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Michael Savage reports that journalists are self-censoring their reporting on right-wing protests, Donald Trump's administration and trans issues because of growing concerns about their personal safety.

"The magazine’s extensive output about Islam emerges from a coherent ideological viewpoint. Muslims are invaders. They don’t belong in this country. They don’t share our values and they threaten our public spaces. Any civic engagement by Muslims in Britain is suspect and should be resisted." Peter Oborne itemises the Spectator's rabid Islamophobia.

 Alistair Jones on the reorganisation of local government in Leicestershire: "Rutland is deemed too small to be a cost-effective council (although, personally, I remain unconvinced). Similarly, although more contentiously, the population argument was likely to see some expansion of the Leicester City Council boundaries. The question was going to be: how far? And now we know. There will be a significantly enlarged city council, and the remainder of the county and Rutland will form a single unitary authority."

In the latest move to censor US school libraries, one district is considering getting rid of them altogether. Erin Reed reports from Clay County in Florida.

"Both detectives were created or at least popularized by women; both possessed a typically female kind of intelligence that was easy to miss or dismiss. But the women who made them lived entirely different relationships to ownership and credit, and those relationships come through in the characters themselves." As the early Miss Marple and Nancy Drew novels are entering the public domain, Ellen O’Connell Whittet asks what comes next for the characters.

Rob Bagchi recalls the Joe Mercer's short, sunny spell as England's caretaker manager in 1974: "He gave them a blueprint for renovation that was disastrously ignored when the caution and anxiety he had temporarily banished returned with a vengeance."

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"Unlike Blair, he was deeply and passionately engaged in the current moment. He had not fossilised his world view. He was intellectually present. He spoke clearly and trenchantly about what populism is and the threat that it poses. 'They are careless of the strife they cause,' he said. 'They trade on grievances in our society. Where ills exist, they exaggerate them. They then blame those ills on minority groups of a different race or religion. It is ugly politics that deserves no place in our country.'" Ian Dunt says John Major is a better former prime minister than Tony Blair will ever be.

Hannah Fearn argues that there is no sudden epidemic of laziness: "What’s not being discussed at all is how young people are the hardest hit by huge external barriers to employment, however hard they want to work."

Stefan Collini examines the roots of Britain's higher education crisis: "The coalition government, the chief architect of this system, aimed to create a market among ‘providers’ which would be driven by the choices of students as ‘consumers’, with the aim of breaking the so-called 'producers' cartel' that had, allegedly, for so long enabled universities to protect their traditional practices."

"But when it comes to AI chatbots, the doctors have learned to proceed with caution. People may tolerate the idea of talking to a computer when booking a holiday or motor insurance but discussing something as personal as your health is quite a different matter." Rory Cellan-Jones on one GP surgery's mixed experience of introducing AI.

Gill Pain discusses what made Agatha Christie so successful: "There was noir Christie, a writer of disturbing, manipulative psychological fiction; comic Christie, a sharp and witty deconstructor of social mores; and uncanny Christie – a crime writer whose familiar voice has a curious knack of making the reader feel at home, while pulling the rug from under them."

"In order to attract puffins to the island, they created 100, lifelike weather resistant decoy puffins and anchored them to the cliffs. To make the illusion as convincing as possible, the team also installed solar powered speakers to blast continuous puffin calls out to sea to catch the attention of passing juveniles." Eva Cahill reports an ingenious attempt to attract puffins back to an islet off the Isle of Man where they once thrived.

Call for police patrols at Agatha Christie beach

Our Headline of the Day Award goes to BBC News. 

The judges tell me that a housemaid and a retired colonel have already been poisoned, and that Miss Marple fears there will be a third murder.

A review of Terry O'Neill's life story in a social work journal

Twenty years ago, every branch of Waterstones had a section called "Painful Lives" that carried memoirs of abuse in childhood. The success of Dave Pelzer's A Child Called It in 1995 had awakened a public appetite for such literature, and publishers were happy to satisfy it.

