Dear listeners,

This is seventh time December has rolled around during the time I've been making Shedunnit, which means that I've had plenty of opportunity to think about festive and wintry themes in murder mysteries. And, with the exception of 2022 (when I lost my voice because I had Covid!), each year I have made a different episode about how the authors of the golden age of detective fiction handled this in their fiction. I've looked at everything from the publishing phenomenon that was the Christie for Christmas to the surprisingly large number of fictional corpses that show up dressed as Father Christmas. I thought I was done! Surely, I said to myself, there can't be anything left to say about the phenomenon of the Christmas mystery.

But then, while I was reading the Shedunnit Book Club's book for December — The Nine Tailors by Dorothy L. Sayers — I suddenly realised that there is a very important part of the traditional Christmas celebration that I have never addressed. The food! That book isn't particularly forthcoming on what Lord Peter Wimsey and Bunter eat during their rural Norfolk Christmas, but the mere mention of the cold roast beef and trifle they have at the vicarage on Christmas Eve was enough to give me inspiration. My research assistant Leandra and I sent to work, scouring our memories and our bookshelves for the most interesting examples of Christmas food in murder mysteries. The resulting episode, A Christmas Feast, has just landed in your podfeeds this morning and I hope you will enjoy listening to it as much as I enjoyed making it.

For the full line-up of Christmas food related books and stories you'll have to get into the episode proper, but while I have you hear I thought I might just highlight three slightly less well-known titles that you might want to have a look at over the next couple of weeks.

I re-read An English Murder at top speed while I was making this episode and marvelled anew at how incredibly good it is. It's technically a post golden age detective novel, being published in 1951, but in a way this makes it even better because Cyril Hare is able to play with the reader's expectations of the form. A country house, a tense Christmas dinner, family members with political differences — there's a lot to enjoy here.

Who Killed the Curate? by Joan Coggin was the Shedunnit Book Club's reading selection for December 2024 and we all ended up enjoying this sprightly village Christmas mystery.

Crime at Christmas by C.H.B. Kitchin was a book I hadn't read for many years but it has plenty to recommend it, not least its wry first-person narrator. I would also recommend this one to anyone who enjoys either stories set in Hampstead (niche, but a little mini-genre, I promise) or books that bring out the nuances of class snobbery in the interwar years.

That's it for me on the subject of Christmas for this year. Will I be inspired to make another festive episode in 2026? We'll all find out together... That isn't all from Shedunnit this year, though. There will be another newsletter next week with some reading recommendations from myself and Leandra, and then on the 24th an extra-special green penguin episode drops, so make sure you're looking out for that.

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. 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).

Dear listeners,

As fans of golden age detective fiction, we have lots of reasons to feel grateful to Anthony Berkeley. The success of his crime fiction during the interwar period assisted in propelling the genre to new heights of popularity. He created highly visible examples of mystery tropes that we now consider standard: the amateur sleuth, the first-person howdunnit, and the multiple solution mystery. Plus, he was a co-founder of the Detection Club and an influential reviewer of detective fiction. He might not be one of the most famous or well-read authors from this period today, but he did a great deal to ensure its longevity.

In this capacity, he has cropped up a fair bit on Shedunnit over the years. When we were doing research in the archive for this newsletter, I was surprised to see that almost all of the episodes devoted to Anthony Berkeley also feature Martin Edwards — current president of the Detection Club, long time friend of Shedunnit, and a keen Berkeley fan. When I first started making the show, I was relatively unfamiliar with Berkeley's work and unsure of becoming better acquainted with it, having been put off by the unsavoury misogyny on display in his 1926 novel The Wychford Poisoning Case. I had read that book because of its connections to the Florence Maybrick case (an early subject of the show) and wasn't especially anxious to spend much more with its author. But Martin convinced me that there was much more to Anthony Berkeley as an innovator in the field of interwar detective fiction and I persevered. And thank goodness I did! Some of the most thrilling "he did what?!" moments that I've had when reading crime fiction have come from his books. He may not have had a Christie-esque long career, but he certainly packed in the surprises.

Back in 2020, Martin was my guest for an episode titled The Psychology of Anthony Berkeley, in which he freely acknowledged that Berkeley can be a hard author to love:

"I think that Berkeley is one of those writers who will always be a bit of a Marmite writer. He's just a bit of a Marmite individual, I think. You like him a lot or you don't really get him. And I think that that was probably true in the thirties. It's certainly true now. But I think if you're interested in ingenuity, clever ideas, a touch of darkness because there's certainly a touch of darkness in his personality that comes through in books."

