The Inspector Morse Mysteries and a Lost Eden

By |2019-01-10T13:57:31-06:00January 5th, 2017|Categories: Christianity, Justice, Mystery, Oxford University, Television|

In the murder mystery, the portrayal of an apparent Eden is broken by the intrusion of crime, and the specific crime of murder, so that by the intervention of clever and wise persons the social world can be healed and order restored… There’s a wonderful moment in one of the old Inspector Morse shows—the one [...]

Top Ten Conspiracy Theories We Can Believe

By |2015-07-16T01:52:26-05:00July 16th, 2015|Categories: Mystery, Stephen Masty|

No, not all conspiracies are hallucinations, nor are all conspiracy theorists crazy or even libertarians. Here our sensible, responsible, even somewhat boring experts present the Top Ten Conspiracy Theories that everyone can trust. 1. Hillary Clinton is a Kleptomaniac You can see her here with her husband, after leaving Wal-Mart hiding a shoplifted ottoman in the [...]

Eccentricity and Domesticity: The World of the Nero Wolfe Mysteries

By |2019-02-14T13:40:21-06:00July 15th, 2014|Categories: Books, Mystery|

The detective story seems predicated on action. Even the most leisurely or snobbish mystery novels contain some semblance of motion, and typically it is the primary detective who does most of the legwork. Of course, the level of sweat is based on who is writing the story. The British school of mystery writing, especially during [...]

The Magic and Mystery of Baseball

By |2020-03-27T09:12:05-05:00April 2nd, 2014|Categories: Baseball, Mystery, Sports, Stephen M. Klugewicz|

Baseball is more than just a sport. Its designation as a “pastime” hints at its essential conservatism as an activity borne of a vanished agrarian civilization in which leisure was valued and in which time was to be filled with imaginative human creativity. The beginning of the baseball season is a natural time to reflect [...]

Fear of State and Dragon Tattoos

By |2015-08-11T17:03:21-05:00October 27th, 2013|Categories: Fiction, Film, Mystery|

In the recent trilogy of Swedish movies beginning with The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, a rather unpleasant fantasy plays out for the viewer. A young, misfit girl (Noomi Rapace’s Lisbeth Salander) is sexually abused, and, as the films drive towards their conclusion, revenges herself upon her immediate tormentors, and then ultimately upon the more [...]

“Quantitative Judgments Don’t Apply”: Foyle’s War, Series Seven

By |2014-01-12T15:16:42-06:00October 18th, 2013|Categories: Daniel McInerny, Mystery, Television|

At the beginning of the third volume of Evelyn Waugh’s masterful World War II trilogy, Sword of Honor, Guy Crouchback, a British Catholic officer entering a disillusioned middle age, has a conversation with his elderly father in which he disparages the Lateran Treaty. Gervase Crouchback rebukes his son’s irascibility. “My dear boy,” he said, “you’re [...]

Return to Sherlock Holmes and Baker Street

By |2014-01-21T10:37:17-06:00September 22nd, 2013|Categories: Books, Fiction, Mystery, Sherlock Holmes|Tags: |

A type of book which we hardly seem to produce in these days, but which flowered with great richness in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, is what Chesterton called the ‘good bad book’: that is, the kind of book that has no literary pretensions but which remains readable when more serious productions have [...]

The Good Sense of Sensationalism

By |2013-12-20T17:49:45-06:00August 19th, 2013|Categories: Books, Daniel McInerny, Mystery|

The only thrill, even of a common thriller, is concerned somehow with the conscience and the will.– G. K. Chesterton A book I much admire is the detective writer P.D. James’s little book, Talking About Detective Fiction, a distillation of the author’s insights into the genre she has practiced so well for nearly five decades. [...]

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