“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) wa…

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 plent…

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), Ma…

“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 …

For a moment in 1935, it looked like there could have been, not twelve, but thirteen Miss Marple novels. If you pull out your volume of Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks and turn to the …

Two years ago, as the 2024 Agatha Christie Festival came to a close, a trio of California lads who had bonded over their passion for the Queen of Crime vowed then and there that they would meet up …

“‘The typist is here, Mr. Mason.’ Mason nodded and stretched back in his chair. Della started to pick up his brief, but hesitated as Gertie came in and carefully closed the door behind her.“‘W…

We’re talking about some of the great actors who excelled in playing country folks and who appeared all over the TV screen in Western dramas and comedies. Last time, we examined Parley Baer, Ben Co…

Ask me if I’m a town mouse or a country mouse, and there’s no doubt about it: I’ve always favored the city. I’d rather stay in an Air B&B in the heart of London or a nice hotel in New York City…

hiatus (n.) – a temporary break, pause or interruption in an ongoing activity, work or series Hello, my fellow mystery lovers! This month marks eleven years of Ah Sweet Mystery! I can’t believ…

Leave it to Alfred Hitchcock to take a Daphne Du Maurier short story about an ornithological Armageddon and turn it into a love story about family healing. By the end of 1963’s The Birds, Melanie D…

“So. What d’you think your last words will be?” Twenty-three-year-old Haru is having a rotten year. She finally found a job, and the company went under. Her mother deserted the family, and her fath…

When Alfred Hitchcock decided to adapt Robert Bloch’s 1959 horror novel Psycho for the big screen, he faced a mountain of objections from the heads of Paramount Studios, who were appalled…

We’ve spoken at length about criminals utilizing dissembling and disguise in order to (sometimes literally) mask their guilt – but what of the detective? The history of fictional sleuths donning a …

Since time immemorial – well, say the last hundred years – a detective’s secretary has been the front line of information about new clients. Her first impression says everything! “’There’s a girl w…

I’m a big fan of screen biddies, those wonderful older women who always steal the scene from the big stars with their sarcastic eye-rolling and witty shenanigans. Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers wer…

My favorite author is Agatha Christie. My favorite director is Alfred Hitchcock. And never the twain shall meet.  And why should they? Hitchcock wasn’t much interested in whodunnits, and goodn…

Knowing full well that my favorite mystery author got her start after working in the pharmaceutical business (dispensing drugs, don’t ya know!), you would think that another writer with a similar r…

It should come as no surprise to you how much I love and admire The Maltese Falcon. It seems I’m always ranking the book or the film on one list or another. Why, only recently, I named it the best …

How do you take a character built for a series of short stories and turn them into the protagonist of a novel? That is the challenge Agatha Christie gave herself with The Murder at the Vicarage. Miss Marple would, of course, go on to become a character who rivals her other major detective, Hercule Poirot, in appeal. That she did is a reflection of the clever choices and design found in this, her first full-length outing.

Despite our busy schedules, as author and podcaster (Sergio Angelini), author and actor (Nick Cardillo) and author, blogger, cat herder and book club moderator (yours truly), the Three Amigos frequ…

In the early days of television, serialized programming was rarely to be found in prime-time. This might seem odd because people like long sagas with character arcs and cliffhangers. (Think of all …

In our exploration of the original teleplays developed for Perry Mason and all the terrific character actors who appeared on that show, we’ve been looking at the crossover these performer…

Before witches became petulant teenagers on Netflix or haunted multiple seasons of American Horror Story, there was Samantha Stephens. Premiering (after a long period of development) on S…

Perhaps I’m getting a little obsessive in my game of linking the dots between classic TV shows with actors who certainly achieved success but maybe never received their just due. I’ve covered histo…

Every month, you fellow mystery lovers who scan the blogosphere for news come upon the same refrain: “My Book Club met, and . . . oy, this book!!!” As you may have deduced from the occasional …

“This is the sort of stuff that drives you nuts in this business,” Drake said. “I have two dozen men on the job. It gets around to the slack time and I start calling them in. Then something like th…

Author Kemper Donovan has made no secret of the influence that Agatha Christie, the Queen of Crime, has had on his own writing. You can hear it in every episode of his podcast, All About Agath…

It’s interesting to consider the all-too-short life of Victor Charles Buono, whose career included Shakespearean stage roles, an Oscar-nominated turn in the movies, and some colorful villains on mu…

Of all the actors who we are fortunate enough to have seen on both Batman and Perry Mason, the most prolific of them all was Neil Hamilton. He played Police Commissioner James G…

It is a truth universally acknowledged that in a murder mystery everybody lies. They lie about their motives, and they lie about their alibis because they don’t want to appear guilty in the eyes of…

I’ve been having so much fun exploring all the actors who appeared on multiple episodes of Perry Mason. Since I’m covering the adaptations of the novels as I read them, here I’m focusing on t…

In the early, pre-Barnabas Collins, days of Dark Shadows, the show tried to behave like a normal soap opera, albeit with Gothic trappings. The main storylines centered around Victoria Win…

Reading Seishi Yokomizo’s work, you’d think you would know, seven volumes in, what to expect of this most famous of honkaku authors: a seemingly cursed and highly dysfunctional family, a seri…

Hollywood cemeteries are strewn with the graves of thousands of forgotten actors and, for most of us, John Lasell is one of them. He had a respectable twenty-five year long career, mostly on televi…

You all know how much I love Erle Stanley Gardner, especially his most famous creation, defense attorney extraordinaire Perry Mason. For the past few years, I’ve been weaving across the M…

My experience with mystery writer Patrick Quentin, the pseudonym of . . . oh, so many people, but mostly Hugh Wheeler and Rickie Webb, is sketchy. Many years ago, Avon published six catch…

Sadly, there hasn’t been much of a reason for me to go to the cinema these past few years, and I say this as someone who was once an inveterate moviegoer. It’s expensive and it’s uncomfortable (I&n…

For those of you with a shaky vocabulary, “coquette” is a French term for a flirty woman. That fits in perfectly with our ’26 Perry Mason theme of Les Femme! Les Femme! Les Femme! But before w…

At the midpoint of 4:50 from Paddington, Lucy Eyelesbarrow enters the Long Barn at Rutherford Hall for the first time. She is looking for a body. This is what she finds: “At a first glance, Lu…

One of the many things that the Three Amigos – Nick, Sergio and Brad – have in common is that, as much as we love to read mysteries, we adore watching them every bit as much! That’s why we talk abo…

It is always a pleasure to return to the work of Anthony Horowitz, an author who never met a meta-fiction he didn’t like. First, he gave us a trilogy about an editor who had to solve the mysteries …

I recently did some research on the concept of déjà vu – not for the first time, I feel almost certain – and I learned that this feeling that we are experiencing something that happened t…

Happy June, everyone! Happy harbinger of summer! Happy Pride Month! It’s time to trade slacks for shorts (please ignore my pasty legs) and fire up those grills (unless the CC&R’s of your condo …

If you are a true “Ah Sweet Mysterian” (yes, we’ve got our own cult name!), then you know that Rear Window is my favorite Alfred Hitchcock movie and maybe my favorite film of all …

We’re nearly halfway through our celebration into the Girls! Girls! Girls! of Perry Mason. The truth is that I selected a dozen novels that, title-wise, fit the thematic bill, but the titular ladie…

What is the most existential birthday present you’ve ever received? I hope that question doesn’t seem too foreboding! It’s not my aim to inspire dread in any of my readers who are about t…