Return of the Son of Murder Monday
I'm back home and almost through the busy season, so hopefully this will be the last useless placeholder for a while.
I didn't actually finish reading anything this week, either! I did have the opportunity to attend an old-school Sherlockian meetup, which was a lot of fun. Highlights of the event included: a summary of "Silver Blaze" composed entirely of clickbait headlines and a guy getting summarily shouted down for trying to make an analogy with his other fandom, Hannibal.
I took home five copies of The Serpentine Muse "a quarterly publication of The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes." This is a zine of about twenty pages with club and fandom news, light verse, speculations on the fates of minor characters, commentary and criticism both earnest and facetious (the latter tending to culminate in a pun of some kind) and toasts to various character categories and characters, Irene Adler and the milk-drinking snake being clear favorites.
One of the most interesting articles was a brief summary of the case of Mary Ann Cotton, a real woman who poisoned between 15 and 20 people with arsenic over a period of twenty years. The author suggests that this is "the most winning woman [Holmes] ever knew" who "was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money," though it appears Cotton was only convicted of one murder and probably committed more than three.
The Listerdale Mystery (a short story collection) was waiting for me when I arrived home last night; I've only read the title story so far, notable for a greater density of snobbery than usual for Christie (the protagonist is a victim of "genteel poverty" who dreads having to share a roof with "fellow-lodgers who always seem to be half-castes") and half the second story, "Philomel Cottage," which is nicely creepy in a mundane way.
I didn't actually finish reading anything this week, either! I did have the opportunity to attend an old-school Sherlockian meetup, which was a lot of fun. Highlights of the event included: a summary of "Silver Blaze" composed entirely of clickbait headlines and a guy getting summarily shouted down for trying to make an analogy with his other fandom, Hannibal.
I took home five copies of The Serpentine Muse "a quarterly publication of The Adventuresses of Sherlock Holmes." This is a zine of about twenty pages with club and fandom news, light verse, speculations on the fates of minor characters, commentary and criticism both earnest and facetious (the latter tending to culminate in a pun of some kind) and toasts to various character categories and characters, Irene Adler and the milk-drinking snake being clear favorites.
One of the most interesting articles was a brief summary of the case of Mary Ann Cotton, a real woman who poisoned between 15 and 20 people with arsenic over a period of twenty years. The author suggests that this is "the most winning woman [Holmes] ever knew" who "was hanged for poisoning three little children for their insurance-money," though it appears Cotton was only convicted of one murder and probably committed more than three.
The Listerdale Mystery (a short story collection) was waiting for me when I arrived home last night; I've only read the title story so far, notable for a greater density of snobbery than usual for Christie (the protagonist is a victim of "genteel poverty" who dreads having to share a roof with "fellow-lodgers who always seem to be half-castes") and half the second story, "Philomel Cottage," which is nicely creepy in a mundane way.