Murder Mystery Research Articles

An Analysis of Parody in Manhattan Murder Mystery Based on Copyright Law

Parody refers to a criticism or comic imitation of the original work or social situation by exaggerating the weakness or seriousness of the original widely-known work to the public. Woody Allen’s Manhattan Murder Mystery is a parody of Hitchcock’s Rear Windowand Vertigo, as well as The Lady from Shanghai directed by Orson Welles. He took the settings of Rear Window and Vertigo and used them as components of the narrative and visually reproduced the Lady from Shanghai by using the footage. The parody of Manhattan Murder Mystery is similar to a direct parody that satires and criticizes the original works. This parody is permitted by the court as fair use under the Copyright Act of South Korea. However, given that each part of the Hitchcock films imitated by Woody Allen is limited to ideas rather than the realm of expression, it will not be judged as an infringement of copyright under the law even if the fair use of the work is not mobilized.

Detecting Post-Nuclear Crisis in Hanna Jameson’s The Last

Abstract Hanna Jameson’s post-apocalyptic detective novel, The Last (2019), addresses contemporary issues that affect us on both a collective and an individual level. The author diagnoses the denial of nuclearism and calls for an awareness of the nuclear age combined with the looming threat of climate change. The novel negotiates alternative strategies for the treatment of crisis brought about by the nuclear attack and borrows many of the thematic and structural elements from twentieth-century nuclear fictions in which the apocalypse is not necessarily regarded in negative terms but as a chance for regeneration. The events of the post-nuclear months in a Swiss hotel are narrated by an American historian whose written account serves several goals. It gives the illusion of delaying crisis, but it also reveals his fears and traumas conjured up by radioactive spectres. There are two different types of narratives at work, the narrative of the crisis and that of the investigation. The narrator-protagonist becomes obsessed with finding the solution to a murder mystery, which in a metaphorical sense is to give a soothing answer to the death of millions. However, this attempt keeps failing, and thus the narrative of the crisis devours all kinds of rational initiatives to resolve chaos. In order to elaborate on the psychological impact of the post-nuclear crisis in subject construction, I do not only examine the character of the amateur detective of the whodunit whose intervention aims to restore order, but I also apply Gabriele Schwab’s concepts of post-nuclear subjectivity and nuclear hauntology.

Evolution of Tools in Undergraduate Electrochemistry Education - The Power of the Spreadsheet

Understanding of at least the rudiments of electrochemistry is a critical component in undergraduate education in chemistry and engineering. Yet, the curriculum often impresses that the most critical component is to differential the anode from the cathode, the oxidation from the reduction.Even in upper level undergraduate and introductory graduate level classes, the students are not provided tools that allow them to pose and to think about electrochemistry questions. Typical electrochemistry curriculum relies on strong algebra skills and being able to remember OIL RIG and Red Cat. This does not capitalize on the contemporary student’s most common skills: facile web searching and spreadsheet manipulation.To provide students with perhaps more effective tools to apprehend electrochemical concepts, spreadsheets and Wolfram widgets replaced the traditional algebraically intense curriculum. Analytical Chemistry I is a lecture course on equilibrium and electrochemistry taught to 50 to 70 upper level undergraduate chemistry and engineering majors at the University of Iowa. Heavy reliance on spreadsheet tools first displaced the intensely algebraic curriculum in Fall 2020.Students undertook development of eight spreadsheets: fractional concentration plots and titrations for acid/bases and redox, potential axes, activity calculations, and voltammetry under Nernstian conditions by steady state rotating disk, potential step to an arbitrary potential, linear sweep, cyclic voltammetry. Systematic treatment of equilibria and explicit finite difference equations underlay the spreadsheets. Students developed each first new spreadsheet directed with written instruction and video. Students then used the spreadsheets to complete homework assignments and two exams. There was no final, but there was a final project where the students used the spreadsheet tools to evaluate a question of their own choosing. The final written report included implementation of their spreadsheets. Projects typically included equilibria and redox species. Final projects covered a range of subjects. I learned the difference in milk and dark chocolate, how catfish find lunch, why ramen noodles cook quickly, how novocaine works, the nuances of polydentate ligands on metals in CO2 reduction, and how hemoglobin carries O2 and CO2. Some wrote murder mysteries or next year’s final. The spreadsheet materials gave the students new skills and tools in understanding electrochemistry.In this presentation, several of the spreadsheets will illustrate how students developed and used the spreadsheet tools to tackle modeling complex electrochemical systems. A cyclic voltammetry spreadsheet is shown for Nernstian kinetics. Figure 1

