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Blog postThe Best Children’s Mysteries
My interest in mysteries started at a very young age. I have discussed my love of Mathnet earlier on this blog. But mysteries written for children are a very special subgenre. In children’s mysteries, the author usually can’t include any serious violence, especially murder. Not only that, but a children’s mystery often has to feature a child protagonist. If you have a child as a -
Blog postWhat is the WORST Mystery Book Cover You’ve Ever Seen?
It’s been said that you can’t judge a book by its cover, and there’s a lot of truth to that. Unfortunately, a bad cover can put a potential reader off, and in my experience, one doesn’t want to look at a cover that just looks disgusting. I’m not a fan of some of the midcentury covers that are particularly lurid, featuring corpses in various states of undress and clear indications of violence.&nbs -
Blog postStory Profile– The Prisoners of Cawdor College
Belanger Books’ two-part anthology Sherlock Holmes: Adventures Through the Multiverse has an interesting premise. These are stories where something is a little different from the Sherlock Holmes Universe we’re used to reading. Maybe Watson is the detective and Holmes is the doctor. Maybe they live in America instead of London. Maybe Holmes’ ethnic background is diffe -
Blog postCongratulations to Lee Child and Laurie R. King!
A few months ago I announced that my book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter had been nominated for an Agatha Award for Best Non-Fiction! This past weekend, the Agatha winners were announced, and the winners of the category were Lee Child and Laurie R. King for How to Write a Mystery: A Handbook from Mystery Writers of America. Congratulations to them, and congratu -
Blog postStory Profile– Think of the Children
When Belanger Books announced their anthology The Nefarious Villains of Sherlock Holmes, featuring stories revolving around various bad guys Holmes comes across over the course of the Canon. I immediately knew that I wanted to write about a character who is referenced in The Sign of the Four: a villain who preys on little children. The killer is only mentioned in an intriguing line of dialogue, and -
Blog postAgatha Christie’s Young Adventurers
When the layperson with only a cursory knowledge of Agatha Christie’s books, they think of older detectives. Miss Marple is a senior citizen, and Poirot is a mature man as well. However, a significant portion of Christie’s books– around twenty percent– feature younger detectives, just starting out in their adult lives and seeking adventure and finding love.
Agatha Christie -
Blog postWhy Can’t Perry Mason Be Adapted Faithfully?
In my previous post, I discussed how the characters in the Perry Mason series changed over the course of the series and also how the very adaptations changed them. But it’s not just the characters created by Erle Stanley Gardner that were altered. The plots and narratives have been changed dramatically, too.
When Perry Mason was made into a ser -
Blog postThe Changing Characters of the Perry Mason Cast
Not long ago, I wrote a blog post on Ellery Queen, noting that characterizations and backstories of the famous sleuth changed so much over the course of four decades, that it was likely that it wasn’t just one man whose exploits were being told, but multiple men who were solving crimes and writing books all under the same name.
In a comparable vein, I’d like to take a look at Erle Stanley Gardner’s -
Blog postMy Guest Post on John C. Wright’s Blog Becomes A Series
Last week, I announced that an article of mine published on NerdHQ was reprinted on John C. Wright’s blog. Covering issues of science fiction, critical disagreement, and fan activism, “No Award: Part One: What’s Happening With the Hugos?” was republished last week. This week, the next two entries in the series, “No Award: Part Two: A Short History of the Sad Puppies at the Hugos”& -
Blog postMy Guest Post on John C. Wright’s Blog
John C. Wright is the author of the award-winning science fiction of author of books like the Golden Age series, the Eschaton Sequence, and the Chronicles of Chaos series, as well as works of social and literary criticism, like From Barsoom to Malacandra: Musings on Things Past and Things to Come, and my personal favorite, The Last Straw: A Critical Autopsy of a Galaxy Far, Far Away.
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Blog postThe WWII Sherlock Holmes Movies of Basil Rathbone in Germany
Ever since my junior year of college, I’ve had an intense interest in how the 1940’s Basil Rathbone and Nigel Bruce-starring Sherlock Holmes movies reflect the times. Transported from the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries to the then contemporary 1940’s, Holmes and Watson not only solved crimes, but they thwarted the evil plans of the Nazis as well.
As I st -
Blog postStory Profile: “The Bitter Gravestones”
In The MX Book of New Sherlock Holmes Stories, Part XXX: More Christmas Adventures (1897-1928), edited by David Marcum (November 2021), the Sherlock Holmes pastiches are all Christmas-themed. One of my stories, “The Bitter Gravestones” is included.
The story was inspired by a thought I had. What would happen if someone was so angry at a deceased person that he woul -
Blog post"Father Brown Rides Again” Opens!