It was in this climate that Terry O'Neill, the younger brother of Dennis O'Neill, whose death I have often written about, posted his life story on the website Authonomy under the title Never Again in 2009. This was a site where authors could post their manuscripts in the hope that its owner Harper Collins or another publisher would see it and be interested.

Fortunately, Harper Collins did recognise what a treasure they had. and published a rewritten version of Terry's book as Someone to Love Us. Despite this very "Painful Lives" title, and a cover that also made it look as though it belonged to that genre, my impression when I read it was that the ghost writer had done a good job. But I do remember things in Terry's original version that didn't make it into the published book, so I hope that manuscript still exists somewhere.

My reason for writing this post is that I've come across a review of Someone to Love Us in a social work journal. It was written by Dave Burnham and appeared in The Bulletin of the Social Work History Network (Vol. 3, No. 1, June 2016).

Here is an extract:

There are recognisable themes:

• Children never being told of decisions about them – not just by officials, but by anybody. 

• The number of placements and the yo-yo emotions associated with moving between caring family homes and rulebound institutions. 

• Although Reginald Gough’s beatings were by far the worst, the punishments meted out later to Terence in homes (beating, deprivation of food) bore a sinister similarity to Bank Farm practices. 

• The rich collection of characters involved in child care: the careful, kind leaders, the charismatic role models, the thoughtless, the demanding bullies. 

• The still silence of the scared children in the face of adult authority.

• The years of guilt Terence felt after Dennis’ death about what he might have done to save him. 

• The official emphasis on attempting to place the boys with a Catholic family, even though, as Terence said until he was in care he'd never been to church in his life. 

• The heartlessness of the press.

Most notably, during the boys’ six month stay there were perhaps ten visits by various officials, a Boarding Out volunteer, two senior Shrewsbury Council [in fact Shropshire County Council] officials, an 18 year old clerk from Newport and social workers dealing with other foster children at the Goughs. Not one of these people went upstairs to the freezing room where the boys slept on a straw pallet with one blanket. Monckton recommended some changes in Boarding Out visiting, but his report is most notable in proposing that people should simply do their jobs properly – seeing where boarded out children slept, for instance. had been expected for fifty years by then.

Burnham ends by saying Someone to Love Us should be read in conjunction with Sir Walter Monckton's report on the affair, but that this is hard to find.

You can find the Monckton Report online, but his statement that "no evidence came to my notice of any exploitation of the boys in the work of the farm" does not accord with the story Terry O'Neill tells.

Terry died in 2023. You can hear him speak in the award-winning BBC Radio Wales documentary The Mousetrap and Me.

Lord Bonkers' Diary: Dame Agatha Mousetrap

And so another week at Bonkers Hall draws to a close. It looks like Keir Starmer is in the clear for a while, but I still wouldn't accept any invitations to stay on mysterious islands off the Devon coast if I were in his shoes.

Sunday

These days every television celebrity thinks he’s Dame Agatha Mousetrap, but there’s more to the whodunnit-writing game than meets the eye. I once had a shot at it myself; all went well until I sat down to pen the final chapter, only to find I had not included a butler among the cast of characters and thus had no murderer to reveal. 

My reason for mentioning this is that if the prime minister has been knifed by this own party by the time you read this, it will be like Murder on the Orient Express. They’ll all have had a go at him.

Lord Bonkers was Liberal MP for Rutland South West, 1906-10.

Earlier this week

• One of Violent Bonham Carter’s boys
• A phone number for the Overton-Window twins
• "I’ll fetch you one up the bracket"
• A young Marines officer called Ashdown
• A strange episode
• He should ask an eagle to do it

The murder of Charles Walton at Lower Quinton in 1945

You can't beat the local by-election previews that Andrew Teale posts every week.

Yesterday there was an election in the Lib Dem held Quinton ward of Stratford-upon-Avon District Council. (Don't worry: we held it.) I wondered if Andrew would know about a notorious murder that took place there.

I needn't have worried. Andrew wrote in this week's preview:

The Quinton ward extends north-east from here to take in the village of Lower Quinton. This was the scene for the 1945 murder of Charles Walton, with local rumour having it that he had been ritually killed and that witchcraft was involved. 

