Mysterious Days: 31 May

1939
Charlie Chan in Reno is released.

The second Chan film to feature Sidney Toler as Charlie Chan, it co-starred Sen Yung as his son Jimmy.

Sen Yung on right, Sydney Toler, Ricardo Cortez next to woman

Mysterious Days: 30 May

1902
George Sims, is born in Iowa. He uses the pseudonym Paul Cain for his stories which are published in Black Mask. His only novel is The Fast One (1933) the story of gunman Gerry Kells and his dipsomaniac lover S Grandquist. Some consider it the "toughest tough guy novel ever written" which remains "as violent and disturbing today as when it first appeared."

1912
The "professor" of detection, Julian Symons, is born in London. A noted scholar, critic, biographer, novelist, president of the Detection Club, and Mystery Writers of America Grand Master (1982).

He is the author of:
The Thirty-first of February (1950)
The Plot Against Roger Rider (1973)

His erudite study of crime literature, Bloody Murder (in US - Mortal Consequences) is a cornerstone analysis of the genre.

Mysterious Days: 29 May

1893
Frederick Faust, creator of Dr. Kildare, is born in Seattle, Washington. As Max Brand, he writes mysteries and Westerns, becoming a constant contributor to the pulps in the 1920s and 1930s.

1963
The first James Bond movie, Dr. No, starring Sean Connery and Ursula Andress is released.

Mysterious Days: 28 May

1874
GK Chesterton is born in London. Chesterton is the author of the Father Brown mysteries and the novel the Man Who Was Thursday.

1908
Ian Fleming is born in London. He is the creator of Bond. James Bond.

1954
Dial M For Murder, Alfred Hitchcock's film starring Ray Milland, Grace Kelly and John Williams, is released. It is based on a play by Frederick Knott. Originally shot in flatscreen, it will be withdrawn so 3D effects can be added.

1958
Alfred Hitchcock's movie Vertigo, starring James Stewart and Kim Novak, is released.

Mysterious Days: 27 May

1894
Dashiell Hammett is born in St. May's Countty, Maryland. He works as a Pinkerton operative before turning to writing. He is of the hard-boiled school, author of The The Thin Man, Red Harvest, and The Dain Curse, as well as The Maltese Falcon.

1925
Tony Hillerman is born in Sacred Heart, Oklahoma. Raised among Native Americans, he writes mysteries featuring Lt Joe Leaphorn and Sgt Jim Chee.

Mysterious Days: 26 May

1894
Paul Lukas (born Pal Lukacs) is born in Budapest, Hungary. Although he won an Oscar for his role in Watch on the Rhine, and played Philo Vance in The Casino Murder Case (1931), he is best known as Professor Arronax in Walt Disney's 1954 film, Twenty Thousand Leagues under the Sea, and as the villain in Hitchcock's The Lady Vanishes.

Mysterious Days: 25 May

1927
Robert Ludlum, best-selling author of complex, convoluted conspiracy thrillers, is born in New York. His novels (The Osterman Weekend (1972), The Icarus Agenda (1988)) usually feature "the ordinary man in extraordinary circumstances" - involved with apocalyptic secret plots.

1932
The outspoken journalist, social critic and novelist John Gregory Dunne is born in New York. His True Confessions (1975) ostensibly based on the infamous "Black dahlia" murder case, is actually an indictment of corruption in Los Angeles city government and in the Roman Catholic church.

Mysterious Days: 24 May

1952
Obsessive one-up man Anthony Abbott (born Fulton Oursler) dies. His mystery novels featuring New York police commissioner Thatcher Colt usually begin with the word "About" (About the Murder of the Night Club Lady, 1931). He does this so the books will appear first on any library lists (that are sorted by title rather than author, anyway!)

Mysterious Days: 23 May

1934
Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow are ambushed by Texas Rangers outside Gibsland, Louisiana. The posse rakes the bandit duo with hundreds of bullets, killing them in their roadster. At the time of death Bonnie was eating a baloney sandwich and Clyde is shoeless-having been driving in his socks.

Mysterious Days: 22 May

1859
Arthur Conan Doyle, creator of Sherlock Holmes, is born in Edinburgh, Scotland.

1885
Victor Hugo, author of the historic French novel Les Miserable, dies. The novel tells the story of fugitive Jean Valjean, who is relentlessly pursued by Inspector Javert for the crime of stealing a loaf of bread.

1966
The 271st-and final-episode of Perry Mason, the series starring Raymond Burr, "The Final Fadeout" is broadcast.

Mysterious Days: 21 May

1917
Raymond Burr, who creates Erle Stanley Gardner's Perry Mason in the late 1950s TV series, is born in New Westminster, British Columbia. In the late 1960s he will become Ironside. And ofcourse...you must see his performance in Rear Window (1952)

1924
In an attrmpt to commit the perfect crime, University of Chicago honor students Nathan Leopold and Richard Loeb kidnap and murder 14-year-old Bobbie Franks. (Hitchcock's 1948 film Rope is based on this case.)

1958
Touch of Evil, a dark tale of a psychopathic cop in a dangerous Mexican border town, starring Orson Welles and Charlton Heston, opens.

1989
Miami Vice, the "definitive" 1980s TV cop series, ends its 5 year run on NBC. The show makes a star of Don Johnson, revitalizes the Miami tourist trade, and creates a fashion craze for pastel t-shirts worn with oversize Italian sports jackets.