This is certainly the view that I've come to (and I do really like Marmite, so that tracks). Perhaps it's because Berkeley was a somewhat troubled, dark individual that he was able to be so interesting and original in his murder mysteries. His prickly personality didn't stop his work from being a hit with his fellow crime writers, who knew flair when they saw it, as Martin explained later in that same episode:

"Well, I think as a crime writer, he was hugely admired. Agatha Christie, I think, particularly admired his detective novels and she was a big fan. Dorothy L Sayers, too in the early days, although I also think that their personal relationship, had a few setbacks during the 1930s. He was a difficult customer and Dorothy probably wasn't the easiest either. So they had a slightly mixed time as friends. But I think that generally there is a huge amount of critical admiration for his work."

Berkeley took this mutual admiration and turned it into something concrete that endures to this day — The Detection Club. Martin explained how it came about in the episode devoted to the Club's history:

"His idea at that time was that detective novelists really didn't know each other socially at all, they were all working in isolation. And he thought it would be good to get together with fellow writers, and talk about matters of mutual interest, whether it was real life crimes of the day, whether it was their dealings with publishers or anything else... And the dinners were apparently a big success. And arising out of that success, he felt that it would be a good idea to form a social club that would meet a number of times a year to have dinner and essentially just chat and chat into the night. And so the club was was proposed. Dorothy L Sayers was amongst those who was an enthusiastic supporter, and she became very much a prime mover, but also Agatha Christie. Ronald Knox and a good many other leading lights of the day came on board.

By the end of the decade, though, Berkeley would have stopped writing detective fiction for good. His final work in the genre was published in 1939 and he did not ever return to pen more. How did Berkeley go from the enthusiastic co-founder of the Detection Club at the start of the 1930s to someone who never published a mystery again by the end of the decade? Martin has some ideas:

"I think were probably a mix of reasons. He said that he wasn't making enough money from the crime fiction. I'm slightly sceptical about that as an excuse. I think he lost his gusto. He wrote a letter in the late 50s or early 60s to a writer called George Bellairs, who's also published in the British Library series. And he said to Bellairs, in that letter, hang on to the gusto. Believe me, it goes and I think that that came from the heart. I think he just lost his enthusiasm, the desire, the energy that had kept him working very frenetically almost in the second half the twenties and through the 1930s when he did write a lot of books. And then I suspect mainly because of issues in his personal life, he just lost that zest and maybe had an extreme case of writer's block — that's been suggested to me by a family member. That was the impression that that person had. And it's hard to tell because he was quite secretive. But I think that one way or another, he lost his enthusiasm for writing fiction. Although he continued to enjoy reading it."

I've been very lucky that the years I have been working on Shedunnit have also coincided with a burgeoning reprint culture for golden age detective fiction. So many more books are now readily available than when I started the show back in 2018, among them many major Anthony Berkeley titles. If you would like to explore his bibliography, you no longer need to be very wealthy or very lucky in the secondhand bookshops or both. Several of these have appeared from the British Library Crime Classics imprint with introductions by Martin (and in the case of The Poisoned Chocolates Case, an entirely new additional ending to the story). Today, I want to draw your attention to one that was republished just this year, Not To Be Taken.

I'm delighted to be taking part in Kate Jackson's "Reprint of the Year" awards over at her blog this year, and this is the first of two titles that I'm going to be proposing.

Not To Be Taken is a standalone village poisoning mystery that first appeared in book form in 1938, having first been serialised as a competition mystery in John o' London's Weekly. Longtime listeners will know that I love a competition mystery, and did a whole live show about them at the International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay a few years ago (listen to that here). As someone who adores the trivia and ephemera of the golden age almost as much of the books themselves, I loved that that this reprint also included Berkeley's original "report" on the competition entries as an appendix. No one person got the full solution completely correct, so he ends up dividing the prizes between a few promising contenders. Being able to read his commentary on the construction of the mystery and its clueing added greatly to my enjoyment of the book once I had finished it.

