50th Episode!

Brook and Sarah celebrate their 50th recorded episode by reflecting on what they’ve learned, their favourite episodes so far, and a few future episode ideas.

Discussed in order

Agatha Christie (February 22, 2022)

Arthur Conan Doyle (March 22, 2022)

Dorothy L. Sayers (April 12, 2022)

Anna Katharine Green (May 3, 2022)

Wilkie Collins (May 10, 2022)

Noir and Hardboiled (May 24, 2022)

Historical Mystery with Sara Rosett (September 20, 2022)

For more information

Instagram: @cluedinmystery
Contact us: hello@cluedinmystery.com
Music: Signs To Nowhere by Shane Ivers – www.silvermansound.com

Transcript

This transcript is generated by a computer and there may be some mis-spellings and strange punctuation. We try to catch these before posting, but some things slip through.

Sarah	Welcome to Clued in Mystery. I’m Sarah.
Brook	And I’m Brook and we both love mystery.
Sarah	Hi Brook.
Brook	Hi Sarah. How are you on this very special day?
Sarah	Yeah, I’m okay, thanks. I’m still getting over a cold you can you can hear it my voice probably but um, yeah I’m super excited to to talk to you today.
Brook	Today is our official fiftieth recording I will say so our fiftieth episode together.
Sarah	I I can’t believe it. I’m so excited. I’m really proud of us.
Brook	I am so proud of us and I agree I cannot believe that we’ve done this fifty times. It does not feel like that.
Sarah	No, it doesn’t at all. I was looking through our list of episodes though and we’ve talked about a whole bunch of things under the mystery umbrella. And I feel like I’ve learned a lot. But I don’t feel like I’ve learned anywhere near as much as there is to learn.
Brook	That is the theme isn’t it. So you know today, we just want to talk about the things we’ve learned, the things we still want to learn, some of our favorite ah episodes and moments that we’ve had over the last year and um, yeah, and just kind of celebrate where we’ve come and where we’re going. And I agree Sarah, I knew when we started the podcast that I was going to learn a lot and you know that was one of the reasons you and I wanted to do this was to learn about more about mystery, especially the history and the um some of the great writers of the golden age those kind of topics. But I did not expect sort of the Pandora’s box that was going to be opened up and how I so I almost feel now like I have more to learn than when we started.
Sarah	Yeah, it’s interesting you say that because I think I feel very similarly that even though we’ve done fifty episodes and we’ve talked about you know, different um categories in the mystery genre I feel like we’ve really only scratched the surface and there’s so much more that we could talk about any of the things that we’ve already talked about and we still haven’t talked about everything that we could talk about.
Brook	Exactly exactly it just goes on and on and on. Well we were really lucky to have a few of our listeners ah tell us about some of their favorite episodes. So, thank you for those of you who answered our call on social media to let us know about your favorite show so far Reginathesouthernista is an avid mystery reader and she’s an Instagram personality and she says “I loved your very first episodes about Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.” So thank you, Regina and our fellow mystery author. And very knowledgeable listener Patricia Meredith says “I loved your episodes about Dorothy L Sayers Anna Katharine Green and Wilkie Collins. Congratulations on fifty episodes.” Thank you Patricia and um, speaking of Anna Katharine Green after our Nancy Drew and the hardy boys episode just last week Patricia reached out to let us know that green wrote mysteries featuring. Girl detective Violet Strange and first of all what a perfect name for a sleuth. Good job Anna Katharine Green. But that was just an example right there. Violet Strange did not come up in my research for that episode and there’s something else. We need to learn about.
Brook	JC  Fuller is another mystery author friend of ours and she makes the funniest bookish reels and Tiktok videos. So if you if that sounds interesting to you go find jcfuller but she says “I enjoyed the Agatha Christie series you did”. And JC we had a ton of fun researching and learning about Agatha Christie too so we’re glad you enjoyed it.
Sarah	Yeah, those are those are um, wonderful pieces of feedback and and I I agree those are some of my favorite episodes as well and I think I’d like to do some more episodes about Agatha Christie and some of the other characters that she created
Sarah	Ah, as well as explore some other authors who were kind of pioneers in the genre who um, maybe at the time were really well-known but have lost some of that awareness with readers and so I’d I’d love to dig into some of those in in some future episodes.