Mysterious Days: 20 May

1904
Margery Allingham is born in London. She is the creator of Albert Campion, who had originally been intended as an update of the Scarlet Pimpernel. He first appears in The Black Dudley Mystery in 1929. Her most famous novel is The Tiger in the Smoke (1952). "The Smoke" is a nickname for the city of London.

1933
The first radio series based on Earl Derr Bigger's character harlie Chan broadcasts its final episode. Waltert Connolly plays the title role. (Charle Chan is a popular character and will appear in movies and radio throughout the 1940s. There will be a TV series in the 1950s.

1956
Stanley Kubrick's The Killing, from Lionel White's novel Clean Break, is released, starring Sterling Hayden as the mastermind behind an elaborate racetrack library. Kubrick co-writes the screenplay with novelist Jim Thompson.

Mysterious Days: 19 May

1932
Paul E. Erdman (May 19, 1932 - April 23, 2007 in Sonoma County, California) , Swiss banker imprisoned briefly for the failure of his bank in 1969, turned mystery writer, is born in Stratford, Ontario. The result of his first prison writing attempt was the Edgar-award winning financial mystery The Billion Dollar Sure Thing (1973). His next novel, The Silver Bears (1975) was a fictionalized version of the events that led to his imprisonment.

The Billion Dollar Sure Thing (1973)
The Silver Bears (1974)
The Crash Of '79 (1976)
The Last Days Of America (1981)
The Panic Of '89 (1986)
The Palace (1987)
The Swiss Account (1992)
Zero Coupon (1993)
The Set-up (1997)

Mysterious Days: 18 May

1909
Phoebe Atwood Taylor (aka Alice Tilton) creator of detectives Asey Mayo and Leonidas Witherall, is born in Boston, MA.

1955
Director Robert Aldrich's Kill Me Deadly is released. It stars Ralph Meeker as Mickey Spillane.

Mysterious Days: 17 May

1904
Actor Jean Gabin is born in France. He will portray Inspector Maigret in three films. In 1937, he starred in the first film version of the life of French gangster Pepe le Moko, remade the following year as Algiers, starring Charles Boyer.

Inspector Maigret 1958
Maigret and the St. Fiacre Case 1959
Maigret voit rouge 1963



1950
Director Nicholas Ray's noir film, In a Lonely Place, starring Humphrey Bogart and Gloria Grahame, based on the novel by Dorothy Hughes, is released.

Mysterious Days: 16 May

1937
Thomas Gifford, author of The Wind Chill Factor, a thriller in the "resurrected Nazi" genre, is born in Dubuque, Iowa. Some of his later novels are The Glendower Legacy (1978) and The Assassini (1990).

1956
Alfred Hitchcock's second version of The Man Who Knew Too Much, starring James Stewart and Doris Day, is released. This film garners for Hitchcock one of the few Oscars awarded to his works - for Doris Day's rendition of "Que Sera, Sera."

Mysterious Days: 15 May

1926
Anthony (15 May, 1926-6 November, 2001) and Peter Shaffer (b 15 May, 1926) are born in Liverpool, England. Although they are best known for their work, seperately and together, for the stage and screen, they collaborate on three detective novels during the 1950s under the pseudonym Peter Anthony.

The Woman in the Wardrobe - A lighthearted detective story (1951) – by Peter Antony with pictures by Nicolas Bentley dedicated to my parents with deepest love and appreciation
How Doth the Little Crocodile? (1952) – co-written with Peter Shaffer, published under the pseudonym "Peter Anthony"
Withered Murder (1955) – co-written with Peter Shaffer, published under the pseudonym "Peter Anthony"

Anthony Shaffer
Sleuth (1970)
Murderer (1975)
Whodunnit (1977)
Frenzy (1972) screenplay
Murder on the Orient Express (1974) uncredited rewrite of screenplay
The Wicker Man (1973)

Peter Shaffer
The Royal Hunt of the Sun (1964)
Equus (1974)
Amadeus (1979)
Lettice and Lovage (1987)

Mysterious Days: 14 May

1818
Matthew Gregory Lewis, whose gothic thriller The Monk (1795) creates a scandal in late 18th century England due to its excessive blood, sacrilege, murder and "immorality", dies of yellow fever at sea (en route from Jamaica to England).

No, you're not being gaslighted

If there were posts here yesterday that you read, which are not here today, it's because...they're not here.

Blogger.com, the platform that hosts this blog, was down for much of yesterday afternoon and all night...just coming up now (11 am mountain time.) And all posts made yesterday have disappeared.

Supposedly, those posts will be restored. I'll give them a day to do so, and if not, will re-post them tomorrow.

Sorry for the inconvenience!

Mysterious Days: 13 May

1907
Daphne du Maurier is born in London. She is the author of Jamaica Inn, made into a movie by Hitchcock in 1939, Rebecca (made into a movie by Alfred Hitchcock in 1940), and The Birds, made into a movie by Hitchcock in 1963.



1941
Alan Ladd stars as the psycho assassin Philip Raven in the film version of Graham Greene's This Gun For Hire, released on this day. (It also starred Robert Preston and Veronica Lake)



1948
The Iron Curtain, directed by William A. Wellman, starring Dana Andrews and Gene Tierney, is released. "Hollywood fired its first shot in the cold war yesterday, and they're ready to fight it out to the last sneer...A highly inflammatory film" commented Bosley Crowther in the New York Times.

