Episode 4: Coming Soon
A backwoods tale written in 1913, set at a carnival fairground in West Virginia ~ featuring knife throwers, a country lawyer, a preacher detective, and a mysterious deaf mute. This particular tale was cited by Otto Penzler as a near-perfect classic of the mystery genre. Stay tuned for this and other exciting developments.
Note: We are currently in the process of reposting higher-quality audio versions of Episodes #1 through #3 of the Mystery Man Podcast along with their respective Show Notes. Please forgive us for any duplication that may occur on your iTunes playlists.
Tree Silhouette, Ax Raven Studios www.axraven.com
Episode 3: The Open Window (1914)
H. H. Munro (‘Saki’)
Scottish author Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916) was born in Burma, the son of an inspector-general in the Burmese police. Apocryphal stories abound around Munro’s short life. It is purported that, at age two, his mother died as the result of an accident involving a runaway cow along a remote English country lane. The boy was later raised by his grandmother and two puritannical aunts: role models, perhaps, for the host of elderly female family figures whom he took such delight in satirizing in his work.
All of Munro’s fiction was published under the pen name ‘Saki’ derived from the name of the cupbearer in the ancient Persian poem The Rubayat of Omar Khayyam. His tales are replete with whimsicality and wit, deep irony, tongue-in-cheek social commentary, and pointed humor. Today his work has been somewhat overshadowed by his predecessor Oscar Wilde, contemporary George Bernard Shaw, and successors P.G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh. Some of his tales contain coded references to homosexuality.
In his early twenties, Munro returned to Burma to join the Colonial Burmese Military Police, an occupation later chronicled by writer George Orwell, until ill-health forced him to return to England. He would then embark on a successful career as a journalist.
With the outbreak of World War I, although officially too old to serve, Munro volunteered for the army as an ordinary foot soldier, stating at the time, that he felt it was his duty to earn his stripes before expecting others to serve under him. He soon rose to the rank of lance sargeant. 
He was killed by a sniper’s bullet in 1916 near Beaumont-Hamel, France. In his final minutes, sheltered in a dugout, his last words were reputedly: “Put that bloody cigarette out!”
After his death, his sister Ethel destroyed most of his personal papers and authored an account of their childhood together. Like her famous brother, Ethel never married.
Saki’s tales typically mock the Edwardian social scene, often in macabre and cruel ways.
‘The Open Window’ appeared in the collection Beasts and SuperBeasts in 1914.
His acerbic yet comic assaults with the pen are now the stufff of legend ~ On the subject of Christianity, he once wrote: “People may say what they like about the decay of Christianity; [but] the religious system that produced green Chartreuse can never really die.”
Accused over the years of being a misogynist, an anti-Semite, and a reactionary, Saki, and his saucy tales, nonetheless~ never fail to amuse.
Bertie The Bounder
The song sung by homecoming brother Ronnie was, in fact, a popular tune of the day: Bertie the Bounder, a thinly disguised jab at the former Price of Wales, Albert Edward (later Edward VII) composed by English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer George Grossmith (1847-1912). The original 1909 recording is now available at the iTunes Store.
file:///C:/DOCUME~1/gulliver/LOCALS~1/Temp/Bertie%20the%20Bounder%20(1909%20recording)%202.url
Episode 2: The Bridge That Broke (1928)
Maurice Leblanc
French author and journalist Maurice Leblanc (1864-1941) is best known today as the creator of legendary gentleman-thief and master of disguise, Arsène Lupin. Despite the passage of time, Leblanc is still one of France’s most popular and prolific mystery authors, having published over 60 novels, plays, and short stories during his lifetime.
Born in Rouen, France, the son of a wealthy shipping owner, from an early age, Leblanc’s life seemed destined for the dramatic. As a boy of four, young Maurice was saved from near death in a blazing house fire. At the age of six, war broke out in France, and he escaped to Scotland where he spent a full year away from his home. After a continental education in France, Germany, and Italy, Leblanc attempted to settle down and work for the family firm in Rouen. He later abandoned the shipping business and took up the study of law but soon abandoned law to become a police reporter and pulp-fiction crime writer for the various French periodicals of the day. His early work appeared in newspapers such as the Echo de Paris. In 1887, Leblanc published his first novel, Une Femme: a psychological study that enjoyed only moderate success. His early work displayed the influence of Gustave Flaubert and Guy de Maupassant.