Québec’s new regional fiction: Louise Penny and Johanne Seymour

Louise Penny’s Still Life (2005) and Johanne Seymour’s Le Cri du cerf (2005) are both murder mysteries set in the Eastern Townships, in south-eastern and south-central Québec. Much of the region borders the United States. To varying degrees, the border makes its presence felt in the novels by Penny and Seymour, along with other landmarks familiar to domestic audiences. This article argues that the apparent situatedness of the texts is, however, challenged by their adherence to the formal conventions of the murder mystery and associated subgenres. In so doing, it claims that Still Life and Le Cri du cerf foster multi-layered readings which, in bringing together the hyper-local and the international, prompt a reconsideration of understandings of regional fiction.

Ghosts, murder and mutation: The portrayal of pandemics in children’s and YA fiction

The coronavirus pandemic has stimulated a number of texts, which are aimed at helping children to cope with situations alien to them. For example, the picture book Staying Home by Sally Nichols and Vivienne Schwarz (2020) deals with the conditions of lockdown and family isolation, whilst Piperpotamus by Annis Watts endeavours to explain COVID-19. This pandemic is not the only such event in history. The Black Death swept across Europe (1347–51) followed by the Spanish flu pandemic (1918–20). Both of these have stimulated historical fiction for older children and Young Adults and have done so by employing differing literary approaches. For instance, Cat Winters’ In the Shadow of Blackbirds (2013) incorporates a ghost story set against the contexts of séances and spirit photographers as the bereaved hope to gain comfort, whilst Charles Todd’s An Unmarked Grave (2012) is a murder mystery. Dystopian science fiction has also been employed to examine the equivalent circumstances of such pandemics. The plague in Gone (2008–14) by Michael Grant follows a nuclear disaster, which has produced a world where only those under fifteen have survived beneath a dome created by a young autistic child at the point of the explosion. Unforeseen forces have erupted resulting in mutation where individuals have supernatural powers taking them into a posthuman state. Their world is later blighted by plague and the children have to deal with remaking their lives and their society without the help of adults. This article will consider the various ways that such texts have approached these world-changing disasters and the common themes, which emerge to give our current generation of children ways of thinking about their present and their future.

Food, Masculinity and Gender-based Violence in Sally Andrew’s Recipes for Love and Murder (2015)

Summary This article offers a reading of Sally Andrew’s debut murder mystery novel, Recipes for Love and Murder: A Tannie Maria Mystery (2015), from the angle of critical food studies. The article explores how the novel’s depiction of food relates to notions of masculinity and power against the backdrop of widespread gender-based violence in South Africa today. I argue that the protagonist and narrator’s reverent, restorative relationship with food represents a gentle yet powerful feminine counternarrative to the violent masculinities of subjugation embodied in Fanie’s dogmatic religious ideology, Dirk’s oppressive military indoctrination, and Cornelius’s cruel hunting practices. Beyond providing mere escapism, this supposedly “popular” novel can therefore be seen as delivering sharp, timely social commentary.