Mysterious Days: 12 May

1881
Achmed Abdullah (ne Alexander Nicholayevitch Romanoff) is born in Yalta. Author of a popular series of adventure novels in the 1910s and 1920s, his most renowned work is The Thief of Bagdad, (1924), the source for the various movie incarnations of that story.


Leslie Charteris and Roger Moore (1960s Saint on TV)
1907
Leslie Charteris, creator of Simon Templar (aka The Saint) is born in Singapore. Born Leslie Clarles Bowyer Yin, his mother was English, his father Chinese - a physician.

In 1926 he adopts the pseudonym Leslie Charteris because of his admiration for Colonel Francis Charteris, the notorious duelist, gambler, rogue and founder of the Hellfire Club.

From the Saint's first appearance (1928, in Meet the Tiger) the modern Robin Hood was an enormous hit.

As a youth, Charteris produced and illustrated his own magazine. One of his stick-figure drawings eventually became known as the calling card of the Saint.


George Sanders played The Saint in 4 movies in the 1940s. Despite this advertisement, the Saint Overboard and the Saint's Vacation were never made. Sanders left the series to play as similar role as Gay Lawrence, the Falcon, for 3 movies, then turned that role over to his brother Tom Conway and moved on to other things.

Mysterious Days: 11 May

1892
Margaret Rutherford, who will play Agatha Christie's Miss Marple four times, is born in London. She was a popular British character actress - her first "breakthrough" role on screen being Madame Arcati in Blithe Spirit.

Mysterious Days: 10 May

1930
Edward L. Stratemyer, who founded the legendary Stratemyer sindicate, dies. "The Factory" as it was known, churned out hundreds of children's mystery and adventure novels in its heyday and gave young Americans their first taste of mystery fiction.

Among the series:
The Hardy Boys
Nancy Drew
Tom Swift (first Sr, then Jr.)
The Rover Boys
The Bobbsey Twins

Books were written by different authors using "house names."

Mysterious Days: 9 May

1932
Gavin Lyall (9 May 1932 - 18 January 2003), RAF pilot turned thriller writer, is born in Birmingham, England. Lyall used his aviation nackground to write international thrillers in the John Buchan vein (Midnight Plus One, 1965).

His later espionage novels featured Major Harry Maxim (The Crocus List, 1985) are traditional British spy tails told with a light touch.

Works
The Wrong Side of the Sky (1961)
The Most Dangerous Game (1963)
Midnight Plus One (1965)
Shooting Script (1966)
Venus With Pistol (1969)
Freedom's Battle: The War in the Air 1939-1945 (1971)
Blame the Dead (1973)
Judas Country (1975)
Operation Warboard: How to Fight World War II Battles in Miniature (1976) non-fiction, in collaboration with his son Bernard Lyall
The Secret Servant (1980)
The Conduct of Major Maxim (1982)
The Crocus List (1985)
Uncle Target (1988)
Spy's Honour (1993)
Flight from Honour (1996)
All Honourable Men (1997)
Honourable Intentions (1999)

Mysterious Days: 8 May

1946
The Blue Dahlia directed by George Marshall from a screenplay by Raymond Chandler, starring Alan Ladd and Veronica Lake, is released. Chandler's agreement with Paramount includes the condition that he be allowed to write the script at home, while drunk.

Plot from Wikipedia

Navy pilot Lieutenant Commander Johnny Morrison (Alan Ladd) is put on the inactive list. He returns home to Hollywood from the fighting in the south Pacific, bringing along his buddies and medically discharged crewmates Buzz Wanchek (William Bendix) and George Copeland (Hugh Beaumont). Buzz is prone to memory lapses and headaches, and is often short tempered, all likely due to his head wound.

Johnny finds his wife Helen (Doris Dowling) living (and partying) in a hotel bungalow. When he spots her kissing her boyfriend Eddie Harwood (Howard Da Silva), the owner of the Blue Dahlia nightclub, he punches Eddie. Though Johnny is willing to try to salvage their troubled marriage, Helen is not. She tells him that their son did not die of diphtheria as she had written him but because she got drunk at a party and crashed her car. Johnny pulls a gun on her but decides she is not worth it. He drops the pistol and walks out taking a framed photograph of their son.

When Buzz comes looking for Johnny, Helen picks him up in the hotel bar and brings him home, neither one knowing who the other is. Later, Helen calls Eddie and becomes angry when he wants to break off their relationship. Eddie drops by that night to straighten things out. All these comings and goings are noted by the house detective, "Dad" Newell (Will Wright). Dad sees Eddie and gets paid to keep his mouth shut. He later sells information about Johnny's whereabouts to his worried friends.

By chance, Johnny is offered a ride by Joyce (Veronica Lake), Harwood's estranged wife, though he tells her his name is "Jimmy Moore" and they remain unaware of their connection. He brushes off her attempts to become better acquainted and gets out of the car. but she spends the night at the same inn. When they meet again at breakfast, she talks him into a walk along the beach. However, when Johnny hears on the radio that Helen has been found dead and that the police are looking for him, he leaves without keeping the rendezvous. Joyce puts two and two together and guesses his identity.

