Fair and Foul Play

Hello everybody; welcome back to the blog. You’re just in time for me to reveal a brand-new feature, something that (I hope) will begin to make a regular appearance on this blog: a brand-new podcast entitled Fair and Foul Play.

What is Fair and Foul Play? The way I envision it, it’ll be a series of one-on-one conversations with other bloggers, mystery fans, and anyone else I can lure to the programme. These conversations will revolve around a specific topic within the mystery genre. For example, today I’m joined by Sergio, the blogger at the excellent site Tipping My Fedora. As it happens, both Sergio and I are big fans of audio productions, although we tend to specialize in different types of productions. The idea suddenly came: why not get together and talk about mysteries in audio? Audiobooks, radio plays, adaptations, dramatizations, original stuff: the complete package.

And so you’re looking at the result below, with Part 1 of our conversation forming episode 1a of Fair and Foul Play. Part 2 won’t be uploaded for a while, for the excellent reason that (a) I haven’t edited it yet and (b) the result would be over an hour long and that would be overwhelming all at once.

Please let us know what you think of the podcast, and if you’ve any interest in appearing in the future, feel free to let me know!

The Case of the Catholic Critic

Strictly speaking, I made my first professional sale when I was sixteen; a short ghost story so abominably written that I now feel that the editor who bought it must have had a sadistic grudge against his readers.

— Anthony Boucher, Exeunt Murderers

William Anthony Parker White (alias Anthony Boucher)

Today I will attempt a first here on the blog. Thus far, I’ve mainly reviewed mystery novels, with the occasional foray into the short story collection. I’ve reviewed one film. All of these have been works of fiction, but today, I will write about some non-fiction for a change. But before I do, allow me to give a note of introduction.

Back in my pre-Agatha-Christie days (Heavens! Was there such a time?), I had finished reading the Sherlock Holmes stories and was unsure where to go to next. There were plenty of juvenile mysteries in the library, and I’d read them, but something just seemed to be missing, and soon enough I gave up on the adventures of the Hardy Boys or their female counterpart, Nancy Drew.