The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, by Anna Kornbluh

Reviewed by: The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space by Anna Kornbluh Lauren M. E. Goodlad (bio) The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space, by Anna Kornbluh; pp. xii + 217. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2019, $82.50, $27.50 paper. Anna Kornbluh's new book extends the author's work on Victorian novels as both a lens on and subject for Marxist theory. The Order of Forms: Realism, Formalism, and Social Space thus joins recent works by Ian Duncan, Elaine Freedgood, and Carolyn Lesjak in illustrating the diverse historical materialisms now flourishing in Victorian studies. While this new breed of materialists adopts varied approaches to Karl Marx's legacy—with Kornbluh standing out for her Slavoj Žižek-like merger with psychoanalysis—what they share is, first, a desire to invigorate materialism's luminous insights into cultural production (thus resisting the anti-historicism that sometimes travels under the sign of postcritique), and, second, an embrace of form and aesthetics that self-styled postcritics also uphold. Hence, while The Order of Forms calls out its allegiance to the resurgent formalism for which Caroline Levine's work is known, there are significant differences. Whereas Kornbluh builds on a longstanding Marxist tradition of theorizing literary form (including Georg Lukács's influential legacy), Levine participates in a project of ontological leveling which, via Bruno Latour's network theory, entered literary study from the social sciences. That explains why The Order of Forms still looks like a work of Victorianist criticism—with chapters on Wuthering Heights (1847), Bleak House (1852–53), Alice's Adventures [End Page 312] in Wonderland (1865), and Jude the Obscure (1895)—while Levine's Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network (2015) is less literary criticism per se than a case for replacing the study of literary form with formalism as a prism for the world at large. It may also explain Kornbluh's choice of Emily Brontë's stormy poetics, Charles Dickens's multiplotted infusions of ghost story and murder mystery, Lewis Carroll's child's-eye surrealism, and Thomas Hardy's naturalistic proto-modernism to exemplify the realist novel. More than twenty years after Harry E. Shaw's Narrating Reality: Austen, Scott, Eliot (1999), readers of this journal will likely recognize Kornbluh's study as part of an ongoing effort to redeem Victorian fiction from the misreadings of prominent New Critics, poststructuralists, and others. Likewise, her debates with Lukács and Fredric Jameson speak to a movement in Victorian studies to embrace these inspired dialecticians while countering their tendencies to misunderstand British literature's formal vigor in the years between Wuthering Heights and Jude the Obscure. As Kornbluh riffs on Jameson's spatial motifs, she reminds us that realist storytelling need not reflexively hew to extant structures or pursue accurate reportage to the detriment of art. This strong case for realist plasticity affirms what Raymond Williams (in a legacy Kornbluh does not explicitly claim) called the nineteenth-century novel's "subjunctive" mode (Writing in Society [Verso, 1983], 161). By far the most original feature of the book is the role accorded to innovations in math. "Mathematical formalism," Kornbluh writes, "powerfully recognizes what forms do," making "relations among abstractions fathomable and reconfigurable" and thus affirming "the madeness" of "laws and states of relationality" (8). When Victorian mathematics radically altered "the basis of human knowledge," it marked a crucial synergy for novels (105). The "broad intellectual milieu of Bleak House," Kornbluh shows, "activates with important advances in formalist mathematics the idea of a limit as that which enables structuration" (84–85). She pairs George Boole's exposition of the topic with a reading of Dickens's work in which limit-building takes the form of "ratifying law" (84). Kornbluh's larger claim, however, is that mathematical formalism presents a unique opportunity to "mightily revise political theorizing" (8). In set theory, advanced calculus, and post-Euclidian geometry, she finds a formalism that places "abstraction above empiricism, consistency before concretude," and the sundering of "signs from things" (105). By triangulating the isomorphic formalisms of math, aesthetics, and politics, Kornbluh urges readers to think less of "present reality" than of what can be "rendered thinkable"—a move toward the antimimetic...

The Mystery of the Dancing Men

In this paper I describe an activity based on a 1903 Sherlock Holmes murder mystery, in which a substitution cipher is used to encrypt secret messages. The story provides a fun and interesting way to talk about frequency analysis, and can be used as a segue into mathematical constructs such as modular arithmetic and computation. The activity is accessible to ages twelve and above, and has been successfully used in mathematics outreach and popularization efforts as well as in general education and mathematics courses.

ClueGen: An Exploration of Procedural Storytelling in the Format of Murder Mystery Games

In this paper I present ClueGen, a murder mystery game that generates its own narrative. I discuss the genre’s suitability for combining gameplay and story using procedural generation techniques, before explaining the implementation and rationale behind ClueGen, utilizing the genre’s common structure as an opportunity to define the scope of the generation requirements. In particular I detail a novel system for telegraphing deceptive characters in procedurally generated games with text-based dialogue, by using audible cues.