Johnny hides out in a flophouse run by Corelli. When he catches Corelli going through his suitcase, a scuffle breaks out, during which the frame of his son's picture is broken. Johnny discovers a message written by Helen and addressed to him on the back of the photograph; it states that Eddie's real name is Bauer, and that he is wanted in New Jersey for murder. Johnny pays a visit to Eddie, but before he can do anything, Joyce shows up. Upon learning that she is Eddie's wife, Johnny leaves in disgust, in the mistaken belief that Joyce was helping her husband all along.

Meanwhile, Corelli calls Eddie's business partner Leo and tells him about Johnny. Leo and one of his men pick up Johnny by pretending to be policemen and take him to Leo's ranch. When the henchman finds and reads Helen's message, Leo has no choice but to dispose of him. Then, though his hands are tied, Johnny manages to strangle Leo and cut himself free before Eddie arrives. Eddie admits to killing a man during a robbery fifteen years ago, but denies murdering Helen, pointing out that he could easily have arranged it much more discreetly. Just then, Leo regains consciousness and tries to shoot Johnny. In the ensuing brawl, Leo accidentally kills Eddie before he himself is shot dead.

When Johnny turns himself in, he finds Buzz about to confess to Helen's murder, even though he cannot remember what happened that night. Johnny is certain he is innocent. He helps Buzz recall that he just walked out. Police Captain Hendrickson (Tom Powers) then accuses Dad (who has already admitted to blackmailing Helen). Hendrickson suggests that when she refused to pay his increased demands after her husband's return, Dad killed her, fearing that she would turn him in to the police or worse, tell Eddie. Dad confesses and pulls out a gun. When he is distracted, Hendrickson shoots him. Afterward, Johnny and Joyce get together.

Mysterious Days: 7 May

1922
Sherlock Holmes - the first American Holmes film with an all-star cast-is released. John Barrymore plays Holmes, famed German silent movie actor Gustav von Seyffertitz plays Moriarty. A young Hedda Hopper has a small role.

1942
Alfred Hitchcock's Saboteur, starring Robert Cummings and Priscilla Lane, opens. Sabateur is best remembered for its breathless climax atop the Statue of Liberty. Many of the film's bon mots are supplied by Dorothy Parker, who contributed to the screenplay.

1945
Damed robber Willie "the Actor" Sutton tunnels his way out of a staet penitentiary in Philadelphia, but unfortunately emerges a few feet away from a pair of Philly beat cops, who immediately rearrest him. ("Why do you rob banks?" "Because that's where the money is."

The real ghost of Manderley

'Daphne' by Justine Picardie (Bloomsbury) is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books

The Telegraph: The real ghost of Manderley
(from 24 Feb 2008)

by Justine Picardie
A troubled marriage, illicit loves, a spooky Cornish house?… Daphne du Maurier's life had all the ingredients of one of her own stories. Which is why Justine Picardie used her as the inspiration for her own latest novel. Here she attempts to unravel du Maurier's tangled affairs, while we present an exclusive extract from 'Daphne'

Extract from 'Daphne' by Justine Picardie
'Last night I dreamt I went to Manderley again.' Daphne du Maurier's famous opening line of Rebecca - one of the most memorable first sentences ever published - appears to beckon the reader through a padlocked iron gate and down a long, serpentine drive to a hidden mansion, a house of secrets and dreams.

When du Maurier wrote those words, she was far away from her beloved Cornwall, exiled to a foreign country, like her nameless narrator. 'I was 30 years old when I began the story,' she wrote, more than four decades later, 'in the fall of 1937 [when] my soldier husband, Boy Browning, was commanding officer of the Second Battalion, Grenadier Guards, which was stationed in Alexandria, and I was with him. We had left our two small daughters, the youngest still a baby, back in England in the care of their nanny…'

Yet in an odd twist of homesickness, what she missed most was not her children, but an abandoned house - Menabilly, which she had fallen in love with long before her marriage, dreaming of rescuing it from ruin - and it was this that she summoned up as the mysterious Manderley.

Manderley, like its inhabitant, Rebecca - a ghost as alive as the house itself - was at the heart of what became an enormously successful novel which was subsequently adapted into a Hitchcock film in 1940. And it was with the proceeds from Rebecca that du Maurier was able to lease Menabilly in 1943, so that she could move into the place that had provided her with such inspiration.

She could never fully possess the house - it had been entailed to the Rashleigh family for 800 years, and still continues to be - but it possessed her, almost as if it were an elusive lover. By 1957, du Maurier had written two more novels set in Menabilly - The King's General, based on the history of the house as a Royalist stronghold during the Civil War, and My Cousin Rachel, in which it provided not only the setting, but a key part of the plot, in a story of a woman as enigmatic and compelling as Rebecca.

Thus, 20 years after she had written Manderley into life, du Maurier was living in the house at the end of that twisting drive; a haunted, shadowy place hidden from the road and the sea, surrounded by dense woodland and a headland of sheer cliffs and jagged rocks. Her reclusive reputation was well-established by then - Menabilly was never open to sightseers; its gates remained closed to all but du Maurier's closest family and friends. Yet in July 1957, she was due to hold a party there to celebrate her silver wedding anniversary with her husband, who was by then a lieutenant general, honoured with a knighthood and a senior position at Buckingham Palace as treasurer to the Duke of Edinburgh.

Sir Frederick Browning - known to his military colleagues as 'Boy' and to his family as 'Tommy' - was a charismatic and dashing man; as handsome and patrician as Lawrence Olivier's screen portrayal of the hero of Rebecca, Maxim de Winter. And the story of his and Daphne's engagement is as romantic as any of her novels; indeed, it was brought about by her first book, The Loving Spirit, a fictionalised account of a Cornish boat-building family, written by du Maurier soon after her father bought a holiday house overlooking the Fowey estuary in the 1920s.

