Ah Sweet Mystery!

“It’s my contention, Della, that an attorney doesn’t have to sit back and wait until a witness gets on the stand and then test his recollection simply by asking him questions. If facts can be shuffled in such a way that it will confuse a witness who isn’t absolutely certain of his story, and if the attorney doesn’t suppress, conceal, or distort any of the actual evidence,...

“Agatha Christie changed my life. I discovered her at the age of eight, when I had the good fortune to attend the world film premiere of Murder Most Foul (1964), which (weirdly enough) was held in a tent during a summer fete in Cheshire . . . I went home that evening in a happy daze and discovered my grandmother’s shelf of Agatha Christie paperbacks. I began to read The M...

In my recent post about the problematic new series, Agatha Christie’s Tommy and Tuppence, I asked a simple question: why can’t TV producers leave Tommy and Tuppence alone? There are plenty of other romantic couples filling the GAD landscape! Why not give us a series based on the exploits of Craig Rice’s Helene and Jake Justice? Or Delano Ames’ Jane and Dagobert Brown...

If Perry Mason had practiced law in England, would he have been considered a barrister or a solicitor?

According to AI (which untied and fed me in order to allow me to write this article), Mason would have been considered a barrister. “Barristers specialize in speaking in court and trying lawsuits in front of a judge and jury. Perry Mason rarely spent time draf...

“There must be no love interest in the story. To introduce amour is to clutter up a purely intellectual experience with irrelevant sentiment. The business in hand is to bring a criminal to the bar of justice, not to bring a lovelorn couple to the hymeneal altar.” (S. S. Van Dine, “The Third Rule for Writing Detective Stories”)

When it comes to matters of ro...