Feminism and Subjectivity of Narration in Alias Grace by Margaret Atwood

Alias Grace is a very famous novel written by Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It was first published in 1996 by McClelland and Stewart. A stage version was premiered at Ball State University in 2016. It was written by Jennifer Blackmer. Later on, it was adapted as a miniseries directed by Mary Harron in 2017 which premiered on CBC Television in Canada and streams globally on Netflix. Alias Grace is based on a true-crime murder mystery set in Canada during the 1800s (Victorian Era). Grace reveals how difficult it was to survive in the past being a woman. With, a murder mystery to solve we are also served with subjectivity towards narrator (only one narrator i.e., Grace herself, who is convicted) and femininity (as the convicted person is a female i.e., Grace). The article will look into the various aspects of the subjectivity of narration and feminism in detail.

Ruritania by the Sea

Seaside resorts frequently served as locations of murder mysteries in Golden Age detection fiction, since these destinations could provide a diverse clientele, confined to manageably small groups essential to classic detective stories. The fictional seaside town of Wilvercombe serves as the location of Dorothy L. Sayers’s detective novel Have His Carcase (1932), in which Lord Peter Wimsey and detective-story writer Harriet Vane investigate the case of a man found dead on the beach. The location of the body turns out to be a source of confusion: while the detectives expect a traditional locked-room mystery to unfold (albeit in an open-air setting), the death cannot be resolved until the detectives realize that they are working in the wrong genre: instead of a clue-puzzle mystery, they are trapped in a Ruritanian romance, with outlandish tales of intrigue, unlikely members of the Russian aristocracy, and exaggerated and oppressive performances of heterosexual romance. (BH)

Citizen Ken: Branagh, Shakespeare, and the movies

As Kenneth Branagh turns sixty, he finds himself honoured by the English theatrical world as the restored heir to its tradition of the actor-manager, having created a theatre and film career unlike any other. He is an actor-manager-film director who builds on the tradition he inherits from Laurence Olivier, Orson Welles, and Franco Zeffirelli even as he revises it. This overview of his career reveals that he can do small and tidy, but his cinematic imagination first feasts on Hollywood movie genres – noir thrillers, murder mysteries, Disney classics, Superhero fantasies, spy films, musicals, and bio-pics – then feeds his lasting legacy to Shakespeare on film.

Browning’s Dracula and the development of the classical screen vampire: genre, form, and figure

ABSTRACT Dracula (Browning, 1931) introduces the general parameters of the classical screen vampire narrative of the 1930s and 1940s; a drawing-room murder mystery. In this investigative ‘drama of proof’, the murderer, already known to the audience, is a vampire who has inserted himself between a young engaged couple, seeking the woman for himself. The classical vampire protagonist is an unreflecting figure driven by a craving for both the young woman of his desire and for human blood as sustenance. The inevitable death of the vampire represents a triumph of ‘life’, marriage understood as the basic unit by which community reproduces itself, playing out a Freudian (and romantic) opposition between the erotic instinct and the aggressive instinct or death drive. The classical screen vampire narrative does not remain static. Two key developments in the classical period are considered: non-vampires masquerading as vampires and the vampire problematizing their own relationship with vampirism.

The “Frozen, Darkened Soul” Rises into Space: Travels in Siberia and the Plight of Life on Earth

Starting in 2006, the author joined and then led field expeditions to central Siberia in search of answers to the greatest murder mystery in the history of Earth: the end-Permian extinction. The rocks that yielded answers were the same kinds of volcanic lavas that can be seen at night on the Moon, or in photos of Mars or Venus. The unyielding Russian engineering that owns the longevity record on the surface of Venus is now used to launch cosmonauts and astronauts from the other end of those same Siberian steppes. Not the data—not the years nor the numbers nor the temperature—but art, as Solzhenitsyn explained, is the only way to reach the heart and soften our pace as we move into another age of space exploration, this time as humans, the author hopes, and not as nations.

Murder Mystery With Fields of Psychology. Conversation With Ethan McMahan, PhD

There’s been a murder! Thank goodness Dr. Ethan McMahan is here to help us “crack the case” while we learn a little about five fields of psychology: clinical, educational, school, cognitive, and quantitative.