Tommy Browning was 34, a decade older than Daphne, when he sailed to Fowey in 1931, on leave from his regiment, a journey he was inspired to make after reading The Loving Spirit. The two did not meet, though Daphne and her elder sister, Angela, spotted the attractive-looking Army major on his boat, Ygdrasil.

The following spring, Tommy returned to Fowey, still in search of the girl who had written The Loving Spirit. Introductions were made - his father had met her father at the Garrick Club; he had been at Eton with her cousins - and so began a swift courtship. In her diary for 8 April, 1932, du Maurier wrote: 'A fine bright day with a cold wind. In the afternoon I went out with Browning in his boat. It was the most terrific fun, the seas short and jumpy, and he put his boat hard into it, and we got drenched with spray...

'He's the most amazing person to be with, no effort at all, and I feel I've known him for years.' Just over three months later, on 19 July, they were married nearby, at Lanteglos church, and then set off aboard Tommy's boat to the Helford River and Frenchman's Creek, where they spent a honeymoon lapped by the waves. 'We couldn't have chosen anything more beautiful,' wrote du Maurier in her diary.

A quarter of a century later, du Maurier and Browning still appeared to be the most loving and charming of couples. She was beautiful, rich and famous, as well as an apparently devoted wife, entertaining Prince Philip when he came to stay at Menabilly, and accompanying Browning to Balmoral when they were invited there by The Queen. Yet just as a du Maurier novel is never quite what it seems - danger is always lurking close to the surface; a kiss can cut like a knife - her marriage to Browning was under threat, and both of them were at breaking point.

It is at this moment in du Maurier's life that I have chosen to begin my novel, Daphne - a book which is itself inspired by the blurring of fiction and reality in her own writing - when she discovered, just over a fortnight before her wedding anniversary, that Browning had suffered a catastrophic mental breakdown. He collapsed in London at the beginning of July 1957, and was hospitalised in a private nursing home near Harley Street, where it quickly became clear that he had been drinking too much, and was suffering from liver damage. Soon afterwards, du Maurier received a phone call from a woman who told her that she and Browning were in love, and that his breakdown had been triggered by the stress of concealing the affair.

Du Maurier was terribly shocked by the news, but there was no question in her mind that they should separate, nor that his trusted position at Buckingham Palace be undermined - indeed, she kept the truth from nearly everyone around her, aside from her closest family and two trusted friends, Maureen and Monty Baker-Munton. Everybody else was told that Browning was suffering from nervous exhaustion, and that his blood was going too slowly through his system. But du Maurier's own sense of guilt and spiralling anxieties became evident when she spoke to Maureen (Browning's personal assistant, whose husband, Monty, a former Spitfire pilot, was as loyal to the du Mauriers as she was).

For like Browning - and so many of her fictional personae - du Maurier had her own secrets to hide, including a wartime affair with a married man, Christopher Puxley, and two intense relationships with women, Nell Doubleday (the wife of her American publisher) and Gertrude Lawrence (the actress, who had not only appeared as the romantic lead in du Maurier's play, September Tide, but had previously been one of her father's lovers).

'It was like being faced with a great jigsaw puzzle,' du Maurier wrote to Maureen, in a long and anguished letter soon after Browning's breakdown, in which she reported her attempts to confess her own infidelities to her husband: '[I said to him] how to blame I had been for so much of his unhappiness during the past years, and came clean about the Puxley man, and then tried to explain in easy language for him to grasp how my obsessions - you can only call them that - for poor old Ellen D. and Gertrude were all part of a nervous breakdown going on inside myself, partly to do with my muddled troubles, and writing, and a fear of facing reality.'

But what was the reality that du Maurier feared facing? This is a question I have attempted to address in my novel - and the choice of fiction to explore the mysteries of her past is in part an acknowledgement that one can never know the entire truth of another's life. There has been a much speculation about her bisexuality (a subject thoroughly covered in Margaret Forster's perceptive 1993 biography).

It seems, however, that the intricate ambiguities of her love life (or lives) only begin to make sense when one considers the complexities of her relationship with her father, Sir Gerald du Maurier; for while there has never been conclusive proof that he expressed explicitly incestuous desire for his daughter, his extreme possessiveness veered towards the inappropriate. Thus when du Maurier announced, at the age of 25, that she and Browning were to be married, her father is said to have burst into tears and cried, 'It's not fair!'

He died less than two years afterwards, at the age of 61, though not before he had read du Maurier's novel The Progress of Julius, published in the year after her marriage, which describes a father who drowns his 25-year-old daughter because he cannot bear the prospect of her involvement with another man. Du Maurier's description of his incestuous feelings was remarkably open in a novel of that period - Julius's wife is shocked by his 'voracious passion' for their adolescent daughter, and when he watches her playing the flute, he is himself aware of 'an odd taste in his mouth, and a sensation in mind and body that was shameful and unclean'. (According to du Maurier's son, Kits Browning, 'It's a fascinating story, with an awful lot based on Daphne's father. Julius is utterly ruthless, but he has a magnetism and charm.')

