Whodunnit Centenary: 1924

Shedunnit

Caroline Crampton

Books, Arts

4.8 • 1.3K Ratings

🗓️ 10 January 2024

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Time travelling, murder mystery style. Mentioned in this episode: — The Man in the Brown Suit by Agatha Christie — The Plague Court Murders by John Dickson Carr — Murder on the Orient Express by Agatha Christie — The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L Sayers — A Man Lay Dead by Ngaio Marsh — Death of a Ghost by Margery Allingham — Checkmate to Murder by ECR Lorac — That Yew Tree's Shade by Cyril Hare — Tenant for Death by Cyril Hare — A Caribbean Mystery by Agatha Christie — From Doon With Death by Ruth Rendell — Cover Her Face by PD James — The Face of Trespass by Ruth Rendell — Malice Aforethought by Frances Iles — Before the Fact by Frances Iles — The Crozier Pharaohs by Gladys Mitchell — Speedy Death by Gladys Mitchell — Postern of Fate by Agatha Christie — Original Sin by PD James — End of Chapter by Nicholas Blake — Case Histories by Kate Atkinson — The Secret Place by Tana French Mentioned Shedunnit episodes: — A Century of Whodunnits — A Second Century of Whodunnits — The Kidnap of Elizabeth Canning, with guest Tana French NB: Links to Blackwell's are affiliate links, meaning that the podcast receives a small commission when you purchase a book there (the price remains the same for you). To be the first to know about future developments with the podcast, sign up for the newsletter at shedunnitshow.com/newsletter. The podcast is on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram as @ShedunnitShow, and you can find it in all major podcast apps. Make sure you’re subscribed so you don’t miss the next episode. Click here to do that now in your app of choice. Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/whodunnitcentenary1924transcript/ Music by Audioblocks and Blue Dot Sessions. See shedunnitshow.com/musiccredits for more details. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Spark your creativity with the Sims. Sometimes you might feel like you're not creative
0:07.0	and you have to go in search of your creative spark again. Maybe this is catching up with creative
0:11.9	friends, experimenting with a new look or trying out a new recipe.
0:16.0	And thanks to The Sims, inspiration is just one game and one spark away.
0:21.0	Ready to spark something? Download The Sims 4 and play for free. I talk a lot on this podcast about the golden age of detective fiction, that period between the
0:37.7	first and second world wars when the fair play puzzle mystery was at the peak of its popularity and its biggest creators were writing their
0:45.2	best work.
0:47.2	But in the last few years there has been a sense that we might be living through, if not a second
0:51.8	golden age, at least another moment of great admiration for this kind of crime writing.
0:57.0	New books that show Golden Age influence are finding millions of readers,
1:01.0	and reprints of lost gems from a century ago are everywhere you look.
1:05.4	There's never been a better time to be a fan of the classic murder mystery.
1:09.6	It wasn't always like this though. Once the Golden Age style who done it had well and truly fallen out of favour after the Second World War,
1:18.0	there was a long period of several decades in which publishers were loath to touch authors who wanted to write books that followed the example of those from the 1920s and 30s.
1:28.0	When before internet book selling in today's thriving culture of reprints, you just had to hope you
1:34.6	encountered your favorite authors out of print titles in a secondhand bookshop one day.
1:41.2	What we have essentially is this huge peak of popularity for the Golden Age style mystery pre- 1940,
1:47.0	then a big trough of disinterest in the second half of the 20th century,
1:51.0	before the interest begins to tick up again in the 2000s so that we reach
1:55.9	our current situation here at the start of 2024.
2:00.9	And since this is the beginning of a new year, I thought it would be interesting to look back over all of this and read my way through the classic murder mysteries life cycle over the past hundred years.
2:11.0	So join me, won't you you as I go back in time to January
	...

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