The First Whodunnit

What was the first murder mystery, really?

No major spoilers about clues or endings in this episode. However, there is some mention or discussion of the books listed below.

Sources and further information:

— The Mysterious Affair at Styles by Agatha Christie

— Partners In Crime by Agatha Christie

— A Study In Scarlet by Arthur Conan Doyle

— The Mystery Of A Hansom Cab by Fergus Hume

— The Moonstone by Wilkie Collins

— L’Affaire Lerouge by Emile Gaboriau

— Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon

— The Suspicions of Mr Whicher by Kate Summerscale

— Bleak House by Charles Dickens

— "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" by Edgar Allen Poe

— The Omnibus of Crime (1929) edited by Dorothy L. Sayers

— "The Masque of the Red Death" by Edgar Allen Poe

— "The Fall of the House of Usher" by Edgar Allen Poe

— "The Imp of the Perverse" by Edgar Allen Poe

— Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

— The Late Scholar by Jill Paton Walsh

— Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu

— "A Passage in the Secret History of an Irish Countess" by Sheridan Le Fanu

— The Aeneid by Virgil

— Uncle Silas by Sheridan Le Fanu

— The Labours of Hercules by Agatha Christie

— Oedipus Rex by Sophocles

—“Who Wrote the First Whodunit?” by Steven Saylor

— “Oedipus on the Nile: translations and adaptations of Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos in Egypt, 1900-1970” by Raphael Christian Cormack —“Oedipus the Detective” by Sean Fitzpatrick

— “Oedipus as Detective: Sophocles, Simenon, Robbe-Grillet” by Page Dubois in Yale French Studies, 2005

— “Oedipus versus Sherlock Holmes” by Marios Ploritis and Richard Schechner in The Tulane Drama Review, Winter 1965

—“From Sophocles to Sherlock: economics, literature and the detective story” by Frank Edmund Smith

—“Fergus Hume’s startling story” by Simon Caterson

—"‘The Most Popular Book of Modern Times’: Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886)" by Clare Clarke in Late Victorian Crime Fiction in the Shadows of Sherlock

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Find a full transcript of this episode at shedunnitshow.com/thefirstwhodunnittranscript.

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