She was the second of Gerald's three daughters, and his favourite, growing up in a sophisticated London household, the adored child of a celebrated actor who ran his own successful troupe at Wyndham's Theatre. From the start, it might have been difficult for du Maurier to face reality - or at least, to know where fantasy took over from the truth, for hers was a family imbued with theatricality and high drama.

Her parents' romance began on stage - her mother, Muriel, was a pretty young actress when she was cast opposite Gerald as the romantic lead in J.M. Barrie's play The Admirable Crichton, and Barrie went on to write a number of other plays and stories for du Maurier's family: most famously, Peter Pan, which was inspired by her cousins, the five Llewellyn Davies boys, and starred Gerald as a menacing double-act of Captain Hook and Mr Darling.

The du Mauriers formed a tight-knit group, with family nicknames and code words: 'menacing', for example, was slang for sexual attraction, which provides an intriguing context to du Maurier's own, sinister stories, where sex and murder often go hand in hand, and desire can lead to death by drowning. It therefore makes a certain sort of warped sense that at 14, on a family holiday beside the sea in Devon, she fell in love with her father's friend and nephew, her handsome cousin, Geoffrey, also an actor, and at 36 far closer in age to Gerald than Daphne.

He was already married to his second wife by then, but appears to have enjoyed the illicit flirtation with his adolescent cousin. 'As the August holiday progressed so did the understanding, and this was something that must not be told to others,' wrote du Maurier, nearly six decades later, '…and after lunch, when we all lay out on the lawn like corpses to catch the sun, rugs over our knees, Geoffrey would come and lie beside me, and feel for my hand under the rug and hold it…'

Later, the hand holding progressed to passionate kisses, when Geoffrey came to stay at the du Maurier family home, Cannon Hall in Hampstead, while his wife was convalescing in a nursing home. Du Maurier wrote in her diary at the time, 'When the others go to bed I let him kiss me in the drawing-room… It seems so natural to kiss him now… The strange thing is it's so like kissing D[addy]. There is hardly any difference between them. Perhaps this family is the same as the Borgias. D[addy] is Pope Alexander, Geoffrey is Cesare, and I am Lucretia. A sort of incest.'

Marrying Browning was, perhaps, du Maurier's way of escaping the confusion of these relationships. He was upright, honourable and courageous - he had been awarded a DSO for bravery during the First World War - and a commander of men in a milieu very different from her father's. A quarter of a century later, however, unsettling similarities between Gerald and Browning had surfaced: both drank too much, both had affairs and suffered from debilitating bouts of black depression, despite the polished demeanour they presented to the outside world. But even more disturbing to du Maurier were her mounting fears that her husband might mirror Maxim de Winter (a character who also bears some resemblance to her father; especially in Lawrence Olivier's portrayal of him in the film version of Rebecca).

'I don't want to resurrect Rebecca,' she wrote to Maureen Baker-Munton in July 1957, yet seemed to be doing exactly that, suggesting in the same letter that her husband could, 'in a blind rage, shoot me as Maxim shot Rebecca, and put my body in Yggie [Browning's boat], and take Yggie out to sea, and then the old tragedy be re-enacted, and when he married, as he would in time [the second wife would] be haunted by my ghost… The evil in us comes to the surface.'

And if Browning was de Winter, then was it Rebecca's face that she saw when she looked in the mirror at night, or did the ghost of Rebecca walk beside her, down the long corridors of Menabilly? These were the unquiet thoughts that haunted Daphne du Maurier, as she awaited her husband's return from hospital; this was the breaking point that she had reached, alone in her house of secrets, behind a locked iron gate, surrounded by woods where the leaves whispered like voices, and beyond the trees were the beckoning waves. What happened next would take an entire book to unfold in full - a novel that I have therefore written...

'Daphne' by Justine Picardie (Bloomsbury) is available for £12.99 plus £1.25 p&p from Telegraph Books

Mysterious Days: 6 May

1879
Max Marcin is born in Posen, Germany (now Poznan, Poland). He will co-author the successful play The House of Glass (1915) with George M. Cohan.

In 1940 he creates Robert Ordway, the popular radio character known to millions as The Crime Doctor. Psychiatrist-detective Ordway's investigations into cases involving the mentally aberrant become a series of B pictures from 1943 to 1949.

1915
Orson Welles is born in Kenosha, Wisconsin. Among his best performances in movies of suspense or espionage are profiteer Harry Lime in The Third Man (1949), Colonel Haki of the Turkish Secret Police in Journey into Fear (1942) and a Nazi incognito in small-town America in The Stranger (1946.)

He is also the first voice of Lamont Cranston, aka The Shadow, on the radio, and also stars as Harry Lime, anti-hero, in the Third Man radio series.

Bibliography
The Mystery Book of Days, William Malloy, Mysterious Press, 1990

Mysterious Days: 5 May

1920
Shoemaker Nicolo Sacco and fish peddler Bartolomeo Vanzetti are arrested on this day in South Baintree, Massachusetts, and charged with the April 15, 1920 robbery and murders at the Slater and Morrill shoe factory. With only circumstantial evidence presented against them, they will eventually be convicted and sentenced to execution. Current thought is that this occurred primarily because of their immigrant backgrounds and anarchist policies. Despite worldwide sentiment for them - they are one of the century's greatest judicial cause celebres-both men are electrocuted at Charlestown Prison on August 23, 1927.