Although there are plenty of indicators in this book that we are in the late 1930s, rather than the halcyon days of the 1920s, in some ways this book was a return to familiar subject matter for Berkeley. It concerns an arsenic poisoning that is originally recorded as a natural death from gastric complication, only for an exhumation and investigation to be undertaken at the request of the deceased's brother. There is no prominent or recurring detective; rather the book is narrated by a local Dorsetshire farmer, Douglas Sewell, who diligently documents the toxic spread of gossip and suspicion through a small community. Those who are familiar with Berkeley's ability to write with drama and excitement — think Malice Aforethought or The Poisoned Chocolates Case — might find the tone of this book surprisingly subdued. But you just have to wait: it all makes sense in the end!

Both because of the cleverness of the story's construction and because the book includes the extra Berkeley material, I think Not To Be Taken is an excellent candidate for Reprint of the Year. If you agree, keep an eye on Kate's blog so that you can vote when the time comes! I'll be along with my second nomination in two weeks. Meanwhile, I hope you feel inspired to try or revisit some Anthony Berkeley, either via the podcast or by picking up one of his books.

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. 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).

Dear listeners,

For the newest instalment in the Green Penguin Book Club series, I got to venture a little into a new sphere: the golden age of Hollywood. The book I look at in this episode, The Rasp by Philip MacDonald, set its British author on a path that resulted in a move to Los Angeles and a successful career in the movie business. It felt right, then, to have as my guest to consider The Rasp the film historian Sergio Angelini, who makes his own podcast about all things film noir and crime fiction.

The Rasp was first published in 1924 and then joined the Penguin series in January 1937 as Penguin 79. It was Philip MacDonald's first solo novel (he had previously written two books with his father under the collective pseudonym "Oliver Fleming"). The Rasp also marks the first appearance of Colonel Anthony Gethryn, an ex-intelligence officer amateur detective about whom Philip would eventually write twelve books. Eleven of these appeared in the 1920s and 1930s and then he published one final Gethryn in 1959, The List of Adrian Messenger.

In 1931, MacDonald moved to Hollywood with his wife, the writer F. Ruth Howard. His fiction had been popular in Britain and he seems like an obvious candidate for membership of the Detection Club, but since he emigrated the year it really got going he was probably not included because of his absence. He continued to be an experimental and interesting crime writer, though, publishing books in the 1930s like X v. Rex, an early example of a serial killer whodunnit, and The Maze, which was his attempt to create a fully fair play epistolary mystery. Meanwhile, he was also writing film scripts for series like those starring Charlie Chan and Mr Moto, and occasionally adapting his own work for the screen too. As you'll hear towards the end of this episode from Sergio, MacDonald's film career is very interesting indeed, spanning quota quickies, science fiction, and films that drew cameos from actors like Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster and Kirk Douglas. I finished our conversation with a long list of films I wanted to watch and I hope you will too.

The Rasp definitely falls into the category of "book I would probably never have read if it weren't for the podcast" but I don't regret it for a second. I found Philip MacDonald's debut to be a fascinating blend of Sherlock Holmes/Dr Thorndyke meticulousness and a more dashing, adventurous style that reminded me of Margery Allingham. Anthony Gethryn's journalism connections and his knowledge of detective fiction put me strongly in mind of past Green Penguin read Trent's Last Case by E.C. Bentley and A.A. Milne's The Red House Mystery, but there's much better momentum in this book, such that you can read it like a real pageturner (I read it in one late night and one early morning!). Sergio said during our interview that several of the big climactic scenes feel very cinematic and I agree — even though MacDonald wasn't yet writing for the screen, he already had a good sense for atmosphere and pace. I certainly finished work on this episode keen to try another of his novels. Perhaps I'll skip to the end next and try The List of Adrian Messenger, since the film adaptation sounds incredible.

This was my last Green Penguin read of 2025, but there will be one more episode coming about the series before the end of the year, before I get stuck into another batch of books with new guests in 2026. There's a really interesting mixture of titles coming up in the sequence, with a couple of truly famous titles (by Dorothy L. Sayers and Arthur Conan Doyle respectively) as well as several that I'd never even heard of before. Also, I think next year is the year that I will finally make it into triple figures in terms of the book's numbering — one of my reads will be Penguin 101! You can browse the full Penguin series and see what's coming up next on this handy list.

Until next time,

Caroline

You can listen to every episode of Shedunnit at shedunnitshow.com or on all major podcast apps. Selected episodes are available on BBC Sounds. There are also transcripts of all episodes on the website. The podcast is now newsletter-only — we're not updating social media — so if you'd like to spread the word about the show consider forwarding this email to a mystery-loving friend with the addition of a personal recommendation. 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).