It’s a Mystery

So we’re getting ready to start PopD up again, drawing on all the work you did in coming up with the mystery movie list several months ago, but we’re changing a few things. (This is cross-posted on Argh Ink, too.)

First, we’re abandoning the chat-during-the-movie. It was too distracting for us and we ended up doing less-than-stellar analysis because we weren’t watching for content. That means that you can watch the movies any time you want (we’ll post the entire list ahead of time).

Then, we’ll post one podcast a week, the same day every week, and we can chat after the podcast in the comments. If you want a live chat, we’re open to discussion, but you’ll have to convince us. We’ll be doing some of the podcasts ahead of time because I’ll be on the road so much, but we’ll do them so they’re always up at the same day and time, much easier for you to follow.

Something else that’s new: we don’t know nearly as much about mystery as we did about romcom, so we’ll be doing a lot more fumbling around in the beginning. I did write my master’s thesis on the mystery novel, but it was on women’s roles in mystery fiction from 1840 to 1930, so it’s not going to be a lot of help. I’ve also read a lot of mystery, it was my first genre love, but that doesn’t mean I know anything about writing the stuff, so this should have a much steeper learning curve for us than the romcom series did (although we learned a lot on that one, too).

Since we’re rebooting the PopD experience, now’s a good time for you to weigh in on what you’d like to see incorporated. Or anything else you’d like to contribute. Not that you guys need encouragement to comment, but really, we’re pretty open at this point. List goes up next week, every title streaming either on Netflix or Amazon. Back at you then . . .

Jenny

9 responses to “It’s a Mystery”

  1. I’ll miss the chat but I understand. Maybe. That won’t mean I won’t whine a bit. Or maybe more than a bit.

    I’ve been missing PopD. It’s not like I have time to watch more movies right now but I miss the structure of it and I LOVE mysteries. They, too, were my first love and my Senior Thesis was on Women in Detective Fiction:)

    I really wanted to do Christie vs. Sayers but I couldn’t find a prof who would admit that they read ‘those sort of books’. Thankfully I found a guy in the English dept who’d just got tenure who admitted to a love of hard-boiled detective fiction and he helped me out. It wasn’t exactly the direction I wanted to go but since I was at a small liberal arts college I had to take what I could get – and it’s not like reading Sue Grafton novels was a hardship.

    But back to the topic. It’s your rodeo. You have work to do. Maybe without the chat there will be more conversation in the comments?

  2. More chat in the comments would be cool. I can never make the live chats, so I won’t miss them. THought the idea was neat, though.

  4. Hah, I never even attempted to make the live chats, wasn’t gonna happen no matter what time apparently 😛 So that’s fine by me.

  5. Glad you guys are coming back, I’ve really missed the podcasts. 🙂 I hardly ever made the chats, so I won’t miss them. Can’t wait to see the list. This is interesting timing; I just read Chandler’s essay “Simple Art of Murder” (http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/chandlerart.html). He has serious problems with the classic British mystery plots, and it’s a good read, if anyone is interested.

  6. I just found this site last week, so have never had the chance to attend a live chat. That said, I like the delayed aspect of comments commentary. It’s not as spontaneous, but thoughtfulness is never a bad thing.

    That said, what are the criteria for reccommendation? Is it limited to theatrical mysteries, or would made for tv or PBS Mysteries work, as long as they are contained to a time frame?

  7. There’s at least one TV show on there: Sherlock. Originally, when the list was much longer, we had a TV show for each subgenre: Veronica Mars for noir, Moonlighting for romance (although I prefer Standoff, but it’s not available), Psych for comedy, Supernatural for paranormal, and I forget what was under non-traditional. But the list was just too long. If we want to do a TV series mini category at the end, we can, but we’re better keeping it short and adding. It’s six months now. You’d be surprised how tired you can get of a genre in six months.

  8. We don’t have much of a criteria except “somebody liked it.” It’s not a survey, it’s just study how mystery we liked works. There are some on there I’ve never seen, so I’m trusting other people. Oh, and we have to be able to GET them, which is going to be a problem because of the different countries we’re dealing with. Canada’s experience with Netflix is not ours. OTOH, we’ll put the whole list up ahead of time with dates so you can get the DVDs from libraries or whatever.