Mysterious Days: 4 April

1891
Sherlock Holmes meets his nemesis, Professor Moriarty, in a struggle to the death at th eReichenbach Falls in Conan Doyle's "The Final Problem." The evenly matched adversaries fall over the cliff, locked in a deadly embrace. Both are reported death. [The Strand magazine featuring this story comes out on this day.]


Mystery of Marie Roget.
Maria Montez center, Patric Knowles on the right.
1942
Edgar Allan Poe's detective C. Auguste Dupin is renamed Dr. Paul Dupin, in Phil Rosen's movie The Mystery of Marie Roget, released on this day. It starred Patric Knowles as Dupin, and Maria Montez. The movies does not receive good reviews.

What is Queen's Quorum?

Queen's Quorum: A History of the Detective-Crime Short Story As Revealed by the 100 Most Important Books Published in this Field Since 1845 - 1951

And who is Ellery Queen?
Ellery Queen is both a fictional character and a pseudonym used by two American cousins from Brooklyn, New York: Daniel Nathan, alias Frederic Dannay (October 20, 1905 – September 3, 1982) and Manford (Emanuel) Lepofsky, alias Manfred Bennington Lee (January 11, 1905 – April 3, 1971), to write detective fiction.

In a successful series of novels that covered 42 years, Ellery Queen served as both author's name and that of the detective-hero. During the 1930s and much of the 1940s, that detective-hero was possibly the best known American fictional detective. Movies, radio shows, and television shows have been based on their works.

The two, particularly Dannay, were also responsible for co-founding and directing Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, generally considered as one of the most influential English Language crime fiction magazines of the last sixty-five years.

They were also prominent historians in the field, editing numerous collections and anthologies of short stories such as The Misadventures of Sherlock Holmes.

Their 994-page anthology for The Modern Library, 101 Years' Entertainment: The Great Detective Stories, 1841-1941, was a landmark work that remained in print for many years.

Under their collective pseudonym, the cousins were given the Grand Master Award for achievements in the field of the mystery story by the Mystery Writers of America in 1961.

"How actually did they do it? Did they sit together and hammer the stuff out word by word? Did one write the dialogue and the other the narration? ... What eventually happened was that Fred Dannay, in principle, produced the plots, the clues and what would have to be deduced from them as well as the outlines of the characters and Manfred Lee clothed it all in words. But it is unlikely to have been as clear cut as that."

The cousins also wrote four novels about a detective named Drury Lane using the pseudonym Barnaby Ross, and allowed the Ellery Queen name to be used as a house name for a number of novels written by other authors.)

According to Otto Penzler, "As an anthologist, Ellery Queen is without peer, his taste unequalled. As a bibliographer and a collector of the detective short story, Queen is, again, a historical personage. Indeed, Ellery Queen clearly is, after Poe, the most important American of mystery fiction."

Margery Allingham wrote that Ellery Queen had "done far more for the detective story than any other two men put together".




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Mysterious Days: 3 May

1901
John Collier, whose short stories of the bizarre, fantastic and mysterious are unlike anything else im modern fiction, is born in London.

His best (and largest) collection is Fancies and Goodnights (1951) and is included in Queen's Quorum.

Collier had first achieved popularity when Dashiell Hammett included his "Green Thoughts" [the story that inspired Little Shop of Horrors] in his 1931 anthology of short horror fiction, Creeps by Night.

From Wikipedia:
John Henry Noyes Collier (3 May 1901 – 6 April 1980) was a British-born author and screenplay writer best known for his short stories, many of which appeared in The New Yorker from the 1930s to the 1950s. They were collected in a 1951 volume, Fancies and Goodnights, which is still in print. Individual stories are frequently anthologized in fantasy collections.

John Collier's writing has been praised by authors such as Anthony Burgess, Ray Bradbury, Roald Dahl, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon and Paul Theroux. He was married to early silent film actress Shirley Palmer. His second marriage in 1942 was to New York actress Beth Kay (Margaret Elizabeth Eke). They divorced a decade later. He had one child, a son, from his third marriage.

Born in London in 1901, John Collier was privately educated by his uncle Vincent Collier, a novelist. When, at the age of 18 or 19, Collier was asked by his father what he had chosen as a vocation, his reply was, "I want to be a poet." His father indulged him; over the course of the next ten years Collier lived on an allowance of two pounds a week plus whatever he could pick up by writing book reviews and acting as a cultural correspondent for a Japanese newspaper. During this time, being not overly burdened by any financial responsibilities, he developed a penchant for games of chance, conversation in cafes and visits to picture galleries.

Poetry to novels and short storiesFor ten years Collier attempted to reconcile intensely visual experience opened to him by the Sitwells and the modern painters with the more austere preoccupations of those classical authors who were fashionable in the 1920s.[2] He felt that his poetry was unsuccessful, however; he was not able to make his two selves (whom he oddly described as the "archaic, uncouth, and even barbarous" Olsen and the "hysterically self-conscious dandy" Valentine) speak with one voice.[3]

Being an admirer of James Joyce, Collier found a solution in Joyce's Ulysses. "On going for my next lesson to Ulysses, that city of modern prose," he wrote, "I was struck by the great number of magnificent passages in which words are used as they are used in poetry, and in which the emotion which is originally aesthetic, and the emotion which has its origin in intellect, are fused in higher proportions of extreme forms than I had believed was possible."[3] The few poems he wrote during this time were afterwards published in a volume under the title Gemini.[2] While he had written some short stories during the period in which he was trying to find success as a poet, his career did not take shape until the publication of His Monkey Wife in 1930. It enjoyed a certain small popularity and critical approval that helped to sell his short stories.[1] As a private joke, Collier wrote a decidedly cool four-page review of His Monkey Wife, describing it as an attempt "to combine the qualities of the thriller with those of what might be called the decorative novel," and concluding with the following appraisal of the talents of its author: "From the classical standpoint his consciousness is too crammed for harmony, too neurasthenic for proportion, and his humor is too hysterical, too greedy, and too crude." [4]