Despite the involvement of the Metropolitan Police officer DS Robert Fabian of the Yard as chief investigating officer, no-one was ever prosecuted for Walton’s death and Warwickshire Constabulary class it as their oldest unsolved murder case.

My suspicion is that – as in many an Agatha Christie plot – what appeared to be an extraordinary killing was in fact an ordinary one with mundane financial motives. But, like poor Bella in the Wych Elm, this murder has gone down in West Midlands history.

For a short introduction of the case, you can try the relevant episode of Punt PI. But what I really recommend is the three-part investigation of it by Hypnogoria. I like its observation that it's common to come across, when researching your family history, to come across people who have left no mark on official records.

The case also inspired a new film called The Last Sacrifice. I've not seen it, but the trailer below plays up the idea that the murder of Charles Walton inspired the folk horror cinema that flourished two or three decades later.

I found the press cutting above in my folder of newspaper stories about Dennis O'Neill. The juxtaposition of the two stories is positively spooky, but that was the West Midlands in 1945.

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Callum Miller, the party's foreign affairs spokesperson, sets out a Liberal Democrat approach to foreign policy: "Our economy is stronger and our security greater when we work with other nations. As an open economy, the UK is a beneficiary when all nations work together and abide by shared rules."

"Gibb’s allies say he’s trying to save the BBC from itself. To me, though, his behavior resembles less a tree surgeon trying to prune an oak for stronger growth than a lumberjack sizing it into planks of wood." Jem Bartholomew dissects the right-wing plan to bring down the BBC.

An investigation by openDemocracy and the Children Rights International Network reveals the shocking extent of the bullying, harassment, self-harm, sexual offences and safeguarding failures that teenagers who join the British Army are subject to.

Fiona Daly says we have grown too comfortable with the exclusion of older people from the digital world.

Alan Tyler tells the story of the remarkable Isokon flats in Belsize Park: "Along with the Bauhaus refugees came many notable residents through the coming years – crime novelist Agatha Christie being the most famous and Soviet spymaster Arnold Deutsch probably the most notorious."

"From the start he has the air of a man who’s seen it all, little of it good. His reaction to a source being gunned down in front of him at Checkpoint Charlie is so restrained as to make it seem routine." Sara Batkie on Richard Burton's performance in The Spy Who Came in from the Cold.

The way we talk about and portray children in care really matters

Photo by Phil Hearing on Unsplash

In the report of his inquiry into the death of Dennis O'Neill in 1945, Sir Walter Monckton wrote:

It is first necessary to explain the basis of the policy of committing children to a local authority which may board them out. The "fit person," local authority or individual, must care for the children as his own: the relation is a personal one. The duty must neither be evaded nor scamped.

That does not appear to be the view taken by the Reform UK member of Cambridgeshire County Council Andy Osborn. He told a meeting of its children and young people committee that some children in care can be "downright evil".

In an article on East Anglia Bylines, Kerrie Portman explains how damaging such language can be:

Words, especially when spoken by those in positions of power, normalise assumptions and prejudices. They embolden others to think, speak and act in this way, which translates directly to the harms inflicted on Care Experienced people, leading to many of our ongoing vulnerabilities and even shortened life expectancies.

When researching my recent Central Bylines article on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, I came across an article by Josie Pearce. In it she notes that writers of television drama treat the fact that someone was orphaned or adopted as enough in itself to explain why they have grown up to commit murder.

As she says:

In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries orphans were most often heroes. ... But since the twentieth century and TV, our most common plotline is that because our parents were dead, dysfunctional, unable... we must be serial killers. I started counting eventually and by my reckoning 90 per cent of TV serial killers were orphans. 

Sir Walter Monckton's report followed the death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire, where he had been fostered with his younger brother Terry. The case caused a national outcry – more against the council that had sent them there than against the farmer Reginald Gough and his wife, who had actually killed the boy – and gave Christie the inspiration for The Mousetrap. 

In my article on the play for Central Bylines, I quoted Phil O'Neill, who is the son of an older brother of Dennis and Terry: 

"My gentle Uncle Terry always said he wouldn’t seek revenge because that would make him no better than the Goughs. It was a shock seeing him portrayed on stage as a psychotic killer."

