ABSTRACT
Death at Broadcasting House (DaB) is the title of a detective novel, rst published in 1934. It is written by a pair of BBC insiders, one of them Val Gielgud, Head of Production for Drama at the time. The genre is the ‘whodunit’, or classical detective story (Cawelti 1976), often associated with Agatha Christie. In this one, however, there are some interesting departures from the rules. While the crime of a classical detective story is situated within the private sphere, disrupting order by placing dead bodies in the midst of our family circle, this one involves a murder at the heart of a mediated centre: the studios of Broadcasting House, i.e. the rst purpose-built headquarters of the BBC, inaugurated in London in 1932. During the live broadcast of a radio play, one of the actors, isolated in one of the talk studios, is strangled to death. While the task of a classical detective usually involves tracking past events via material clues and eyewitness accounts from the scene of the crime, this detective faces an intriguing dilemma: while millions have listened in to the live performance of a murder, no one has seen anything, not a single clue was left in the studio. To explain what happened, detective Spears must reconstruct the locality of a crime that has registered only in the ether.
