Caroline: In the everyday course of modern life, we rarely feel more vulnerable than when we are horizontal, a stranger in a mask looming with a sharp and buzzing implement in hand ready to do violence to our teeth. Of course, we do this willingly, for the sake of good oral health, but it is… Continue reading…
Transcripts
Instrument of Death Transcript
Caroline: Even if you have no interest in music at all, there’s a strong chance that you could hum at least one famous piece of organ music. Pipe organs of all sizes and shapes have been the ceremonial instrument of choice for centuries, accompanying weddings, funerals, coronations, inaugurations, thanksgivings and more. Although of course it… Continue reading…
Mr Fortune, Please Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 4)
Green Penguin Music Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime or green title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is Mr Fortune, Please by H.C. Bailey, and is also… Continue reading…
Christianna Brand’s Impossible Crimes Transcript
Caroline: In the appreciation of detective fiction, there is a tendency to view certain elements of the form as an either/or situation. A writer can either be good at plot or at characters, dialogue or description, clewing or twists. It isn’t normal, or indeed permitted, to have both sides of the equation be present in… Continue reading…
Death at the Speakeasy Transcript
Music Leandra: The date is Friday, 16th January, 1920. At the Metropolitan Club in Washington D.C., Assistant Secretary of the Navy, and future 32nd president of the US, Franklin D Roosevelt spends this winter evening drinking champagne with other members of the Harvard class of 1904. Further north, on a New York City sidewalk, Gold’s… Continue reading…
The Thin Man Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 3)
Green Penguin Music Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett, which was first published in 1934… Continue reading…
Murder in the Library Transcript
Caroline: There are certain places to which stories just seem to cling, whether they are invited to be there or not. We’ve all felt it: the shiver down the back of the spine when entering a room, and the sense that somebody, long dead or imaginary, exited out of the opposite door just before we… Continue reading…
Dylan’s Whodunnits Transcript
Guy: Golden Age detective fiction is known for its accessibility, its readability, its language that is immediately understandable: it doesn’t require you to spend time studying what the language means – you focus instead on trying to solve the murder. But at the same time, during the 1920s, 30s and 40s, modern poetry was often… Continue reading…
The Mystery of A.A. Milne Transcript
Caroline: There was a bit a formula to literary success during the golden age of detective fiction. You wrote one crime novel, it was a hit with readers, and so you wrote lots more. Some of the most popular writers I discuss on the show are also some of the genre’s most prolific practitioners, from… Continue reading…
The Murder on the Links Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 2)
Music Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. And welcome back to Green Penguin Book Club, a series within Shedunnit that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Murder on the Links by Agatha Christie, which was originally published… Continue reading…
Agatha Christie’s Many Houses Transcript
Caroline: Agatha Christie is, without a doubt, best known as the author of dozens of brilliantly crafted whodunnits and the creator of enduring characters like Hercule Poirot and Jane Marple. She is unjustly slightly less famous for her many successful plays, but I still think that The Mousetrap, at least, with its record-breaking almost 72-year… Continue reading…
You Probably Imagined It! Transcript
Caroline: Detective novels are all about doubt and certainty, and moving from one state to the other. A murder is committed and the world is plunged into doubt: who did it, how did they do it, why did they do it, can anyone’s story about it be trusted, and so on. Gradually, over the course… Continue reading…
The Tea Leaf Transcript
Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. A reminder, before we begin, that my new book A Body Made of Glass comes out in April, just a few short weeks away, and that I’m doing an exclusive online launch on 10th April that you’re all invited to — I hope it’s going to be a… Continue reading…
Lucy, Anthony and Anne Transcript
Caroline: The writer I want to talk about today published her first mystery in the 1920s and kept up a blistering at-least-a-novel-a-year pace for five decades, with her final book coming out after her death in the 1970s. She penned multiple detective characters, one of whom was so popular that he appeared in dozens of… Continue reading…
The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club (Green Penguin Book Club 1) Transcript
Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. And welcome to the very first Green Penguin Book Club, a new kind of Shedunnit episode that documents my journey of reading and discussing every crime title from the main Penguin series, in order. Our book today is The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club by Dorothy L. Sayers,… Continue reading…
The Green Penguin Transcript
Caroline: It started, as things so often do in the world of Shedunnit, with Agatha Christie. In the early autumn of 1934, Christie hosted a weekend house party at her childhood home of Ashfield in Torquay, Devon. Afterwards, one of her guests was making his way back to London by train and found himself with… Continue reading…
A Reading Life Transcript
Caroline: Hello, and welcome to Shedunnit, the podcast that unravels the mysteries behind classic detective stories. I’m Caroline Crampton, and today I’m going to be taking you behind the scenes a little bit of the making of this show. Whenever I chat to Shedunnit listeners online or meet you out in the real world, one… Continue reading…
Whodunnit Centenary: 1924 Transcript
