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If you have ever finished an Agatha Christie at 1am, put the book down, and immediately wanted to phone someone — anyone — to ask whether all those poisonings were actually pharmacologically plausible or whether the country house weekend was a real social institution or a clever bit of plot machinery, then I have very good news. That someone exists, and her name is Caroline Crampton, and her podcast Shedunnit has been quietly answering exactly those questions, every other Wednesday, since 2018.
Shedunnit is, on paper, a podcast about Golden Age detective fiction — that loosely defined heyday of the whodunnit that runs roughly from the end of the First World War to the middle of the Second, taking in Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham, Ngaio Marsh, Josephine Tey, and a host of writers who were enormously popular at the time and have since slipped into the kind of half-light that demands rescue. In practice it is much more than that. It is a podcast about the social history of the interwar period, the rise of forensic science, the changing role of women, the politics of empire, the architecture of the English country house, and the strange enduring pleasure of being lied to by a clever author for 280 pages.
Crampton is the entire show, and that is part of what makes it work. She writes and narrates each episode herself, often with a guest expert dropped in for the second half — a Christie scholar, a forensic historian, a fellow podcaster, a novelist who grew up reading Sayers in Singapore. The structure is consistent: a tight, beautifully edited opening that frames the question (why are libraries such popular murder settings? what did Christie actually know about poison? why did Sayers fall out so spectacularly with the first Lord Peter Wimsey film?), followed by a deep, considered exploration that always feels like it has been researched twice as hard as it needs to be. Episodes generally clock in around 25 to 30 minutes, which is genuinely the perfect length — long enough to dig in, short enough to fit into a commute or a dog walk without you having to pause halfway through and lose the thread.
What separates Shedunnit from the (admittedly small) field of literary history podcasts is Crampton's tone. She is enthusiastic without being twee, scholarly without being dusty, and — crucially — she likes these books without being uncritical of them. The episodes about empire, race, antisemitism, and class in Golden Age fiction are some of the strongest in the catalogue, treating their subjects with the seriousness they deserve without sliding into the kind of finger-wagging that ruins a perfectly good evening with Hercule Poirot. She loves the genre. She also sees it clearly. Both things at once.
The show has grown sideways in interesting directions, too. The Shedunnit Book Club — a Patreon-style membership that funds the main podcast — adds monthly reading discussions and bonus episodes, and more recently Crampton launched Green Penguin Book Club, a series-within-the-series in which she reads through every crime title in the original Penguin paperback line, in order, starting with Sayers' The Unpleasantness at the Bellona Club. It's the kind of obsessive completionist project that you either find delightful or baffling. (Reader: I find it delightful.)
A few warnings. If you are looking for a podcast that will keep you abreast of contemporary thriller releases or BookTok's latest dark academia darling, Shedunnit is going to disappoint you — the focus is squarely on the 1920s, 30s, and 40s, with occasional excursions backward to Conan Doyle or forward to writers consciously playing with the tradition. Crampton's voice is calm and measured, which I find soothing and others may find understated; if you want hot takes and shouting, look elsewhere. And the show does sometimes assume a baseline of familiarity — you don't need to have read every Christie, but if you've never read any mystery from the period, a few of the references will sail past you. (Cure: read one. Any one. Start with The Murder of Roger Ackroyd and report back.)
But these are tiny things. Shedunnit is the rare podcast that makes you feel cleverer for having listened — not because it talks down to you, but because it takes its subject seriously and assumes you can keep up. It has the careful production values of public radio and the niche-obsessive heart of the best independent shows. It will send you to the secondhand bookshop. It will make you start sentences with "well, in 1932…" It will, in the truest sense of the phrase, make you a better reader.
Press play. Bring snacks. Mind the butler.