The way we talk about and portray children in care really matters. We should give it more thought.

Not so cosy: A podcast on Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap

I came across a new podcast today – Garlic & Pearls – via a really good episode on Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.

It's thoroughly researched and emphasises how far from cosy Christie's works can be. The Mousetrap is set in a dislocated postwar world in which the class structure has been shaken and there is an air of paranoid watchfulness.

The BBC's adaptations of the Miss Marple books, which starred the incomparable Joan Hickson, were set firmly in this world. And it's noticeable that when Bertram's Hotel appears to have survived the changes unscathed, it turns out to be too good to be true.

Meanwhile, after the Colonel died, Dolly Bantry sold the big house and moved very happily into a modernised lodge house with all the latest conveniences. The future need not always be resisted, as the worldly Marple grasps.

I recently wrote an article for Central Bylines about the 12-year-old foster child called Dennis O'Neill whose death on a farm in Shropshire Christie to write the play.

When filmmakers trample all over real-life stories you care about

There should be an ancient Chinese curse: May someone make a film of a real-life story you care about.

I went to a couple of open days at the Richard III dig before it was announced that they thought they had found him, and went to several academic events after his identity had been confirmed. I even filed past Richard's coffin to pay my respects, which was more than I did for Elizabeth II.

The whole episode was a marvellous example of interesting and involving the community in archaeology. I find I got quite emotional about the day Richard was reburied.

So we really didn't need Steve Coogan and his film to give us a false picture of these events.

I didn't see The Lost King because I knew it would annoy me, and I had already been annoyed by another film in the autumn 2022.

See How They Run was a murder mystery set in and around the record-breaking London run of Agatha Christie's play The Mousetrap.

I have just written an article for Central Bylines on the play's roots in a real-life death – that of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill on a farm in the Shropshire hills in 1945.

As I suspected, See How They Run used this story, but it contrived to end with a young man called Dennis being clubbed to death. He had been committing the murders as a protest against Christie's exploitation of his family's story.

In the review I posted after seeing it, I quoted the American film writer Gregory Mysogland:

Christie expresses sympathy for him but states that to not write about tragic topics would be to deny a part of who she is. This is an understandable viewpoint, but it's also the last word the film says on the issue, and as such is much too simplistic and one-sided. ...

Eventually, Christie herself kills Dennis by hitting him in the head with a shovel, comically going in for more blows before the others stop her. Although Henderson's manic performance is good enough to make this scene darkly funny on first viewing, upon reflection, it adds to the exploitation of the O'Neill's represented by Dennis' role. 

Making the character a murderous villain and then dismissing his legitimate argument with a wave of the hand is bad enough, but having him meet a violent death similar to the real Dennis's is cruel and immoral, not to mention completely against the ideas the film tries to bring up in relation to him.

Mysgoland was right. I could have done without this film too.

For Central Bylines: The forgotten Shropshire tragedy that inspired The Mousetrap

I met the editor of Central Bylines for coffee while I was on holiday in Shrewsbury. "Did you know that The Mousetrap was inspired by a real-life case that took place in Shropshire?" I asked.

So that's what my second article for the site is about.

Too often victims of crime are seen only as victims, so I was pleased to be able to include this from a news report of the trial:

Mrs Connop, who had previously fostered them and their younger brother Freddie in Herefordshire, described them in her evidence as "happy-go-lucky and harum-scarum, but nothing else" and Dennis himself as a "forgiving and sweet boy".

On which note, the photo below, which must be copyright to the O'Neill family, shows (from the left) Terry, Dennis and Freddie O'Neill in their days with Mrs Connop.

I've written before for Lion and Unicorn about the influence of this case on an earlier play: No Room at the Inn. And also about its uncanny parallels with what is now my favourite Malcolm Saville story Seven White Gates.

Carry on Sergeant, some real crimes that inspired Agatha Christie and It's Trad, Dad!

Embed from Getty Images

Three podcasts to enjoy.

Susan Calman and Mike Muncer have begun going through the Carry On films one by one. I listened to their edition on Carry On Sergeant, the very first of them. The makers had no idea they were launching a franchise and national institution, though several actors who were to become Carry On actors were in tha cast. It comes over as a gentle and likeable British film comedy.

Camper Donovan spoke to the Agatha Christie International Festival in Torquay last week and that talk is now an edition of his podcast All About Agatha. His subject was the real-life crimes that inspired some of her best-known novels and her best-known play. Regular readers of this blog will know that The Mousetrap drew upon the death of 12-year-old Dennis O'Neill in Shropshire in 1945, but Kemper gave many more examples of such inspiration that were new to me.

And Andrew Hickey has taken time off from his own magisterial music blog to talk to Goon Pod about the 1962 film It's Trad, Dad! He regards it as the best British pop music film made before A Hard Day's Night. (Lord Bonkers once claimed to have made a controversial film in the same era - I'm a Jihadi, Daddy.)

Book Review... All the Wide Border: Wales, England and the Places Between by Mike Parker

This review appears in the new issue of Liberator. You can download it free of charge from the magazine's website.

All the Wide Border: Wales, England and the Places Between

Mike Parker

Harper North, 2024; £10.99

The Welsh border is the most intoxicating landscape I know, and Mike Parker is a companionable guide to it. Immune to the tendency to complain that things aren’t what they used to be – when were they ever? – he is interested in the towns and countryside as he finds them today.

Parker made the journeys he describes in this book during the Covid pandemic, a period that may turn out to be little represented in our literature. An English-born Welsh Nationalist, he found the more collectivist traditions of his adopted country served people better in that time of trial.

Along some stretches of the border, it’s easy to forget which country you are in. I remember once coming down off the hills to Kington and being almost surprised to find myself in a red-brick Midland town with Burton beers in all the pubs. Further north, around Chester in particular, Parker shows the border is still a hard reality that affects the economy and society on both its sides.

Much as I enjoyed All the Wide Border, it’s a reminder of how personal our reaction to places can be. The first chapter takes you to a place I’ve been many times: the country west of the Stiperstones up to Shropshire’s border with Powys. 

For me it means the remains of the lead-mining industry; the children’s books of Malcolm Saville; Ronnie Lane and one of his rock star mates, down to use the studio at Lane’s place a couple of fields into Wales, playing unannounced at a remote pub; the death at a farm of the foster child Dennis O’Neill, which led both to the 1948 Children’s Act and Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap. Parker’s chapter mentions none of these, yet I still found it as interesting as any in the book.

Jonathan Calder

Meeting a nephew of Dennis O'Neill

Twenty years ago, I published a chapter (“Histories of child abuse”) in the book Making and Breaking Children’s Lives.

In it, I was feeling my way towards the thesis that child abuse is less a new discovery than a phenomenon that has been regularly uncovered and then forgotten. This belief grew from a time when I was producing psychology newsletters in my day job and studying for an MA in Victorian Studies in the evenings. 

This belief was strengthened as I came to realise that the caring professions knew as much about their own history as they did about 19th-century novels.

I began the chapter with the death in 1945 of Dennis O’Neill, a child in public care who’d been ‘boarded out’ at a farm in Shropshire. His death caused a national scandal, shared the front pages with the last stages of the war in Europe and led to the 1948 Children’s Act. Yet Dennis had clearly been forgotten by 1973, when the death of Maria Colwell shocked the nation to a similar degree.

What led me to the Dennis O’Neill case was a passing mention of him in a book by Bob Holman that had come into the office for review. It sent me – intrigued that Dennis’s death had taken place at a “lonely farmhouse in Shropshire” – to a book by Dennis’s older brother Tom, who had worked in child care. That book, A Place Called Hope, was one of the sources for my chapter.

I may write another paper on this case one day because, though it was forgotten for so long – it has been better remembered since the publication of Terry O’Neill’s book Someone to Love Us – you can find traces of it in all sorts of unexpected places in our culture. 

The most substantial trace is in Agatha Christie’s play The Mousetrap, which has the Dennis O’Neill case at its root. You can hear Phil O’Neill, one of Tom’s sons, talk about the O’Neill family’s connection with the play on the All About Agatha podcast.

All this is by way of saying that I met Phil O’Neill, who is (or would have been) Dennis’s nephew, for a drink the other day. We’d been in touch by email for a while, which is why I was able to suggest him as a guest to the podcast. 

We had a good chat despite the London heat, and he told me one particularly interesting fact. In the Sixties, the maker of television films Jeremy Sandford, most famous for Cathy Come Home, was interested in writing something about Dennis O’Neill and in touch with his family about it, but nothing came of the idea.

He also confirmed that the photograph here is the only one of Dennis known to exist – he is the dark-haired boy in the middle. Copyright must rest with someone in the O’Neill family, but I hope no one will mind that I have used it here.

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Christine Jardine says it was a privilege to support the Assisted Dying Bill: "The debate has been for all of us MPs a harrowing experience as we welcomed into Parliament the families and friends of terminally-ill adults, who either had to live in pain, or make the heartbreaking trip to Dignitas alone to avoid the risk of their family being investigated for assisting a death."

"Nobody identified more strongly with Britain than that generation, many of whom had a picture of Queen Elizabeth II on their living-room wall. When the Empire Windrush arrived at Tilbury docks in Essex, its occupants did not see themselves as 'immigrants', but citizens of the United Kingdom and Commonwealth come to help rebuild the 'mother country' after the war." Dianne Abbott found the Windrush Day reception at No 10 joyous, but it was also a reminder of the ugliness behind the 'island of strangers' rhetoric.

Grieving families are being left without answers because of an overstretched and undertrained coroner's service reports Angela Walker.

Bob Berzins makes the case for banning driven grouse shooting.

John Lanchester discusses the enormous popularity of Agatha Christie. "[Her] great talent for fictional murder is to do with her understanding of, and complete belief in, human malignity. She knew that people could hate each other, and act on their hate. Her plots are complicated, designedly so, and the backstories and red herrings involved are often ornate, but in the end, the reason one person murders another in her work comes down to avarice and/or hate."

Well before streaming and cable TV, the BBC's Moviedrome offered an accessible gateway to cinema. A quarter of a century on from its final instalment, the strand is being celebrated with a two-month season at BFI Southbank featuring some of the most significant titles from its run. Matthew Taylor talks to Alex Cox and Nick Freand Jones about their experiences working on this influential series.

Agatha Christie on Hercule Poirot: "Would anyone go and consult him? One feels not"

John Lanchester once wrote a good essay for the London Review of Books on Agatha Christie, emphasising that the most interesting thing about her is the way she plays with every convention of the detective novel:

The self-conscious, formalist impulse behind Christie’s work is the explanation for one of the biggest puzzles about her books: why the most popular detective writer of all time had as her principal character a man who is, by general agreement, the worst detective of all. 

By "worst" I mean least likeable, most implausible, most annoying, vainest, and the one whose characterisation is most dependent on whimsical details that add nothing in terms of psychological insight: in other words, Poirot. (By "whimsical details" I mean all that guff about hot chocolate and moustaches and "the little grey cells".) 

Detectives are often – one might go so far as to say are usually – annoying and implausible, but nobody is more so than Poirot, as Christie herself acknowledged. "Would anyone go and 'consult; him?" she wondered aloud. "One feels not." He was, she said, "regarded perhaps with more affection by outsiders than by his own creator". 

Her advice to writers starting out on a career in detective fiction was: "Be very careful what central character you create – you may have him with you for a very long time!"

In that same essay, Christie put her finger on something which has long been apparent to her readers, that Miss Marple, in her creator’s words "an elderly, gossipy lady in a small village, who pokes her nose into all that does or does not concern her, and draws deductions based on years of experience of human nature", is fundamentally believable in a fashion that her other great detective isn’t.

And yet there are only 12 Marple novels and 20 short stories, versus Poirot’s total of 33 novels, 51 stories and a play.

Christie is often dismissed as "cosy", but it seems to me that Miss Marple, with her belief that you can understand every variety of human evil by studying everyday life in an English village, is one of the least cosy figures in our literature.