Once again, Morning Star Productions is putting on an interactive theater production: Father Brown Rides Again. It will run this weekend and next, and it features six “colorful” suspects reminiscent of a famous mystery board game. A bejeweled treasure has been stolen, and now you can help the good Father track down the thief!
From the Morning Star Productions w -
Blog postMystery Criticism and “Liquid Filth”
I review a lot of mysteries, and at times I wonder if my attitude’s a bit too much like Donald Pleasance’s character Adrian Carsini from the Columbo episode “Any Old Port in a Storm.” In that episode, Carsini famously throws a fit when he tastes a bottle of port that has been allowed to overheat, causing it to develop an inferior flavor that only the most discerning palates can detect. Others can’t taste -
Blog postFather Brown Rides Again!
Are you a fan of G.K. Chesterton’s detective Father Brown and interactive mysteries? Do you live in the Milwaukee area? May I suggest Morning Star Production’s Father Brown Rides Again, a live theater experience where the good Father investigates a case with six colorful suspects.
The show is on the weekends of February 25th and March 4th. There are several shows -
Blog postREVIEW: Murderville
In the last three years, there really haven’t very many new comedies that I’ve enjoyed. There are one or two exceptions, but this week, I watched a comedy series that had me laughing all the way through. That series is Netflix’s Murderville. Based on a British series, the show is a quasi-improvisational comedy. The storyline features a homicide detective, Terry Seattle (who has never visited the cit -
Blog postMURDER MOST GROTESQUE Has Been Nominated for an Agatha Award!
I am grateful to share that my book MURDER MOST GROTESQUE: THE COMEDIC CRIME FICTION OF JOYCE PORTER has been nominated for an Agatha Award from Malice Domestic in the best Nonfiction category! I'd like to thank everybody who nominated me, and I also want to congratulate all of the other nominees, especially the other Level Best authors and the other Nonfiction nominees: Jan Brogan, Julie Kavanaugh, Lee Child, and -
Blog postSherlock Holmes: Adventures Through The Multiverse
Over the last few years, I’ve published several stories in anthologies by Belanger Books, and their upcoming project is a bit different. It’s called Sherlock Holmes: Adventures Through The Multiverse, and it features a world that’s not the same as the one readers generally know.
Belanger Books describes the two-volume set, saying:
Imagine Sherl -
Blog postWhat Makes A Story “Stick” With You?
I read a lot, and I have an excellent memory. The books I tend to remember best are the ones I enjoy. Yet there are a lot of mediocre books out there, and in some ways, there are some books that fail in a different way from the truly awful. The worst books haunt my memory with how terrible they are. The truly forgettable books are utter nonentities in my mind.
How bland d -
Blog postThe Perils of Bingewatching
In my last post, I talked about the difference between watching TV and movies alone vs. with watching with other people. Truly, community plays a role in how we respond to entertainment. Now, I want to move on to another issue: bingewatching. Bingewatching is the practice of watching seasons of television series extremely quickly, essentially watching one episode after another and completing a season in a very s -
Blog postThe Viewing Experience
Happy New Year, everybody!
Today I want to bring up an issue that I’ve been pondering for a while now: do we respond to watching television shows and movies differently when we watch them alone, as opposed to when we watch them with others?
I first started thinking about this phenomenon when talking with friends, and they discussed how they didn’t find The Simpsons as funny as they used to in the p -
Blog postMerry Christmas!
Merry Christmas to everybody! If anybody has any suggestions for content they’d like to see on this blog in the future, please let me know in the comments. Thanks!
–Chris Chan
Chris Chan’s first novel, Sherlock’s Secretary, was released on November 3rd. His book Murder Most Grotesque: The Comedic Crime Fiction of Joyce Porter -
Blog postA Theory on Ellery Queen
Ellery Queen is one of the most prominent and influential figures in 20th-century American crime fiction. The creation of a pair of cousins, Frederic Dannay and Manfred Lee, who decided it would be a clever bit of publicity to give their detective their own pen name, Ellery Queen emerged on the scene in 1929’s The Roman Hat Mystery. In the early books, he’s a rather snobbish young man, who stresses logic and acts as if h -
Blog postStory Profile – “The Outline of Mystery”
“The Outline of Mystery” is another novella I wrote for Belanger Books, for their anthology Sherlock Holmes: Further Adventures in the Realms of H.G. Wells, Volume One, edited by Derrick Belanger and C. Edward Davis. This is a collection of stories where Sherlock Holmes is inserted into tales created by H.G. Wells. My own story is a bit different, being based on Wells’ real life.
Well -
Blog postCritical Overview: Ms. Ma, Nemesis (Part Three)
In the third (and for now final, though I may revisit this production later) installment of my analysis of this South Korean adaptation of Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple novels. This post will look at the characterization of the adaptations.
The central character, Ms. Ma, is only loosely based on Miss Marple. She’s at least a generation younger than Chr
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