Escape from Adjunct Hell

Escape from Adjunct Hell Jennifer Wilson (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Illustration by Anna Sorokina [End Page 6] A happily lapsed academic, I try to avoid any content that might bring back memories. This instinct for self-preservation has generally served me and my inbox well; recently, I finally unsubscribed from a listserv about Slavic grammar that has, over the years, devolved into a cesspool of transphobia and people “just asking questions.”™ However, complete abstinence—which, coincidentally, was the subject of my dissertation—nearly prevented me from reading one of the sharpest pieces of fiction released last year, The Life of the Mind, by Christine Smallwood. The novel, along with Lynn Steger Strong’s piercingly honest Want, has been credited with cementing the literary status of adjunct fiction, a relatively new genre that is billed as a kind of remix of the traditional campus novel, with less ivy and more medical debt. Earlier entries included Rion Amilcar Scott’s experimental novella “Special Topics in Loneliness Studies” (2019), the story of a homeless adjunct who burns his diplomas to stay warm, and the self-published Adjunct (2017), by Geoff Cebula, a murder mystery about a lecturer who wonders just how far another precarious PhD might be willing to go to eliminate the competition. With The Life of the Mind and Want, adjunct fiction feels like it has finally arrived, even if its subjects have not. Both novels follow female protagonists whose PhDs in literature have failed to translate into secure, tenure-track positions. They are instead relegated to low-pay, benefits-ineligible, short-term contracts that have little to no chance of becoming permanent. In short, they are like the vast majority of people with their level of education who teach at colleges and universities in the United States. As much as we might be primed to read these books in terms of their depiction of academic contingency, Smallwood’s protagonist, Dorothy, and Strong’s unnamed narrator concern themselves with questions that will feel familiar even to people who have never written a dissertation. Unlike many of the viral personal essays that have been penned by PhDs unable to secure permanent jobs in academia, the novels never present what happens to these women as uniquely tragic, or as some violation of an unwritten rule that this is not supposed to happen to people who read The Arcades Project. The Life of the Mind is as much about climate change as it is about the adjunct crisis; Dorothy is ever conscious that global warming has rendered everyone on earth a member of the precariat. The narrator of Want is saddled with medical debt and is married to a freelance carpenter who is struggling to get back into the kind of stable, salaried work that could help lift his family out of bankruptcy. In other words, these novels acknowledge the broader forms of contingency that exist beyond the walls of the university, and in doing so open up the question of why these walls—and the various [End Page 7] measures that distance academics from other workers—exist in the first place. As Dorothy throws her students’ papers in the trash, has poetry verses blown into her vagina by someone on the tenure track, and finds endless material from her own professional life for the class she’s teaching on “Writing Apocalypse,” we get a sobering picture of what finding refuge in the life of the mind actually means. More importantly, though, we are asked to question—or, to borrow a word from academia, problematize—the very concept of refuge itself. If academia once provided a life raft that could stave off the destructive forces of the material world, precarity now has Smallwood and Strong’s overeducated heroines realizing that to float, in this economy, means to watch others drown. When we first meet Dorothy, a thirty-something adjunct, she is on her sixth day of bleeding following a miscarriage. Knowing when the bleeding began is not the same as knowing when the pregnancy failed, a fact Dorothy finds both frustrating and predictable. “How typical of her,” Smallwood writes, “not to know something was over when it was over. And...

A writer, her doppelgänger, a baby, and a chorus of ghosts all try to get their story straight