There's nothing unique about the tradition that you don't reveal whodunnit in The Mousetrap

Much is made of Mousetrap omerta - the taboo against revealing the identity of the murderer in Agatha Christie's record-breaking play. But it never used to be a unique tradition.

Whodunnits were one of the staples of weekly repertory theatre, and it was common for such plays to end with one of the cast saying something like:

"We hope you enjoyed the play and will tell your neighbours about it - but please don't tell them who the killer is."

An example of this comes in one of the funnier anecdotes in David Hemmings' memoirs.

The summer of 1960 saw him in rep at Ryde on the Isle of Wight. This doesn't sound like the top of the tree for a young actor, but he was 18 and wanted to be with his first wife Jenny Lewes. This newspaper cutting comes from that summer. 

To make the sometimes very ordinary plays more fun, the cast had evolved a game where they had to pass an apple to each other without altering an action of the play. So if you had the apple, passing a letter to another actor would present a perfect opportunity for getting rid of it. And the actor left with the apple at the end of the play had to buy the first round of drinks.

In one performance of a whodunnit, Hemmings was the detective. Alone on the stage with the victim's corpse, which was under a sheet, he was giving the final speech, explaining how the murder had been done. As the corpse had the apple, he reckoned he was safe.

Suddenly, the corpse reared up, dragged itself across the stage issuing horrible guttural noises, passed the apple to Hemmings under cover of the sheet and then died again at his feet.

After that, says Hemmings, it didn't seem worth asking the audience not to reveal the ending of the play - it would never end that way again.

If you do want to know the murderer in The Mousetrap, there's Wikipedia. Or you can listen to Tom Holland blurt it out in one of the better editions of The Rest is History.

A post for Lion & Unicorn: No Room at the Inn (1948) and the death of Dennis O'Neill

I've written a post for Lion & Unicorn about the 1948 film No Room at the Inn, which starred this blog's hero Freda Jackson. The poet Dylan Thomas was partly responsible for the screenplay.

No Room at the Inn was based on a 1945 play of the same name by Joan Temple. Like Agatha Christie's The Mousetrap, that play was inspired by the death of the foster child Dennis O'Neill on a farm in Shropshire.

And Dennis O'Neill died 80 years ago today.

Read the post on Lion & Unicorn.

Margery Allingham celebrates the London of 1965

Published in 1965, the year before she died, The Mind Readers was the last complete novel by Margery Allingham. And she, along with Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers and Ngaio Marsh, was considered one of the for 'Queens of Crime' for detective fiction's golden age.

So whatever I expected when I opened The Mind Readers, it wasn't this celebration of the London of the Sixties::

The Great City of London was once more her splendid self; mysterious as ever but bursting with new life.

In the tightly packed clusters of villagers with the ancient names - Hackney, Holborn, Shoreditch, Putney, Paddington, Bow - new towns were rising into the yellow sky; the open spaces if fewer, were neater, the old houses were painted, the monuments clean. 

Best news of all, the people were regrown. The same savagely cheerful race, fresh mixed with more new blood than ever in its history, jostle together in costumes inspired by every romantic fashion known to television. While round its knees in a luxuriant crop the educated children shot up like the towers, full of the future.

It just goes to show you'll never know what you find when you open a second-hand book.

It's also a reminder that the golden age of detective fiction was still within touching distance when I was a teenager. Allingham was only 62 when she died, Agatha Christie, as we recently saw, lived to ponder the fate of Lord Lucan, and Ngaio Marsh wrote an episode of Crown Court.

Later. Shedunnit podcast has a good episode on Margery Allingham's career as a writer.

Lord Lucan helps Agatha Christie win Quote of the Day

Lord Lucan is everywhere this week, because it's 50 years since he murdered his children's nanny, attacked his wife and then disappeared.

The new Fortean Times has an article on the affair, which quotes the reaction of Agatha Christie:

“ I wonder what has happened to Lord Lucan?”

Christie may seem like a figure from an earlier era, but she did not die until 1976. And Lord Lucan died in 1974.

Or did he?