His stories may be broadly classified as fantasies but are really sui generis. They feature an acerbic wit and are usually ironic or dark in tone. Like the stories of P. G. Wodehouse, they are perfectly constructed and feature a brilliant literary craftsmanship that can easily escape notice. His stories are memorable; people who cannot recall title or author will nevertheless remember "the story about the people who lived in the department store" ("Evening Primrose") or "the story in which the famous beauties that the man magically summons all say 'Here I am on a tiger-skin again'" ("Bottle Party").

A characteristic point of his style is that the titles of many of his stories reveal (or at least telegraph) what would otherwise be a surprise ending.

Two examples, both from "Over Insurance," may illustrate his style. The story opens:

Alice and Irwin were as simple and as happy as any young couple in a family-style motion picture. In fact, they were even happier, for people were not looking at them all the time and their joys were not restricted by the censorship code. It is therefore impossible to describe the transports with which Alice flew to embrace Irwin on his return from work, or the rapture with which Irwin returned her caresses.... It was at least two hours before they even thought about dinner.... Whatever was best on his plate, he found time to put it on hers, and she was no slower in picking out some dainty tidbit to put between his eager and rather rubbery lips.

They become distressed at the possibility of each others' death, and agree that their only consolation would be to cry. However, they decide that it would be better to cry in luxury. Irwin observes:

I would rather cry on a yacht," said he, "where my tears could be ascribed to the salt spray, and I should not be thought unmanly. Let us insure one another, darling, so that if the worst happens we can cry without interruption. Let us put nine-tenths of our money into insurance....

"And let us," cried she, "insure our dear bird also," pointing to the feathered cageling, whom they always left uncovered at night, in order that his impassioned trills might grace their diviner raptures.

"You are right," said he, "I will put ten bucks on the bird."

[edit] Other mediaIn the succeeding years, Collier traveled between England, France and Hollywood.[1] While he did continue to write short stories, as time went on he would turn his attention more and more towards writing screenplays.

Having moved to Hollywood in 1935, Collier wrote most prolifically for film and television. He contributed notably to the screenplays of The African Queen along with James Agee and John Huston, the Elephant Boy, The War Lord, I Am A Camera , originally Goodbye to Berlin remade later as Cabaret, Sylvia Scarlett, Her Cardboard Lover, Deception and Roseanna McCoy.

He received the Edgar Award in 1952 for the short story collection Fancies and Goodnights which also won the International Fantasy Award in 1952. His short story "Evening Primrose" was the subject of a 1966 television musical by Stephen Sondheim, and it was also adapted for the radio series Escape and by BBC Radio. Several of his stories, including "Back for Christmas," "Wet Saturday" and "De Mortuis" were adapted for the television series Alfred Hitchcock Presents.

Death
John Collier died in 1980 in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, California. Near the end of his life, he wrote, "I sometimes marvel that a third-rate writer like me has been able to palm himself off as a second-rate writer."[

Mysterious Days: 2 May

1905
Charlotte Armstrong is born in Vulcan, Michigan. She won an Edgar for her 1956 A Dram of Poison. Her 1950 novel Mischief was filmed in 1952 as Don't Bother to Knock, the first starring role for Marilyn Monroe, and Anne Bancroft's film debut. She also wrote The Unsuspected (1945) which was made into a film with Claude Rains in 1947.



1929
Bulldog Drummond, the first Drummond movie, is released. F. Richard Jones directs, Ronald Colman and Joan Bennett star.


1946.
The Postman Always Rings Twice, directed by Tay Garnett and starring John Garfirld and Lana Turner, opens. Despite the censors a good deal of the simmering sexuality of the James M. CAin novel is preserved - due to the performance of the Sweater Girl.

1946
Also in 1946, the inmates of Alcatraz prison revolt. Two platoons of marines armed with machine guns, bazookas and tear gas are necessary before the convicts surrender. Over the course of the two days, two guards and three inmates are killed.

Mysterious Days: 1 May

Henri Landru
1915.
French mass murderer Henri Landru takes out his first lovelorn ad in the Parisian newspaper Le Journal and in this fashion the "French Bluebeard" lures at least ten victims to their death.

Alvin Karpis
1936.
Alvin Karpis, who follows John Dillinger as "Public Enemy Number One" is captured in New Orleans by J. Edgar Hoover and a small army of G-Men. Sentenced to life imprisonment at Alcatraz, he is eventually released. He will die in Europe in 1979.


1939.
Batman, the first and best-known of the costumed comic book heroes to utilize detective skills in addition to fisticuffs, debuts in issue 27 of Detective Comics. His first story is "The Case of the Chemical Syndicate." In the tale "the Batman" battles Alfred Stryker, a business executive turned murderer, finally tossing him into a vat of acid and leaving him with the epitaph: "A fitting end for his kind." Batman would become less grim as the years passed (only to be resurrected as the very grim "Dark Knight" in the 1990s.