Caroline: I talk a lot on this podcast about the golden age of detective fiction — that period between the 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 best work. But in the last few years, there has been… Continue reading…
The Murderless Christmas Mystery Transcript
Caroline: When planning a festive celebration, chaos and commotion is the opposite of what we’re wishing for. An awful lot of preparation and precaution goes into trying to create a peaceful and harmonious break from the usual business of the world. We travel, shop, cook, and prep, all so that we can enjoy a few… Continue reading…
Who Was Robert Eustace? Transcript
Caroline: If you have been reading golden age detective fiction for a while, you will probably have noticed that not all novels from this period have a single author. Indeed, I’ve devoted whole episodes to this in the past — married couples sometimes wrote mysteries together, as did friends and colleagues. Collaboration is part of what… Continue reading…
Death at the Club Transcript
Caroline: How many busy places full of people are there, do you think, where the body of a murder victim could sit propped up in a chair for hours without being noticed? Where the penalty for disturbing the quiet atmosphere is so great that those nearby would rather a corpse sit among the living than… Continue reading…
The Pimlico Poisoning Mystery Transcript
Caroline: So often, when I’m talking about the real life cases that shaped detective fiction in the twentieth century, we’re dealing with stories that end in tragedy for the woman in the dock. I’m thinking of Edith Thompson, who was hanged in 1923 for a murder which her own supposed accomplice swore she had nothing… Continue reading…
Spooky Sleuthing Transcript
Caroline: Detective fiction, especially the fair play style that relies on logical deduction above all else, should have no time at all for ghosts, spirits or magic. What place could supernatural happenings have in a genre defined by its interest in precision and verification? That demands to know exactly who was where doing what, and… Continue reading…
Agatha and Plum Transcript
Caroline: Two writers, both masters of their craft. Very different on the surface, their work has far more in common than many assume. Neither were taken very seriously as “literary” artists, but they nevertheless shaped the popular understanding of both the novel and the short story in the twentieth century. They dominated the interwar period… Continue reading…
Shedunnit Recommends Transcript
Music Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. Over the years that I’ve been making this podcast, I get asked one question more than any other. It’s this: what should I read next? Now, I love answering it, especially because getting to introduce people who love golden age murder mysteries to new authors from that… Continue reading…
Murder-on-Sea Transcript
Caroline: The seaside, especially an English coastal resort, is an iconic location for a classic murder mystery. We only have to browse quickly through some titles from the 1920s and 1930s to see this, with names like The Cornish Coast Murder, The Sea Mystery, Mist on the Saltings, The Cape Cod Mystery and plenty of… Continue reading…
Murder in a Heatwave Transcript
Caroline: Tempers flaring. Simmering tension. Anger boiling over. A lot of the language that we use to describe the bursts of violent emotion that can result in the murder for a murder mystery has to do with hotness and heat. It’s an image so common that I don’t think we even give it much thought.… Continue reading…
Cricket And Crime Transcript
Caroline: There are many things to love about the stories that emerged from the golden age of detective fiction. These mysteries from the interwar years have clever plots that engage with a complicated set of rules, an insistence on fair play, strong recurring characters and a powerful sense of narrative momentum that carries the reader… Continue reading…
Editing Agatha Christie Transcript
Caroline: Time passes and the world changes — we hope that it largely changes for the better, although the evidence for that might not yet satisfy the best detectives. Still, it is to be expected that the language and beliefs that were commonplace and unremarkable a hundred years ago are approached differently now. For anyone… Continue reading…
Meet The Coles Transcript
Caroline: Even as recently as ten years ago, being a fan of golden age detective fiction was a very different experience. Today, we’re living in a thriving culture of reprints, with previously hard-to-find titles being brought back into mainstream accessibility in gorgeous new editions with informative introductions. But it certainly wasn’t always this way: for… Continue reading…
Miss Marple, Spinster Sleuth Transcript
Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. I want to take you back in time today, to November 2018, when the very first episode of Shedunnit was published. My subject for that one was the so-called “Surplus Women” — the women it was believed had been “left over”, as single women, after a vast swathe of… Continue reading…
The Villa Murder Transcript
Content warning: this episode includes mention of suicide. Caroline: Two women appeared at the infamous Court No 1 at the Old Bailey in London, twelve years apart. Both were accused of conspiring with their lovers to murder their husbands. Both became the subject of intense scrutiny and fascination, with the international media picking over every… Continue reading…
The Evolution of Margery Allingham Transcript
Caroline: The lifespan of a sleuth from the golden age of detective fiction is difficult to estimate. These tend to be creatures of extremes. Either they exist for a concentrated period of time before the writer moves on to other characters or literary endeavours, as Dorothy L. Sayers did with Lord Peter Wimsey, or they… Continue reading…
The Murder Mystery Hotline Transcript
Caroline: When I tell people what this podcast is about one of the first questions that I usually get asked is if I am worried about “running out of things to talk about”. And I suppose that is not an unreasonable concern, if you are only aware of the work of Agatha Christie and perhaps… Continue reading…