Although Leblanc had a lengthy career as a journalist, it was not until he created Arsène Lupin, while in his forties, that he achieved true international fame. Today, in France, Lupin’s popularity rivals and perhaps surpasses even that of Sherlock Holmes. The numerous Lupin adventures kept Leblanc busy for nearly twenty-five years. His cunning anti-hero even went up against Sherlock Holmes himself (renamed Homlock Shears for legal reasons) in the tale ‘Arsène Lupin Versus Holmlock Shears” (1908), and according to Leblanc’s version, outwitted the English master detective ~ to the decided chagrin of Holmes’ creator, Arthur Conan Doyle.
Curiously, the character of Arsène Lupin was born through an accidental assignment from publisher Pierre Laffitte for his weekly magazine Je Sais Tout, modeled upon The Strand from England, which, at the time, was a rather avant-garde publication. Laffitte commissioned Leblanc to write a story with a Holmesian hero. Instead Leblanc opted to create a character that was his perfect nemesis: a carefree rogue adventurer, modeled more after Ponson de Terrail’s Rocambole (1866). He first named his hero Arsène Lopin, after a Parisian councilor, but when the real Lopin protested, he changed the name. ‘L’arrestation d’Arsène Lupin’ appeared in English in The Exploits of Arsene Lupin (1909). Other collections of short stories and a long series of novels followed. In later life, Leblanc was named a member of the French Legion of Honour. He died in Perpignan, France on November 6, 1941.
The first Lupin novel, Arsène Lupin, Gentleman Cambrioleur, appeared in 1907. In these, and subsequent tales, Lupin’s criminal activities often stem from altruisitc motives. If he steals a painting, for example, it is so that the work can be genuinely appreciated by the public. Lupin often amuses himself outwitting the police. His principal opponent is Inspector Ganimard from the Sûrete de Paris. Later, during his undercover period, Lupin finds himself often collaborating with the authorities. Leblanc himself served as a consultant on the staff of the Paris police force, and this shift is duly reflected in his latter stories about Lupin. Among the best novels of this period are 813 (1910), in which Lupin, accused of murder, heads the police investigation to clear his own name by finding the true killer, and The Hollow Needle (1910), in which a bright lycée student manages to solve the riddle of Lupin and penetrate his secret treasure chamber. In this novel, Lupin falls in love with a beautiful girl yet naturally, fate stands in the way. Arsène Lupin’s adventures have been the basis for endless movies and television series. In Japan, the gentleman burglar has inspired a more modern series featuring Lupin’s grandson, Lupin III.
Adapted from an article written by Petri Liukkonen. © 2002-2009 Petri Liukkonen. Some rights reserved.
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/indeksi.htm#l
Contemporary Observation on Maurice Leblanc:
“He was a quiet, friendly man with a large moustache who liked to play chess and to write in his glass-enclosed study, designed to catch every ray of natural light.” (Source: World Authors, 1900-1950, vol. 2, ed. by Martin Seymour-Smith and Andrew C. Kimmes, 1996)
The Bridge That Broke (1928)
The Bridge that Broke was originally intended for publication within the collection L’Agence Barnett et Cie, published in France in 1928 ~ yet for reasons unknown ~ the story never appeared in the original French. 
Strangely enough, it did appear in the English translation versions along with the eight original tales under the title Jim Barnett Intervenes in Great Britain and Arsène Lupin Intervenes in the United States. It was not until nearly seventy years later that Oxford University Press rediscovered the tale and reprinted it in its superb international anthology The Oxford Book of Detective Fiction, edited by Patricia Craig, that most Lupin enthusiasts were aware of this ingenious tale.
Sherlock Holmes’ Greatest Rival
Part of Arsène Lupin’s curious charm is that, often for his own amusement, he operates on both sides of the law, frequently under multiple disguises, including the assumed personna of private detective Jim Barnett, featured in this month’s podcast The Bridge that Broke.
Part of Arsène Lupin’s curious charm is that, often for his own amusement, he operates on both sides of the law, frequently under multiple disguises, including the assumed personna of private detective Jim Barnett, featured in this month’s podcast The Bridge that Broke.
Over the years, other authors have contributed to Lupin’s ongoing legacy. The writing team of Thomas Narcejac and Pierre Boileau (who themselves authored the source novel for the classic French thriller Diabolique) contributed several authorized sequels to the Lupin chronolog after Leblanc’s death. Over the past century, the character of Arsène Lupin has also graced dozens of films, television productions, stage plays, and comic books.
