As part of our lighter August load, we decided to return to childhood detective stories. At the time, that seemed friendly and reasonable and Encyclopedia Brown went well. This episode ... went slightly sideways.

We don't dig into the actual book as much, using it instead as an occasion to duck into a couple of side conversations*. And that's a very different approach from our usual.

We begin by spending a lot of time talking about Alfred Hitchcock and publishing seals of approval used for marketing purposes.

Brick bounces us from Jupiter Jones into a discussion of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes and the complexities of interpretation in an age of rewrites, reboots, and reimaginings. Kathryn talks about discovering, as an adult, how racist the book she read as a child is. And we end, as sometimes happens, with a reflection on what we see as the value of the humanities and the function of art.

Thanks for joining us again. We will be back … soon …. (We’re sorry we can’t be more specific, but we are in the U.S. and dealing with the tension and increased work-load of university after university insisting on starting face-to-face classes and then abruptly “pivoting” to online instruction.)

*Kathryn hates talking this way about genre, but it's usable shorthand for podcast purposes.