Podcasts

The Lost Detectives Podcast is hosted by Dr Claire Whitehead with contributing guest Carol Adlam. In it we discuss adaptations of nineteenth-century literary works into different media including stage, audio, and graphic novel. If you have any comments or suggestions please get in touch [cew12@st-andrews.ac.uk].

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. The podcast also provides an update on the Lost Detectives project with Claire Whitehead and Carol Adlam, with news of developments on the graphic novel project and the script adaptations. 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, 1876], 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 Three Courts, or Murder During the Ball (1876). The episode also includes excerpts of a recording of Carol’s adaptation of Nikolai Timofeev’s Notes of an Investigator (1872) into a radio play, Today in 1864, based on BBC Radio 4’s flagship news programme as well as examples of her use of the technique of interleaved voices in her adaptation of Aleksandr Shkliarevskii’s story A Secret Investigation from 1876. Our discussion ends with Carol demonstrating a new technique she has developed, which she is calling ‘fugitive printing’, and which she plans to employ in her adaptation of Three Courts into a graphic novel.

A transcript of the podcast will be available shortly.

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 Val’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 her collaboration with the artist Kathryn Briggs on the forthcoming graphic novel, Resistance, due for publication in May 2021 and which is based on Val’s original BBC radio play from 2017. Val is also kind enough to share her insights into crime fiction’s potential for adaptation, the filming of the first of her Karen Pirie novels, A Distant Echo, in Fife and her favourite foreign crime writers and TV series.

A transcript of the podcast is available here: Episode 5 transcript (PDF)