67 Order and Method: A Feline’s Guide to Hercule Poirot

Thanksgiving has a way of bringing back memories of the people, places, and peculiar family traditions that made the holiday special. For Dr. Liam, the best part of Thanksgiving was always the people around the table and the stories they told. In this episode of Mossbunker Review, Liam recalls those family gatherings before taking us back to Revolutionary War New England for the story of a resourceful woman whose husband and two sons have gone off to fight for American independence. It's a warm Thanksgiving story filled with humor, faith, family, and an unexpected homecoming. Pour yourself a cup of coffee and join us for a Thanksgiving worth remembering.

What could a tuxico kitten possibly find fascinating about Hercule Poirot? For four consecutive evenings, Moka has stationed herself before the television, captivated by David Suchet’s portrayal of Agatha Christie’s fastidious Belgian detective. Her peculiar enthusiasm presents retired historian Dr. Liam with a mystery worthy of Poirot’s celebrated little grey cells. Sometimes the most intriguing mysteries are the ones we are perfectly content to leave unsolved.

As a Halloween treat, Dr. Liam reprises his most popular podcast in this new recording of “The Lodge” This is  a work of historical fiction based on real-life occurrences in during a trip to England in 1993. Following the story, he gives a historian's assessment of what haunted Bodley Lodge.

After the strong response to last week’s reading of “Naboth’s Vineyard,” Dr. Liam returns to Melville Davisson Post with one of his favorite Uncle Abner stories, “The Doomdorf Mystery,” first published in The Saturday Evening Post in 1914. A brutal man is found shot dead inside a bolted room, two different people claim responsibility, and every obvious explanation collapses under examination. What follows is Post at his best, blending the locked-room mystery, frontier justice, biblical imagery, and Uncle Abner’s conviction that what Randolph calls accident may yet reveal the justice of God.

In this episode, Dr. Liam reads Melville Davisson Post’s “Naboth’s Vineyard,” one of the finest Uncle Abner stories. A farm hand stands accused of murder, a young woman makes a shocking confession, and what appears to be a solved case begins to unravel when Uncle Abner sees what everyone else has missed. The story becomes a meditation on evidence, justice, public authority, and the danger of mistaking appearances for truth, all set against Post’s vivid world of western Virginia.

Melville Davisson Post is largely forgotten today, but his Uncle Abner stories remain one of the most unusual achievements in early American detective fiction. Abner is a Bible-reading cattleman from the Virginia mountains who solves murders, exposes fraud, and pursues justice in a world where formal law is often weak or distant. In this episode, Dr. Liam explores how Post combined legal experience, frontier memory, biblical imagination, and carefully constructed mystery plots to create a detective unlike almost anyone else in the genre.

Melville Davisson Post is largely forgotten today, but at the turn of the twentieth century he was one of the most inventive writers working in the mystery genre. Long before Perry Mason, Post created Randolph Mason, a brilliant and deeply unsettling lawyer whose clients were often plainly guilty and whose genius lay in showing them how the law might fail to punish them. In this episode, Dr. Liam explores how Post turned the detective story inside out, why Randolph Mason caused such ethical controversy, and how this small-town West Virginia lawyer helped reshape the possibilities of crime fiction.

In 1946, Winston Churchill stood before a small audience in Fulton, Missouri and said something that would echo for forty years: an iron curtain had descended across Europe. But the speech he called The Sinews of Peace was never meant as a prophecy of permanent division. Dr. Liam argues it was an old Victorian's case for building enough strength to negotiate without fear. Not to fight, but to parley. This week, we revisit Fulton and find a Churchill more complicated and more hopeful than the one we remember, who believed that peace needs bones and muscles as well as good intentions.

Dr. Liam reflects on what it means to be born in another century. The simple purchase of an Apple Watch to pair with his iPhone sparks memories of a very different world: the Cuban Missile Crisis, backyard fallout shelters, and a childhood lived in the shadow of nuclear war. From there, he discusses idea of a "short twentieth century" running from 1914 to 1989, coving seventy-five years that amounted to one long struggle. He then examines Winston Churchill's 1946 speech at Fulton, Missouri, better known as the Iron Curtain Speech, arguing that its real message wasn't a curtain of division but what Churchill called "the sinews of peace": the idea that strength and diplomacy must work together.

“A man walks into a coffeehouse” is no joke. In this  redux of an earlier episode, Dr. Liam uses a little coffeehouse mischief to explore the idea that human beings stand at the center of what they know, and why that esoteric idea is so important. The Scientific Revolution taught us that Earth is not the physical center of the cosmos, but we can never step outside ourselves and observe the past from nowhere. History comes to us through human minds, memories, evidence, language, and judgment, and the way we understand and tell other people’s stories matters.