Transcripts

The Missing Moneylender by W. Stanley Sykes Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 7)

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 one I’m guessing will be new to the majority… Continue reading…

On Gaudy Night Transcript

Caroline: J.R.R. Tolkien couldn’t stand it. George Orwell thought it was a bad detective story. One critic has described its protagonist as “a Yoko Ono figure” who lured her creator away from writing crime fiction. And yet, Gaudy Night is a brilliant and beloved novel, fervently discussed and re-read by those, like me, who love… Continue reading…

Whodunnit Centenary: 1925 Transcript

Caroline: Every January, I think about the Christmas Eve shift in the bookshop where I worked as a teenager. The day itself would be hectic, with a constant flow of people crowding in to do last minute present shopping. Then, after we had closed, the staff stayed for an extra two hours to transform the… Continue reading…

Notes & Queries Transcript

Music Caroline: Welcome to Shedunnit I’m Caroline Crampton. I’ve made a lot of episodes of Shedunnit — this is the 152nd, actually, but whose counting. And almost all of them feature me talking, sharing my research and opinions about the golden age of detective fiction. But I’m very aware at all times that I’m just one… Continue reading…

Father Christmas Transcript

Caroline: Father Christmas, Santa Klaus, Jolly Old Saint Nick, Kris Kringle, Père Noël, Sinterklaas — many different cultures and traditions celebrate the story of a cheerful old man with a flowing white beard and a red outfit, who visits the children of the world in December to distribute gifts. In most of these tales, he is… Continue reading…

Edmund Crispin’s Inside Jokes Transcript

Caroline: We begin in a pub. A pub in Oxford. The year is 1943. A young student, just 22 years old, is having a drink with a theatrical acquaintance, reminiscing over some performances they had collaborated on the previous year. As was often the case with their friendship, the talk turned to books — what they… Continue reading…

The Mysterious Affair At Styles Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 6)

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 big one: The Mysterious Affair At Styles by Agatha… Continue reading…

Vanishing Corpses Transcript

Caroline: If you are a character in a classic murder mystery novel, there are few things worse than stumbling across an unexpected corpse. There you were, going about your business, innocently opening a door to a house or a room or cupboard or making your way down a secluded country lane or path, and suddenly,… Continue reading…

Mysterious Knitting Transcript

Caroline: A hallmark of a really good mystery, for me, is that while I’m reading it I can’t see all of the tricks and devices that are making it function so well. Clues, red herrings, alibis, twists — they just flow easily past in the narrative stream, regardless of how painstakingly and deliberately the author worked… Continue reading…

The Poisoned Chocolates Case Transcript (Green Penguin Book Club 5)

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 The Poisoned Chocolates Case by Anthony Berkeley, which was… Continue reading…

The Red Barn Murder Transcript

Caroline: In the 1930s, using the proceeds from several collaborative book projects, the Detection Club rented its own premises in central London. Their two rooms were upstairs at 31 Gerrard Street in the Soho area of London’s West End, which at the time was a proper red light district, known for its nightclubs of varying… Continue reading…

In the Dentist’s Chair Transcript

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…

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…