The following is a reprint of my 2021 article from Mystery & Suspense titled “Supernatural Detectives: Ten Supernatural Thrillers that are Also Great Detective Stories.” For more on crime fiction, see my post “Hard-Boiled Detectives: Unveiling Detective Fiction’s Thrilling Dark Influence.” Any good mystery draws the reader into a sinister puzzle (usually involving murder) while…
The Ziegfeld Follies changed American entertainment in a big way. When Florenz Ziegfeld, Jr., introduced the Follies of 1907 at the New York Theatre on Broadway, he took spectacle to a whole new level. It started as an uncertain experiment. It blossomed into an entertainment empire that ran until 1931 (with periodic revivals after Ziegfeld’s…
Edythe Baker was a distinctive figure in jazz world during the 1920s and 1930s, making her mark in a male-dominated profession. She excelled as a jazz pianist, composer, and recorder of popular music. Her beauty and talent also led her to both dance and play the piano in the renowned Florenz Ziegfeld’s Midnight Frolic. Performing…
Detectives in the Shadows: A Hard-Boiled History by Susanna Lee, as published in The Interdisciplinary Journal of Popular Culture and Pedagogy, in March 2023. Susanna Lee’s Detectives in the Shadows is an incisive, entertaining jaunt through the hard-boiled genre from its pulp-fiction origins to the present. Lee, Professor and Chair of the Department of French…
Rereading Louise Brooks’s writing of her early years in New York City, published as Chapter One in Lulu in Hollywood, I’m struck by the unique blend of detail, candor, and lack of pretension or sentiment. She credits her success in the city to a soda jerk who tamed her accent, a waiter who refined her…
Revised April 2, 2025 A Salome story: I spent many years working with historical documents at the Library of Congress and other cultural heritage institutions. Historical documents, also known as primary sources, provide firsthand evidence about people, events, and ideas from the past. Primary sources can reveal great stories about what has—and hasn’t—changed over time….
Revised March 26, 2025 The telephone and “Hello Girls” were wildly disruptive when they arrived at the end of the 19th century. They were radical innovations that brought change, not the least for single women, both in the workplace and in the male imagination. Women dominated the ranks of telephone operators early on, starting with…
Modified March 25, 2025 Autistic characters—both in stories and real life—have always existed. What we now call autism has long been part of the human condition, even though medicine only began identifying the particular set of physical and mental traits associated with it within the last 100 years. This issue has special relevance to me….
Revised March 25, 2025 Women doctors now make up about 60 percent of practitioners under 35. The situation was very different in the past. No Women Doctors Need Apply In her book “Doctors Wanted, No Women Need Apply”: Sexual Barriers in the Medical Profession, 1835-1975, Mary Roth Walsh recounts the terrible difficulty women faced in…
Posted on February 20, 2020 by billlefurgy Updated, March 25, 2025 A viral song elbowed sex into American popular culture during the early years of the twentieth century. I learned more about this while researching my historical mystery book Into the Suffering City, which is set in 1909 Baltimore. Ragtime Music Sets the Stage for Controversial Songs Romance…