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!

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.

CBS Orders Pilots For Sherlock Holmes and "Mommy Track" Detective Series

From the Hollywood Reporter: news that CBS may schedule a new Sherlock Holmes series; it has ordered a pilot from CBS Television Studios and producers Sarah Timberman and Carl Beverly. In addition, the Eye is ordering a pilot based on Ayelet Waldman's series based on stay-at-home "Mommy Track"  sleuth (and former lawyer) Juliet Appelbaum. Ms. Waldman, like her detective a former attorney, will write, and Jennifer Levin and Sherri Cooper will produce. I really like the Juliet Appelbaum mystery novels,. Entertaining and well-written, they feature a genuinely smart woman--someone I'd like to know. First in the series: Nursery Crimes (Berkley, 2000).

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.

Searching For Charlie Chan

The new book out on Charlie Chan, the fictional detective, is getting good reviews. Author Yunte Huang explores the origins, influence and meaning of Chan in Charlie Chan:
The Untold Story of the Honorable Detective and His Rendezvous with American History (Norton, 2010).

Charlie Chan was the hero of a number of murder mysteries written by Earl Derr Biggers, and brought to the screen during the 1930s by Warner Oland, Sidney Toler, and Roland Winters. Louisiana-born Mantan Moreland also starred in the Chan films as the detective's chauffeur (although Mr. Moreland was a talented actor who made a number of other movies). Charlie Chan even made it into the Saturday morning cartoon line-up.
For more about Chan see the website CharlieChan.net and the Charlie Chan Family Home.

Jill Lepore writes about the inspiration for the character in Chan, the Man: On the Trail of the Honorable Detective here for the New Yorker.

More on Asian image and portrayals on film in Gina Marchetti, Romance and the "yellow peril" : race, sex, and discursive strategies in Hollywood fiction (University of California Press, 1993).