The tradition of the gentleman thief has a long and twisted genealogy within the detective genre in France. Although most fans agree that Lupin is a direct literary descendant of Rocambole, the character created by French author Ponson de Terrail a generation earlier, France’s other beloved arch-criminal Fantomas was his literary contemporary, following Lupin’s lead by about four years.
Some critics argue that the character of Lupin might have been based on French anarchist Marius Jacob, whose trial made headlines in March 1905; it is also possible that Leblanc had also read Octave Mirbeau’s Les 21 jours d’un neurasthénique (1901), which features a gentleman thief named Arthur Lebeau, and seen Octave Mirbeau’s comedy Scrupules (1902), whose main character is a gentleman thief. It was not influenced by E. W. Hornung’s gentleman thief, A.J. Raffles, created in 1899, whom Leblanc had not read.
Some lupinophiles/lupinologists/lupinomaniacs disturbingly but somewhat convincingly argue (André Comte-Sponville, François George in Preuves de l’existence d’Arsène Lupin) that Lupin really existed and that Leblanc was thus his mere historiographer.
By 1907, Leblanc had graduated to writing full-length Lupin novels, and the reviews and sales were so good that Leblanc effectively dedicated the rest of his career to working on the Lupin stories. Arsène Lupin had a long and illustrious career, both as an arch-criminal and later under various guises, including those on the other side of the law. In The Bridge That Broke, Lupin appears throughout the tale as Jim Barnett, the owner of a private detective agency~ and only reveals his identity in the very last word of the story. With ever-blossoming creativity, Leblanc continued to pen Lupin tales well into the 1930s.
For a timeline of Arsène Lupin’s nefarious activities, please click here:
http://www.coolfrenchcomics.com/arsenelupin.htm
New Translations
from Black Coat Press
Entirely new translations of a handful of the more intriguing Lupin novels have recently been issued by www.blackcoatpress.
Click here for a full search of the Lupin novels in English:
Episode 1: The Green Door (1906)
O. Henry
O. Henry (1862-1910) was the pen name of American author William Sidney Porter, a native of Greensboro, North Carolina, and more to his nature, a gypsy soul, who at various points in his life, was a bank teller, cowboy, sheep herder, merchant, miner, druggist, and journalist—as well as a convicted embezzler.
While in prison, Porter began writing short stories to help generate income in order to support his daughter Margaret. His numerous tales are renowned for their wit, wordplay, warm characterization, and twist endings. In fact, in literary parlance, an unexpected or surprising dénouement within any short piece of fiction is often referred to as an ‘O. Henry ending.’
The Green Door (1906)
The Green Door originally appeared in O. Henry’s second collection of short stories ~The Four Million ~ the title being a reference to the population of New York City at the turn of the century.
Although more adventure tale than mystery, we have selected The Green Door by O. Henry for the first episode of THE MYSTERY MAN PODCAST® because, from its opening lines, this story embodies and celebrates the irresistible allure of following the unknown; in that sense, it is the perfect opening gambit for a podcast that hopes to charm and intrigue you over the coming years with obscure tales of the unexpected.
The thematic device of the green door was, apparently, a recurring one in early 20th century fiction. The literary website languagehat.com cites Mary E. Stone Basset’s The Little Green Door (1905) and H.G. Wells’ The Door in the Wall (1911) as examples of this motif. “As Borley Rectory and The Green-Baize Door points out, in Victorian times, a green door led to the servant’s section, the behind-the-scenes part of a house, and that could be the origin of its mystique as a front for hidden activities.” [Source: www.languagehat.com]
Although not traditionally associated with the mystery genre, O. Henry’s fascination with the unexpected ranks him high amongst readers who appreciate his cunning sense of plot and oddball-yet-charming characterization.
After penning nearly three-hundred stories, O. Henry died in 1910 of cirrhosis of the liver. Today, a prestigious award, the O. Henry Prize, is bestowed yearly to outstanding examples of short fiction. http://www.randomhouse.com/anchor/ohenry/
Further Reading:
http://www.online-literature.com/o_henry/
http://www.io.com/~xeke/twoframe.htm
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/ohenry.htm
http://www.gutenberg.org/browse/authors/h#a634
http://www.foxearth.org.uk/BorleyRectory/BorleyRectoryandtheGreenBaizeDoor.htm
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