A writer, her doppelgänger, a baby, and a chorus of ghosts all try to get their story straight Brendan Kiernan Diane Brown. Every Now and Then I Have Another Child. Dunedin: Otago University Press, 2020. 163 pp. US $19.00. ISBN: 9781988592404 Diane Brown's Every Now and Then I Have Another Child evades sentimentalities or poetic pieties. It is far more interested in jokes, in writing itself, in pointing out the absurd self-regard of the writer's cosmos. [End Page 301] Babies tell stories; pictures on the walls give poems to the readers. A doppelgänger bullies her way into a creative writing teacher's house. The heavy stuff will blow you away; the mundane will make you laugh (when is the last time you laughed at poetry?). The rest will bore you. Unlike a romantic poet, Brown does not hold her verse to the titanic obligations of transforming everyday life. Sometimes, morbid jokes and self-effacement suffice in keeping us invested in her world. We play along—we are game to play her games. While a capable craftsperson with poetic verse, Brown invents slippery plot conceits and alter egos to entrap the anguish under all the artifice. Grief, oblivion, and the longing for redemptive love: these are the preoccupations of Brown's impressive, idiosyncratic, and uneven collection. As Brown's collection goes on, you feel more and more that Brown resents the vulnerability and direct confession that poetry obliges. Conventional poetry is like conventional motherhood in her work—noxious, suffocating, tragic, impossible in its demands of this particular poet. In "What's Expected," Brown literally tells us, "I'm not that kind of writer" (57). Indeed, as the work goes on, you see more clearly that the bewildering and inventive world of Diane Brown's poems has been structured around Brown trying to invent a new form of poetry to suit her persona. Her character Joanna Lodge wants to be the unbounded writer who is inured to the cliches and superfluities of the contemporary poet's life, yet she still stews and broods in the tragedies that haunt her. The more I read, the more I see a writer trying to assert herself precisely as she constructs herself. A reader needing to assert him- or herself turns into a drag fast, but Brown's self-deconstructions and self-destructions still feel more fun than poetry should be. You may find that after eighty pages of playful prose poems, you have had plenty of uncommonly good poetry. But then you still have Brown's eighty-page dessert coming your way. This is also by far the least appetizing course Brown offers, replete with a messy mélange of halfhearted murder mystery plots. Once thoughtful, disturbing, and wry meditations on oblivion and loss now have been overwritten by cop interrogations that Brown's gotten tired of writing even as she is writing it. Brown finishes "How We Give Ourselves Away" with an insight that then burdens the work as an extended premise: "Have I stepped over the line/into reality, a murder mystery?" (78). All the moving poems seem to go into hibernation in the latter sections of Brown's collection until her excellent and crafted poem "Yes" near the end of the volume. The Baby poems—narrated by a Baby that Brown has invented—early in the work stun with their macabre beauty. But later in the collection, in "The Manifesto," the Baby narrator stops crying out for love, instead engaging in meta-commentary on other poems in the collection: "The Boy on the Wall wasn't a good fit/for her or this story. The reader/might think it a step too far" (118). Why bring me into this? Brown confirms that she has worn out her welcome with us readers. The serpentine world that she has created in the first part of her work folds into gummy neurosis of the worst kind, an author outsourcing critique to her readers. None of the playful self-regard feels fun anymore. Still, one should take Brown seriously as an idiosyncratic talent. If this collection lost two-thirds of its poems, with a judicious editor biopsying all the murder...