Brook	Yeah I agree. We’ve had some suggestions by people. Um some of our listeners of authors we should check out. And they’re definitely in that category where for whatever reason they didn’t remain you know popular or at the tip of everyone’s tongues and so they’ve kind of in a sense been lost to history. So, I would really like to investigate some of those too and bring them back to um, the forefront. So other people can can enjoy them. And I would agree with you, Sarah, the Agatha Christie episodes were some of my favorite as well. I think my top favorite was the disappearance of Agatha episode. That was so much fun to research and learn about I love talking about the theories of her disappearance both ours and you know other people’s theories. Um, and I I love that it is an eternal mystery. We’re we’re never going to know what really happened and that’s just so fun since it originated with the Queen of Crime. And it was also great to read the fiction that came out of a real life event because that’s a topic that you and I come back to over and over is that real life then sometimes inspires fictional stories and it definitely happened in that situation.
Sarah	I really enjoyed that episode as well and I had a really hard time thinking about or picking my favorite episode that we’ve done. Because I think after every conversation we have um I say “I loved that. That was so great.” They’re all my favorites. But I really have enjoyed when we’ve brought on a guest to talk about something that you know we don’t know as much about or you know it’s something that they’re an expert in. And I I think I really enjoyed the episode or the conversation that we had with Frances from Chronicles of Crime about noir and hardboiled and she just knows so much about that. And so that was really fun because that for me was something that I had not read a lot of um and just to kind of understand a little bit more about that.
Brook	Yeah I agree that the interview episodes are always so much fun I counted up. We’ve had twelve guests so twelve of our fifty episodes have been with friends. You know, I remember, Sarah the first time we talked about inviting someone to come on the show and we were a little nervous like “will anyone be interested? This brand new podcast.” But I think to date we’ve only had one person turn us down and that was because of ah you know an extenuating circumstance so people have been so wonderful and really anxious to come on the show another favorite ah interview of ours was ah Sara Rosett. I loved talking to Sara. She’s such an accomplished person in the mystery space and it was really an honor to have her on the show. But like you say, I could name like you say every one of them was was special and informative and just such a great addition to to our show.
Sarah	Just hearing you talking about that and thinking about kind of all of the different things that we’ve done. Have we done three of the What Would You Do episodes. And I really enjoy that where we kind of look at a book and and and and talk about what you know if if I was the main character, what would I do in this situation that that the author has put the character into? And I think that’s that’s been super fun to do both as a reader and as an author in terms of thinking about how books are structured and how some of the decisions that an author might make when they’re creating their books.
Brook	Yes, that’s a great point I always feel like we’re in a book club when we do those, Sarah. Like you know you know your friends out there are reading the same book as you and then you get to talk about it later I I love those episodes and and I know we have another one coming up soon. So that’ll be great.
Sarah	I think one of the other things that I’ve learned over the last just over a year is um, what I really like about mystery. So I’ve always felt that mystery. Um. There’s mystery elements in almost everything that we read or maybe everything that we read, right? Because there’s the question of who or what or why? But those having those questions doesn’t make a book a mystery and so I’ve been thinking a bit about that and that relationship between like what is it that actually makes a book a mystery um and I’ve been thinking about that because I’ve made some um some reading choices that I’ve been really disappointed in recently where a book has been pitched as being a mystery and then I’ve read it and then thought “no this actually wasn’t a mystery” and so it’s been really disappointing as a reader to have been expecting something. But you know so it had questions of who or what or why. But was more ultimately general fiction or women’s fiction rather than than being a mystery. And so I think um over the last year I’ve really come to um, be able to better articulate what I love about mystery and and what I want when I’m reading a mystery.
