New Podcast—Detective Agency: Discreet Inquiries, Mysteries Solved + Endnotes

Our new show and Mel's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week

Our new episode Detective Agency: Discreet Inquiries, Mysteries Solved is in your podcast player right now!

Mel, here… Left to my own devices, I would read mysteries 98.8% of the time, so to say I’ve been looking forward to this episode would be a massive understatement. I have so many additional book recommendations and fun videos to share over the next two weeks. Turn up the collar on your trenchcoat and join us for a foggy walk through these mean streets. (Full disclosure: They’re not all mean. One of them is even whimsical.)

Visit our show notes to listen to the new episode and tons more book recommendations, frankly amazing videos, a mood-setting noir soundtrack, and everything else we discuss in the show.

Fictional detectives are some of the most beloved characters in print and on-screen. It's easy to relate to someone with an overblown sense of justice and a need to set the world right (or as right as it can be).

There are nosy neighbors like Nancy Drew and Miss Marple with no real credentials whatsoever and police detectives — Hello, Harry Bosch! Ta, Inspector Lynley! — with entire departments behind them. Relentless journalists, dogged medical examiners, resourceful bounty hunters (We see you, Stefanie Plum!), and, perhaps, the most endearing detectives of them all: private eyes.

This show is all about the gumshoes who work outside the pesky laws of search warrants and chain of evidence. Who maybe toil in an office with a frosted glass door and a dame with moxie tapping away at a typewriter — or perhaps the dame with moxie is the detective. This installment celebrates independent investigators who distract and delight in their search for the truth.

In this episode, we meet the world's first PI and first American lady detective, delve into Poe scholarship and the problem with his 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' and discuss one of the kindest mystery authors.

Then we recommend five books we love that put us in the thick of dangerous inquiries, including:

• the escapades of a thoroughly modern detective agency

• an urban mystery with a bookish PI

• a British caper with an unforgettable hero

• a how-to for wannabe detectives

• a noir-tinged fantasy novel about a reluctant sleuth

Listen on your favorite podcast app or on our website. We hope you enjoy the show!

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Endnotes: 13 September

The Egyptian pyramids are one of the most recognizable landmarks in the world, but there’s still much to learn about them and life in ancient Egypt. I’ve been devouring the Ancient Egypt podcast series from History Extra. The installments about Civilization, Everyday Life, and Culture are available right now. The information is fascinating — and/but it’s the two voices behind the show that have really won me over. The host Emily Briffett asks excellent questions and is clearly engaged in the conversation — and Campbell Price, the guest Egyptologist, is charm personified. His delight in sharing what he knows is palpable. He does a bang-up job merging his deep expertise with a sense of humor (and hot tips like watching the campy classic Land of the Pharoahs from 1955). Price is the Curator of Egypt and Sudan at the Manchester Museum, which displays works of archaeology, anthropology, and natural history at the University of Manchester. Price curated the exhibit ‘Golden Mummies of Exhibit.’ Here’s a short (great!) video about the show, a longer live tour through the exhibit, and the book Golden Mummies of Egypt. Need more Egypt books and stories in your life this weekend? Enjoy our podcast episode Egypt: Ancient Antiquities, Fiery Djinn, and the Lure of the Nile.

• The details about a 3000-year-old notebook (salvaged from a shipwreck!) in the opening of this essay made my heart feel full. ‘The oldest item that looks to modern eyes like a notebook sits in a display case in a castle in a Turkish city, thousands of years ago a thriving commercial and intellectual hub and now an equally busy holiday resort… the Bodrum Museum of Underwater Archaeology shows off items recovered from the bottom of the Mediterranean. The Ulu Burun shipwreck is one of its glories, and its gallery dedicates a display case to a small wood-and-ivory item: a hinged writing tablet which, when folded shut, would sit nicely on the palm of your hand.’

• Subverse Reads has become one of my favorite places to find book recommendations and bookish banter. This Fall Book Preview is filled with strong picks in categories like ‘very buzzy, very lit girl’ and ‘things might get a little freaky.’ 

• This library of pressed flowers in London is a delight. ‘A remarkably precious artifact, extracted from one of these cupboards, lies on a large oak table in front of me. It is a solanum flower, a wild tomato pressed, dried, and mounted on paper, collected during Charles Darwin’s early 19th-century expedition to the Galapagos Islands.’

• I’ve so been enjoying the slow read of the Wolf Hall trilogy hosted by Footnotes & Tangents with

  Simon Haisell
  . (Pssst… it’s happening again next year if you want to spend quality time with Thomas Cromwell.) The slow read trend is a fantastic way to read in community and take the time to process all that’s happening on the page. It’s also an accessible way to tackle challenging books. Starting in January, the Deep Reads Book Club is hosting a slow read of The Iliad and The Odyssey. In November, your guide
  Matthew Long
  will provide a reading schedule, discussions of different translations, and other intro info; weekly updates begin in January. Subscribe to his Substack now so you’re in on the details.

• Gotta be honest, a headline like this — Photographing One of the Most Remote Places on Earth — is irresistible to me. Give me all the cold, barren, beautiful places. (If you’re into chilly locales, too, you might like our podcast episodes Arctic: Otherworldly Beauty That Might Kill You and Alaska: Fresh-Caught Salmon, Cake Mix, and So Many Bears).

• This hotel in northern Italy promises ‘peak happiness.’ The views are stunning.

• We were honored to talk about books and our adopted home city of Prague on this episode of the American Citizens Abroad podcast.

• Our favorite street artist is at it again:

  nes.nespoon

  

  A post shared by @nes.nespoon

• Just in time for spooky season, the Gothic novel The Company by Jon Michael Varese (about arsenic-laced wallpaper!) is now available in paperback. You can hear me talk about it on this episode of The Library of Lost Time.

• A terrifying doll, an ‘evil’ number, cursed medieval books, and more: Atlas Obscura presents 6 Cursed Objects, and the Legends Behind Them.

• Engaging review of the new (beautiful, hefty) book The Tarot of A. E. Waite and P. Colman Smith. ‘To me, what makes this book stand out from other histories and examinations of the tarot is how much it emphasizes the creative process, making sense of tarot’s enduring popularity today.’

• 5 Historical Novels Set in Italy, compiled by author Tracy Chevalier, author of The Girl with a Pearl Earring and the new Venice-set novel The Glassmaker. 

• These book cover vases are perfect for showing your good taste in books and flora. How great would Dracula look with one perfect red rose?

• Ooh la la! Tips from the Emily in Paris cast about where to eat and drink in Paris.

• Stranger Things: A Reading List of Unsolved Mysteries. ‘Unsolved mysteries manage to be as irresistible as they are frustrating, stoking our imagination even while they tease our need for resolution. Faced with a story that refuses to tie everything into a neat bow, we chew on potential explanations until we find the one we like best — the one that satisfies all our biases, the one that allows us to bask in the knowledge that we (and only we) know what actually happened. A lack of answers may be maddening, but it also allows us to rewrite stories to our satisfaction.’

May all your mysteries be fun-filled.