What's Ticking in The Walls

What's Ticking in The Walls

A Century Since The Crime Of The Century

May 21 marks one hundred years since Chicago teenagers Nathan Leopold (1904-71) and Richard Loeb (1905-36) murdered 14-year-old Bobby Franks as part of their plan to execute a "perfect crime". The two randomly chose Franks and picked him up a few blocks from his home. Following his death, the boys dumped the body near Wolf Lake in Hammond, Indiana, 25 miles south of Chicago. But it wasn't a perfect crime. Police found a pair of eyeglasses near Franks's body with a unique hinge purchased by only three customers in Chicago, one of whom was Leopold. Things escalated quickly, and their confessions were announced ten days later.

Sum þing Māra Abūtan Englisċ

Hƿæt sǣde hē?

Something About April 11, 1954

Celebrating something dull.

Memoriam: Richard Strader

Something About Nero's Theater

Golden boy strikes again.

Something About Pimlico

Prim and proper.

Something More About Kryptos

Code-breakers.

Something About Amalia Pimlico

She has her eye on you.

Something About Character Swaps

What if...?

Happy Birthday, John Bellairs

We take a moment to raise a glass to John Bellairs on what would have been his 86th birthday. Cheers!

Something About Cat-Calling Nuns

Reciting Old Deuteronomy?

An Interview With Simon Loxley

Montague Rhodes James (1862-1936) was a British academic and ghost story author whose tales are some of the best-known and most respected in the genre. John Bellairs was a fan and agreed with James that "spooky tales are most effective when the ghastly things happen to people who are going about their business in an ordinary, matter-of-fact world… (Locus, 1991). Bellairs was a Jamesian fan – and included a few homages in his novels – as is Simon Loxley, a British graphic designer and writer on design. Loxley's fandom went as far as writing and self-publishing A Geography of Horror: The Ghost Stories of M.R. James and the Suffolk Landscape, in 2021. It's taken us over a year to order the book, read (and reread), and conduct our interview, but Loxley was game – and here we are.