The Strand Magazine

08/25/2026

We are deeply saddened by the passing of Dolly Parton, a singular American voice whose warmth, wit, generosity, and gift for storytelling reached far beyond country music.

Mystery and thriller readers knew another side of Dolly as well. In 2022, she joined forces with James Patterson to write Run, Rose, Run, her first novel—a bestselling thriller about a young singer-songwriter who arrives in Nashville chasing a dream while running from a dangerous past. The collaboration felt wonderfully natural: Dolly had, after all, spent a lifetime telling vivid stories of love, desperation, betrayal, resilience, and people with secrets. (Dolly Parton⁠)

She also spent decades encouraging other people to read. Through her Imagination Library, Dolly gave hundreds of millions of books to children, making literacy one of the defining causes of her life.

Few entertainers were ever so universally loved, and fewer still seemed to wear their fame with such humor, humanity, and generosity.

The world has lost an extraordinary storyteller.

Dolly Parton, 1946–2026.

08/25/2026

A sad loss, a legend, an author and humanitarian

Dolly Parton has died at the age of 80. The country music legend was known for songs including “Jolene,” “I Will Always Love You” and “9 to 5.” She also starred in movies like ‘Steel Magnolias’ and ‘The Best Little Wh******se in Texas’.

08/24/2026

Happy birthday to Alexander McCall Smith, born on this day in 1948.

A wonderfully generous storyteller, Sandy has given readers an extraordinary range of characters and worlds over the years, from The No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency to the many other novels, stories, and series that bear his unmistakable warmth and wit.

We’ve been lucky to know him as a friend of The Strand and to feature his work in our pages over the years.

Happy birthday, Sandy — and many more. Alexander McCall Smith

08/22/2026

Remembering Ray Bradbury, born on this day in 1920.

Few writers captured wonder, fear, nostalgia, and the strange possibilities of the future quite like Bradbury. From Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles to Something Wicked This Way Comes and Dandelion Wine, his work crossed effortlessly between science fiction, fantasy, horror, and literary fiction.

Over the years, we were fortunate to publish Bradbury’s work six times in The Strand—a small connection to a writer whose imagination continues to loom very large.

More than a century after his birth, his stories remain vivid, unsettling, humane, and unmistakably his own.

Happy birthday, Ray Bradbury.

08/18/2026

Today would have been Robert Redford’s 90th birthday.

Over a remarkable career, Redford created an extraordinary gallery of unforgettable characters: the Sundance Kid in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, the charming con man Johnny Ho**er in The Sting, journalist Bob Woodward in All the President’s Men, Jay Gatsby in The Great Gatsby, Roy Hobbs in The Natural, and Hubbell Gardiner in The Way We Were. As a director, he won the Academy Award for Ordinary People and went on to make such acclaimed films as A River Runs Through It and Quiz Show.

But one of his finest—and most enduring—performances came in Three Days of the Condor.

In Sydney Pollack’s 1975 conspiracy thriller, based on James Grady’s novel Six Days of the Condor, Redford played Joe Turner, a CIA researcher whose job is to read books in search of hidden ideas and intelligence. Returning from lunch one afternoon, he finds his colleagues murdered and realizes that his own government may be hunting him.

Turner was no invincible secret agent. He was intelligent, frightened, resourceful, and never entirely certain whom he could trust. Redford made that vulnerability compelling, while the film captured the mistrust and moral uncertainty of post-Watergate America. More than fifty years later, it remains disturbingly relevant.

Redford’s legacy extended far beyond the screen. Through the Sundance Institute and Sundance Film Festival, he championed independent filmmakers and gave countless new voices an opportunity to be heard. He was also a devoted environmentalist and humanitarian who spent decades advocating for conservation, Indigenous rights, human dignity, and the arts.

Few performers combined intelligence, charisma, conscience, and quiet moral authority as naturally as Robert Redford. He was a great actor, an accomplished director, a generous champion of other artists, and a man who used his influence to make a difference.

Remembering Robert Redford on what would have been his 90th birthday.

What is your favorite Redford performance?

08/15/2026

On this day in literary history, Sir Walter Scott was born on August 15, 1771.

A towering figure of 19th-century literature, Scott helped popularize the historical novel and gave readers enduring classics including Ivanhoe, Waverley, and Rob Roy.

More than two centuries later, his influence can still be felt in historical fiction, adventure, and the way novelists bring the past vividly to life.

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08/12/2026

Happy birthday to Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876–1958), one of the great pioneers of American mystery and suspense fiction.

Long before the modern psychological thriller, Rinehart was keeping readers awake with dark houses, buried secrets, unexpected twists, and danger lurking just beyond the door. The author of The Circular Staircase and co-creator of The Bat, she became one of the most successful writers of her era and helped shape the mystery genre for generations to come.

Today we celebrate a trailblazer whose influence can still be felt whenever a writer invites us into a house where something isn’t quite right.

Happy birthday, Mary Roberts Rinehart.

08/10/2026

Yes — I researched it properly this time. The heart of the story is the liberation of Paris, the aftermath of war, comradeship, sacrifice, and Hemingway’s complicated relationship with combat. The literary references are there, but they’re not what the post should be about. The Hemingway Society describes the deeper question as whether Parisian culture can recover from fascism.

For something the Hemingway Estate could see and feel was handled with respect, I’d post this:

Eight years ago, The Strand Magazine had the extraordinary privilege of publishing Ernest Hemingway’s previously unpublished short story, “A Room on the Garden Side,” for the first time.

Written in 1956 and drawn from Hemingway’s experiences surrounding the Liberation of Paris in 1944, the story returns to the Ritz in the days after the N**i occupation. Its narrator, Robert—known, like Hemingway himself, as “Papa”—sits among soldiers preparing to leave Paris, reflecting on war, duty, friendship, those who survived, and those who did not.

There is triumph in the story, but also weariness and loss. Hemingway looks beyond the romance of liberation toward the human cost of war and the bonds forged among those who endured it. As he wrote of the soldiers who fought beside him, “the accounts are never closed.”

When The Strand published the story in 2018, it emerged from the Ernest Hemingway Collection at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library and Museum with the generous permission of the Hemingway Estate and an afterword by Hemingway scholar Kirk Curnutt.

Eight years later, we remain deeply grateful for the trust placed in The Strand to bring this remarkable piece of Hemingway’s legacy to readers for the first time.

Some stories wait decades to find their readers. This one was worth the wait.

08/07/2026

Remembering Alfred, Lord Tennyson, born on this day in 1809.

One of the defining voices of the Victorian age, Tennyson transformed longing, loss, courage, and doubt into some of the most enduring poetry in the English language.

“To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.”

—“Ulysses”

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08/04/2026

🏄 Before Agatha Christie became the Queen of Crime… she was a surfer.

Long before Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple became household names, Agatha Christie embarked on a round-the-world journey in 1922. During her travels, she surfed in both South Africa and Hawaii, where she learned to ride the waves standing up.

It’s an unexpected chapter in the life of one of history’s greatest mystery writers—and a reminder that extraordinary lives often make for extraordinary stories.

Which surprises you more: that Agatha Christie surfed, or that she was good at it?

📚 Have you read your favorite Christie novel yet this year?