Brook	Yes, that’s definitely true for me as well. And I think it speaks to the um, the popularity of the genre when we see some of those stories marketed as mysteries when really they just have a mystery element in there, which as you say all good story should right? So um, that sounds like a topic for an upcoming episode, Sarah.
Sarah	I think I think we could talk about it but I also don’t want to be really critical of the of the books because the books they weren’t bad. They just weren’t what I thought they were going to be and you know that’s a decision that someone made when they were marketing the books and that may not be the fault of the author. Um, I don’t I don’t want to be . . . I’m critical of that happening, but I’m not necessarily critical of the of the books But it is yeah it is disappointing to be like well “where’s the where’s the murder?”
Brook	Yes, we have to have that, right?
Brook	And speaking of things that you’ve learned, you know I um as a lot of us bookish people probably have those notebooks that either you’ve purchased or someone’s gifted to you that you’d never write in it because you don’t want to mess it up. And I had this really beautiful bound dot grid notebook that I thought um had just been sitting on my shelf. And when we started the podcast, Sarah I thought okay this is a ah good reason to start using that beautiful notebook. It’s been so fun watching it fill up with different colors of ink and highlighters and post-it notes and all my notes from our different episodes and you know what? It’s not even quite halfway finished. So um. I’m sure that we have at least fifty more episodes in us. Um, at least the notebook does.
Sarah	Oh, Brook. I love this that you have kept everything in in a notebook and um, yeah I agree we have I would like to think at least fifty more episodes because there’s just so much that we can talk about in mystery.
Brook	Yes.
Sarah	I hope we can continue to do that.
Brook	Another thing that struck me is, yes during the past year I would have been reading mysteries of course but there are many many books that I never would have read if we hadn’t been preparing for episodes. Um, but because we were being really specific about a certain topic or a subgenre you know I have read a lot of political thrillers and spy thrillers that I wouldn’t have read um and and experimented in the world of mystery so that has been really enriching for me and some of my favorite books that I’ve picked up because of the of the show are the Bella Ellis Bronte sister mysteries and ah Mystery Manon who was also a guest on the show suggested the Elizabeth Peters series um and those have been ah, there’s one of those authors that I hadn’t. Read before but because of the show I’ve learned about and and they’re really great and then of course, Sarah you have turned me on to Anthony Horowitz’s work and now I’m a big fan just like you.
Sarah	Yeah I I think we should um, go through and count up how many times I’ve mentioned Anthony Horowitz because it’s probably close to every episode.
Brook	It’s an Easter egg hunt for our listeners.
Sarah	Yeah, like you Brook, there’s been some books that I’ve read over the last um year and a bit that I probably wouldn’t have read if it weren’t for the podcast. Ah and ah one example of that is um, some short story collections. I really hadn’t read a lot of short stories before we started the podcast but I’ve really um, really come to enjoy them and have been you know, checking short story collections out of the library a result because they’re just such a great way to kind of get introduced to different to different authors.
Brook	That’s awesome. Yeah, and I really enjoyed our episode on short stories and it brought that all the good things about short stories ah to the forefront again and and there are so many good mystery short stories.
Sarah	So, you know I know this has been a ah different episode because we haven’t talked about anything you know specific in the mystery space. We’ve just been waxing on about how much we love mysteries generally and how much we’ve and enjoyed the podcast. how much we’ve enjoyed making this podcast. I hope our listeners have enjoyed listening to us talk for the last fifty episodes and will continue to listen to us as we continue our education. In mystery.
Brook	Absolutely and we would love to hear ideas for shows that you’d like to learn about if there’s a topic or a subgenre that you want to hear more about we’d be anxious to research and share what we learn. And we want to thank you all for being here for our first fifty episodes. We hope that we get to do this for a lot longer. Thank you for joining us on Clued and Mystery. I’m Brook.
Sarah	And I’m Sarah, and we both love mystery.