Film Chronicle

Film Chronicle Jefferson Hunter (bio) In a Lonely Place, directed by Nicholas Ray (streaming on Amazon) Sunset Blvd, directed by Billy Wilder (streaming on Amazon) White Hunter, Black Heart, directed by Clint Eastwood (streaming on Amazon and YouTube) Barton Fink, directed by Joel Coen (streaming on Apple TV and Amazon) Trumbo, directed by Peter Askin (streaming on Kanopy) Dreams on Spec, directed by Daniel Snyder (streaming on Amazon) Adaptation, directed by Spike Jonze (streaming on Apple TV and Amazon) Mank, directed by David Fincher (streaming on Netflix). In the Hollywood of old a well-defined hierarchy of power and prestige extended from studio moguls at the top down through unit managers and producers to directors and established stars, then to ordinary actors, and below them, finally, to screenwriters, the necessary but otherwise unimportant wordsmiths who crafted lines for stars to speak and studio moguls to sneer at. From the 1930s through the 1940s a lot of wordsmiths, among them highly regarded reporters, playwrights, and novelists like Ben Hecht, Charles MacArthur, Herman Mankiewicz, William Faulkner, Raymond Chandler, Nathanael West, and Scott Fitzgerald, headed west to make easy money by writing scripts, only to find that film-industry money came with a price, namely the incomprehension, disdain, or outright hostility of picture people. In the last sad year of his life Fitzgerald distilled his unhappy scenario-writing experiences into a dozen or so stories about an old alcoholic hack, Pat Hobby, still trying to scratch out a living in Hollywood. One of the stories, “Mightier Than the Sword,” sees Pat and another scrivener yelled at by a big-shot producer: Goddam writers! . . . What do we pay you for? Millions—and you write a lot of tripe I can’t photograph and get sore if we don’t read your lousy stuff! How can a man make pictures when they give me two bastards like you and Hudson. How? How do you think—you old whiskey bum? The producer promptly throws them out of his office and off the lot. So much for the might of the pen as compared with that of the sword. Interestingly, old Hollywood liked to depict fictional screenwriters in movies, low-positioned as they might be in the studio pecking order. After all, comedy or melodrama might be wrung out of their eccentricities [End Page 459] or disillusionments. Unquestionably, melodrama is wrung out of the experiences of the fictional screenwriter Duke Steele in Nicholas Ray’s In a Lonely Place, from 1950. Humphrey Bogart plays Steele in what is generally regarded as one of the finest performances of his career; Gloria Grahame is no less impressive as Laurel Gray, the young actress-wannabe who falls hard for him. There are really three storylines here. First and least interesting, a murder mystery: did Steele seduce and then strangle a naïve hat-check girl? Certain clues point in his direction, but it is scarcely giving anything away to reveal that he is innocent, and finally proven innocent by a deus-ex-machina confession from someone else. Second comes the story of Steele’s uncontrollable anger. His outbursts may have to do with his drinking or being suspected by the police, but fundamentally they derive from built-up resentment at the whole Hollywood scene. Even when not enraged, Steele can be controlling, at times boorish, so that one sometimes wonders how Laurel can be drawn to him. Eventually she becomes terrified by him, his sudden fury at an innocent beach party, his lashings-out at another driver on the highway (could this be the first instance of road rage ever screened?). The third and by far most compelling story focuses on Steele as screenwriter. We watch him lost in concentrated thought, scribbling away, piling up pages of dialogue for Laurel to type. Many movies involving screenwriters feature getting-it-down-on-paper processes like this, often via montage sequences. In a Lonely Place, unusually, shows the mental work which precedes getting it down on paper. A genuinely startling moment from early in the film presents Duke imagining how the murder of the hat-check girl might have taken place, detail by lurid detail (note the melodramatic light Ray casts on...

An Atmosphere of Malaise: Failures of Detection in Friedrich Glauser's Matto regiert (1936)

Friedrich Glauser's Motto regiert (1936) tells a story with parabolic qualities: Sergeant Studer must investigate a murder that has taken place in a Swiss psychiatric clinic. The social and political issues that are roiling Europe in the years leading up to World War Two find condensed expression in this microcosm. The essay focuses on the literary devices the text employs to create atmosphere and asks how atmosphere functions both to support the construction of a classic murder mystery, while also subverting some of its generic conventions. The figure of the detective is of central importance, as he is portrayed as uncommonly sensitive to the atmosphere of his surroundings. At the same time, however, the clinic's atmosphere ultimately proves to some extent unreadable. Hence, Glauser's text can be viewed as a precursor of the what in post‐war literature will come to be known as anti‐detective fiction.

The Grimrose Girls by Laura Pohl

Reviewed by: The Grimrose Girls by Laura Pohl April Spisak Pohl, Laura The Grimrose Girls. Sourcebooks Fire, 2021 [400p] Paper ed. ISBN 9781728228877 $10.99 E-book ed. ISBN 9781728228884 $9.99/US Reviewed from digital galleys R Gr. 8-10 An elite Swiss boarding school is the backdrop for this murder mystery laced with fairy tales. Ella, Yuki, and Rory are still reeling from the death of their other best friend, even more so because it is unclear whether it was a suicide, accident, or a murder. Enter Nani, a new student who gets thrown into their group because she [End Page 69] literally ends up with the dead girl’s bed, and this diverse, plucky foursome had better be quick about solving what is happening with an ominous fairy tale collection that has real girls’ names written as marginalia before more deaths occur. The isolation of the school and dark fairy tale references make for an unsettling backdrop, and while girls the girls themselves exist more as representations (the good girl, the new girl, the rich girl) rather than memorable protagonists, there’s certainly plenty of potential in future volumes for them to gain more depth and nuance. A chilling climax will keep readers engaged and anticipating the next volume. Copyright © 2021 The Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois