The Lost Detectives Podcast is hosted by Dr Claire Whitehead with contributing guest Carol Adlam. In it we discuss cross-media adaptation, covering adaptation of both contemporary and historical literary works into media including TV, stage, audio, and graphic novel, and of video games into immersive live performance installation. We also discuss the theory as well as practice of transmedia adaptation.
Episode One: Dr Claire Whitehead and Carol Adlam discuss the adaptation of two novels first published in 1872: Semyon Panov’s novel Tri suda ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala [Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball], which Adlam has adapted in graphic novel form as The Bobrov Affair, and Nikolai Timofeev’s Zapiski sledovatelia [Notes of an Investigator], adapted by Adlam as an audio play entitled Today in 1864, and as Spade and Sand, a verse drama. Recorded in St Andrews, 12/12/2019, with Claire Whitehead and Carol Adlam. Readings by: Victoria Donovan, Emily Finer, Jesse Gardiner, Margarita Vaysman, Mikhail Vodopyanov, & Claire Whitehead.
A transcript of the podcast is available here: Episode 1 transcript (PDF).
Episode Two: Carol Adlam interviews Dr Simon Grennan, visual artist and specialist in graphic novels, adaptation, and intermediality. Simon and Carol discuss Simon’s graphic novel Dispossession: A Novel in Few Words (Jonathan Cape and Les Impressions Nouvelles, 2015), an adaptation of Antony Trollope’s John Caldigate, first published in 1877. Topics covered include intermedial adaptation; finding visual analogues to literary texts; Australia in nineteenth-century literature; twentieth-century movie time and point of view; and comics theory. Recorded in Chester, Nottingham and St Andrews, February-May 2020.
A transcript of the podcast is available here: Episode 2 transcript (PDF)
Episode Three: Claire Whitehead and Carol Adlam discuss Adlam’s audio play Curare, inspired by the Russian crime novel Sekretnoe sledstvie (A Secret Investigation, 1881), by Aleksandr Shkliarevskii. Topics discussed include transmedia adaptation, narrative structure and voice, women’s education and medical training in the reform period (1860s-1870s), the use of curare in anaesthesia, the rise of the animal rights movement, and the use of photography in early forensic science. Recorded in Nottingham and St Andrews, September 2020.
A transcript of the podcast is available here: Episode 3 transcript (PDF)
Episode Four: This episode is a recording of a Byre World ‘In Conversation…’ event that took place on 11 November 2020 and was kindly sponsored by the School of Modern Languages at the University of St Andrews. In it, Claire Whitehead and Carol Adlam discuss ongoing progress on their ‘Lost Detectives’ project, including Carol’s thoughts on principles of adaptation she has developed through her work with nineteenth-century Russian crime fiction and how she handles the problematic trope of the woman driven to murder out of jealousy in her adaptation of Semyon Panov’s Tri suda, ili ubiistvo vo vremia bala (Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball, 1876).
Episode Five: Dr Claire Whitehead and Carol Adlam interview bestselling and award-winning crime writer, Val McDermid, about her various experiences of adaptation. Their conversation covers McDermid’s very first novel which, although never published, was adapted into a stage play; the radio adaptations of her Kate Brannigan novel Clean Break; the ITV series Wire in the Blood and the mini-series A Place of Execution by Coastal Productions. They also chat about the TV series Traces, set in a sunny Dundee, and about McDermid’s collaboration with artist Kathryn Briggs to adapt McDermid’s radio play Resistance (BBC4, 2021) into a graphic novel of the same name (Profile Books; Wellcome Collection, 2021). McDermid ends by sharing her insights into crime fiction’s potential for adaptation, and talks about the filming of the first of her Karen Pirie novels, A Distant Echo.
A transcript of the podcast is available here: Episode 5 transcript (PDF).
Episode 6: We are delighted to present an interview with Dr Mona Bozdog, specialist in immersive experience design in the Department of Games and Arts, University of Abertay. In her wide-ranging creative work Bozdog focuses on the convergence of contemporary performance practices and video games, designing hybrid forms of storytelling, performative games, mixed-reality and immersive experiences and games for public spaces and heritage sites. We discuss Bozdog’s innovative crossmedia projects such as Incholm Project and Generation ZX(X) and her views on working across media in adaptation and beyond.
A transcript of the podcast is available here:
