on whom Chandler based his fictional sleuth.

Devon Greggory is writing the scripts for the CW series.  More here from The Hollywood Reporter. 

Here are more (big screen) versions of Marlowe, beginning with Dick Powell's interpretation (1944), and not including the iconic Humphrey Bogart version. Check out The Thrilling Detective Marlowe webpage that includes great information about the character here.

I'm going to be watching this story with great interest!

Writing the Detective Novel

Have you ever wanted to write detective fiction? Here's some assistance from two experts.

First Raymond Chandler offers Ten Commandments for writing a detective novel, available here from Open Culture.

His first rule: 1) It [the novel] must be credibly motivated, both as to the original situation and the dénouement.

Also check out Father Ronald Knox's Ten Commandments for writing detective fiction, here. 

He begins:  The criminal must be someone mentioned in the early part of the story, but must not be anyone whose thoughts the reader has been allowed to follow.  Agatha Christie broke that one quite famously in The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

Of course, if writing detective novels, or any fiction, were that easy, anybody could do it. Reminds me of the old joke about the aspiring writer who asked a publisher how long novels are supposed to be. Intending to be helpful, she responded, "Oh, about 70,000 words or so." "Great!" he said. "Then I'm done!" 

How Mystery-Novel Savvy Are You?

Take this Buzzfeed quiz to see your Classic Mystery Novel Lovers quotient. Mine is Rookie Detective (my score was 59 novels of 99, and no, I'm not revealing which novels I've read).

Most of the choices are fairly modern publications, by U.S. and U.K. authors, with some obvious exceptions (Umberto Eco, Stieg Larsson, Dostoyevsky). If you had to make up your own, international, list of classic mystery novels, which ones would be on your list? Edgar Allan Poe's collection Tales of Mystery and Imagination?  (which is on the Buzzfeed list)? Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment (which is also on the list)? A Simenon novel? Voltaire's Zadig? A Judge Dee novel by Robert van Gulik? Something by Qiu Xiaolong?

Check out other lists here provided by LibraryThing, including the UK Crime Writers' Association Top 100, H.R.F. Keating's Top 100 picks, and Julian Symons' choices. 

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.

Rex Stout's Influences

Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law & The Green Bag, and Cattleya M. Concepcion, The Green Bag, have published Fore-Shadowed: Where Rex Stout Got the Idea for Fer-De-Lance,  at 2012 Green Bag Almanac and Reader 151. Here is the abstract.

Researchers describing the discovery of something they are not equipped to fully understand run the risk that their reach will exceed their grasp. And so, as mere enthusiastic newcomers to the study of author Rex Stout, we will limit ourselves to: (1) reporting that we have run across an early (1916) detective story written by Stout and (2) sharing a few thoughts that would likely occur on first reading to anyone - and especially a lawyer - familiar with Stout’s later (beginning in 1934) detective stories featuring his Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin characters.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.

Doing Them In, Domestically

Agatha Christie and the rest of the cosy mystery writers were onto something, but they got some of their inspiration from life. As Deborah Blum writes in this article for Lapham's Quarterly, cooks, manufacturers, and killers (and they might have been the same folks) have for centuries accidentally and purposefully "done in" those around them. And the government and scientists have been trailing along behind slowly catching up.

Sometimes the culprits were food additives.

Oh. Charming.

Read on. It's great stuff. But don't read it around mealtime.

 

[T]he ancients were also fully aware that foods could be dangerous without human help, hence the warnings regarding meat consumption. And they’d learned from long-time experience that even routinely safe foods carried unexpected risks. Consider the wonderfully bizarre story of “mad honey” and the Greek army commanded by Xenophon in 401 bc. Returning from an unsuccessful raid in Persia, Xenophon’s men raided beehives along the eastern edge of the Black Sea, acquiring a treasure trove of local honey. By day’s end, the raiding party was immobilized. They were like men “greatly intoxicated,” wrote Xenophon, whose army was suffering from nausea, inability to walk straight, and lethargy. Over three centuries later, the Roman general Pompey’s troops also encamped by the Black Sea and gorged themselves on the local honey. Pompey lost three squadrons to the enemy fighters who had deliberately placed honeycombs in the path of his troops.

Borax came first on the list, partly because it was so widely used by meat processors. Derived from the element boron, it slowed decomposition but could also react with proteins and firm them up, giving rotting meat a more shapely appearance. Borax had thus figured in the “embalmed beef” scandal of the Spanish-American War, in which officers in the U.S. Army accused their suppliers of shipping tins of refrigerated beef that was treated with “secret chemicals” and canned beef that was no more than a “bundle of fibers.” “It looked well but had an odor similar to that of a dead human body after being injected with preservatives,” an Army medical officer wrote of the refrigerated meat, adding that when cooked, the product tasted rather depressingly like boric acid.

The Case Method, the Scientific Method, and the Detective's Method

Simon Stern, University of Toronto Faculty of Law, has published Detecting Doctrines: The Case Method and the Detective Story in volume 23 of the Yale Journal of Law and the Humanities (2011). Here is the abstract.

Many scholars have compared legal judgments with detective stories, and have suggested that law professors should teach cases in a way that reflects the structure of detective fiction. This essay explores that analogy, arguing that detective fiction’s asserted concern with the logical analysis of clues helps to show why exponents of legal doctrine would look to this genre as a model. Detective stories changed in the late nineteenth century, for the first time organizing their narrative structure around the use of clues, and hence claiming to promote logical reasoning in a way that allowed the reader to compete with the detective in solving the mystery. This explanation echoes the rationales offered by the advocates of the case method when it was first being endorsed around the same time. Law teaching changed similarly, moving from the methods of lecture and memorization to an approach that required students to navigate a narrative medium (the case) and to discover its essential components on their own. These two developments, in literature and law, stem from a common source - the emergence of new scientific methods aimed at tracing visible effects back to their hidden causes, exemplified by Charles Lyell’s work in geology and Charles Darwin’s work in evolution. When the early advocates of the case method talked about legal science, they emphasized scientific values such as coherence, clarity, and consistency, but an equally important aspect of the enterprise received much less rhetorical emphasis - namely, the method itself, which reflected the forms of scientific inquiry exemplified by Lyell and Darwin.



This essay explores those connections by considering various historical and structural analogies between the case method and the detective story. Part I takes up the changes in legal education associated with Christopher Columbus Langdell at Harvard, and discusses the intellectual roots of the case method, the justifications offered in its support, and the narrative tendencies that it relies on and promotes. Part II turns to the origins of the modern detective story near the end of the nineteenth century, and shows how the genre developed from the same scientific background as the case method. This section then examines in greater detail some of the ways in which case-method pedagogy may be said to cultivate the same habits as detective fiction, and concludes with some examples in which courts have expressly invoked the analogy to describe their own procedures or have crafted doctrines with the aid of propositions borrowed from detective stories. Part III considers some examples of detective fiction, pursuing the analogy further by asking why lawyers often figure as detectives in these stories. Finally, in a short conclusion, I discuss the analogy’s implications by considering the emergence, around the turn of the nineteenth century, of a doctrinal approach that discovered underlying rights behind express constitutional guarantees.

Download the article from SSRN at the link.