Death Under Par Transcript
Caroline: One hundred years ago this year, in 1923, Agatha Christie’s novel The Murder on the Links was published. On the surface, this is not an especially momentous anniversary — especially when compared with the others that we will enjoy in future years as the centenaries of her most famous works rolls round. This book was… Continue reading…
The Golden Age Autopsy Transcript
Caroline: Golden age detective fiction has a tendency to skip over the corpse. Important as it is to the story, one of the defining features of crime fiction from that period between the first and second world wars is its lack of description of the consequences of murder. Characters react to the victim’s death, of… Continue reading…
At Home With Agatha Christie Transcript
Clive: Hi there. National Trust Manager: So you’re in very, very good hands. This is Caroline, have you ever listened to the Shedunnit podcast? Music fades up, dialogue continues in background (No, you got to do it. It’s gripping. It’s all about female, or detective writers, but mainly Agatha. So you are here just to… Continue reading…
The Trials of Madeleine Smith Transcript
Caroline: Whether the reader actually gets to read about it on the page or not, detective fiction is usually aimed in one very specific direction: the moment when an accused gets to their feet in a courtroom and waits to hear whether they have been found guilty or not guilty of the crime at issue.… Continue reading…
The Death Of The Country House Transcript
Guy: Burnt to death, blown up, stripped and beaten up, knocked to the ground, dismembered or just abandoned and left to a slow undignified demise. This was Golden Age murder in a world of wealth and privilege. But the murder victims were not people; they were country houses — those historic houses that will be… Continue reading…
A Detective’s Farewell Transcript
Caroline: The recurring detective is a mainstay of the classic mystery novel. A character who readers can get to know book after book, who has certain traits or habits that become familiar. Part of the joy of following a series over the decades is seeing this well-known sleuth put into different situations, whether that’s a… Continue reading…
The Mysterious Dorothy Bowers Transcript
Caroline: Most of us leave echoes as we move through the world. A trail of clues, if you will, that some interested historian or detective would be able to follow in the long distant future. Of course, the more prominent and privileged an individual is, the easier it will be able to reconstruct their life,… Continue reading…
The Advertising Adventures of Dorothy L. Sayers Transcript
Caroline: Being a writer is a peculiar occupation in lots of ways. It falls somewhere between job, pastime, hobby and vocation, and might be one, several or none of those things at the same time. Even within the subset of those who write to earn their living, there are plenty of further divisions. Today, you… Continue reading…
Howdunnit Transcript
Caroline: When we want to describe a work of detective fiction, there are a few different terms that get thrown around. We might say “murder mystery”, or “crime fiction”, or “detective story”, or “thriller”, or perhaps “whodunnit”. These aren’t all the same thing, of course, but they are expressions that get used fairly interchangeably. A… Continue reading…
Clerical Crimes Transcript
Caroline: A golden age murder mystery should work on two levels. There’s the day to day world that the characters inhabit, in which they eat meals, share gossip and, occasionally, kill each other. Lying behind that is a more elemental realm, in which abstract concepts like justice, order, fairness, guilt and revenge find expression. The… Continue reading…
The Shedunnit Centenary Transcript
Music Guy: Welcome to Shedunnit. My name is Guy Cuthbertson. I am Caroline Crampton’s husband. And this is a special episode because it is episode number 100. So out of the walk-in wardrobe in our bedroom, which is also Caroline’s recording studio, there have come 100 episodes of Shedunnit. Wafting out of the house into… Continue reading…
The Kidnap of Elizabeth Canning Transcript
Caroline: Late on the evening of the 29th January 1753, a young maidservant walked back into her family home in east London. She had no shoes or luggage with her, and her hands and feet were filthy, as was the underdress and petticoat she was wearing. A dirty, blood-soaked rag was tied around her head.… Continue reading…
Queering The Golden Age Transcript
Caroline: Murder mysteries are all about certainty. It’s all there in that nickname we use for the form — the whodunnit. That word poses a question — who? — which the detective ultimately answers, usually in a satisfying final chapter that tidies everything away into neat boxes labelled “guilty”, “innocent”, “good” and “bad”. This black and white take… Continue reading…
A Prize Mystery Transcript
Caroline: What you’re about to hear is a live episode of Shedunnit recorded at the 2022 International Agatha Christie Festival in Torquay. Enjoy. Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. Our story today starts on Monday 1st March, 1926. A woman opens a newspaper, and finds herself drawn in by a story published inside. In this… Continue reading…
The Elusive Agatha Christie Transcript
Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit. I’m Caroline Crampton. We all think we know Agatha Christie. How could we not? She’s one of the bestselling authors of all time, an icon of British popular culture, and as you’re listening to this podcast, probably one of your favourite writers. During her lifetime, and in the almost half a… Continue reading…
The Challenge Of Dorothy L. Sayers Transcript
Caroline: Should detective fiction be easy reading? Despite their murderous plots, we often talk of these stories as comforting, even cosy — a pleasant way to relax, switch off the brain, and escape from the real world for a while. And they certainly can fulfil that role, with their familiar structures and satisfying solutions. But not… Continue reading…
