Explore the crime fiction genre with us!
Jack Whicher, left, was one of Scotland Yard’s first detectives. His investigation of the Road Hill House child murder in 1860 inspired writers such as Charles Dickens. Above right, Dickens’s Inspector Bucket.
Did you know that a real murder in Victorian England inspired the crime fiction genre? What can we learn from that “cosy crime” formula practised by Agatha Christie and her contemporaries during the “Golden Age” of detective fiction? How do hard-boiled detectives like Sam Spade fit in?
Join us for a five-part murder mystery reading series led by writer and professor emerita Janice Kulyk Keefer on Zoom on five Tuesday evenings from 7:00 to 8:15 pm starting April 11.
Janice, a specialist in modernist literature, has immersed herself in the ocean of murder mysteries and will introduce us to some key writers and themes in this popular genre.
Each session will begin with an introductory talk by Janice, followed by a discussion.
Check out the subject list below, with suggested readings for each talk. Janice will end with a session about some of her favourites, perfect for summer reading!
Suggested optional donation: $25 for the series. Sign up for the first session, and we will send you links to all five sessions. If you have missed the first talk, sign up for any others you would like to attend. Suggested donation: $5 each. Register on Eventbrite.
Topics and Suggested Readings:
April 11: A True Crime’s Impact: Victorian England in 1860 was horrified and riveted by the Road Hill murder: A child brutally killed and stuffed down a privy, a country house, family secrets and one of Scotland Yard’s first detectives. Our crime fiction series starts with Kate Summerscale’s The Suspicions of Mr Whicher, a masterful account of this crime, its investigation and its influence on the newly emerging murder mystery genre.
May 2: Golden Age or “Snobbery with Violence”? What are the strengths and failings of fiction written during the ‘Golden Age’ of murder mysteries (1918-1939)? ‘The country house mystery’, ‘cosy crime’, the ‘whodunnit’—these common terms for the murder mystery point to the escapist nature of some of our favourite reading, and have given rise to the condemnation of the genre as a “guilty pleasure” at best and as, at worst, a waste of time, brains and heart. We’ll look at works like Bentley’s Trent’s Last Case, Christie’s Murder at the Vicarage, Allingham’s The Beckoning Lady, Edmund Crispins’ Holy Disorders, and John Dickson Carr’s The Hollow Man.
May 23: Queens of Crime: Agatha Christie (The ABC Murders, Sleeping Murder); Dorothy Sayers (The Nine Tailors, The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club); Margery Allingham (The Beckoning Lady, The Tiger in the Smoke) and Ngaio Marsh (Vintage Murder, Artists in Crime). The best of these, though flawed by their immersion in the prejudices of their time, possess a skill, complexity and imaginative range that make them worth re-reading.
June 13: Noir, Hard-Boiled and Fictive Grit: The antithesis of the cosy or country-house murder mystery, the work of Americans Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler set the bar for 1930s noir. We will look at two representative classics—The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Big Sleep (1939)—before going on to examine how their work and its view of the human condition have shaped subsequent generations of writers, among them the American Ross MacDonald (aka Kenneth Millar), Scotsman Ian Rankin and Irishman Benjamin Black. We will also consider the work of Georges Simenon whose Inspector Maigret may be said to be the Soul of French Noir.
June 27: My Tendentious Top 10 Murder Mysteries (perfect summer reading!): In no particular order: Reginald Hill’s On Beulah Hill; Martha Grimes’s The Anodyne Necklace; Sjowall and Wahloo’s The Terrorists; Ruth Rendell’s The Monster in the Box; P.D. James’s Devices and Desires; Fred Vargas’s The Ghost Riders of Ordebec (L’Armée Furieuse); Hilda Lawrence’s The Pavilion; Benjamin Black’s Elegy for April; Qiu-Xiaolong’s Death of a Red Heroine; Edith Pargeter’s Most Loving Mere Folly.
Our First Session: The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher
Here’s what The New York Times reviewer said about this fascinating book by Kate Summerscale:
“Summerscale accomplishes what modern genre authors hardly bother to do anymore, which is to use a murder investigation as a portal to a wider world. When put in historical context, every aspect of this case tells us something about mid-Victorian society, from prevailing attitudes about women (“prone to insanity”), children (“full of savage whims and impulses,” according to one 19th-century physician) and servants (“outsiders who might be spies or seducers”) to the morality-based intellectual constructs that codified such views of human behavior.
“But the spirit of scientific enlightenment was also flourishing in this industrialized period. People were already infatuated with police detectives (“a secular substitute for a prophet or a priest”) and morbidly curious about the advances in criminal psychology and forensic procedures. For a nation of armchair detectives, the prolonged and very public Scotland Yard investigation was like a teaching manual in the new forensic sciences. As Summerscale puts it, ‘The Road Hill case turned everyone detective.’ “