In 1905 in Paris, the publisher Pierre Laffite had an idea. His new journal Je Sais Tout (I Know Everything) had just launched and he was looking for an author who could do for his magazine, what Arthur Conan Doyle’s phenomenally popular Sherlock Holmes had done for The Strand magazine, read more…
Crime
Ep 44: Words Dunnit (Live at the Dublin Podcast Festival)
Last year Caroline Crampton (of Shedunnit) and I teamed up to create a joint live show, called Words Dunnit: a 200-year history of detective fiction in an hour. We performed the show live at the Dublin Podcast Festival in November 2019, and then again at Pod UK, in Birmingham, in read more…
Ep32: Golden Age Detective Fiction
An English country estate. A detective pacing the room, explaining how they have solved the crime, revealing the solution to a puzzle and the clues which were there all along. It’s so easy to parody this scene because it’s so familiar. It’s Reverend Green in the drawing room with the read more…
Episode 20: Domestic Noir
Why Are There So Many Crime Thrillers With ‘Girl’ in the Title? Gone Girl, The Girl on the Train, Luckiest Girl Alive, Final Girls… There’s no shortage of crime novels with ‘girl’ in the title since the huge success of Gillian Flynn’s 2012 thriller Gone Girl. But what do these read more…
Episode 11: Cesare Lombroso & The Born Criminal
Turin in the 19th Century The northern Italian city of Turin is quite distinctive as Italian cities go. It is still Italy, so of course it has its grand piazzas and ornate churches, and pasta and pizza and cappuccinos. But whereas in so many Italian cities it is read more…
Episode 8: A Lawyer, an Author, and a Murderer – The Trial of William Edward Hickman
“The most horrible crime of the 1920s” The case of William Edward Hickman went to trial in Los Angeles in 1928. The accused was charged with the gruesome murder of a 12-year-old girl, and he faced the death penalty. The trial was reported all across the U.S. because it was read more…