Today, we're joined by medical historian Lindsey Fitzharris to talk about her new book, Sleuth-Hound. It's a biography of Joseph Bell, the real Scottish physician who inspired the fictional character of Sherlock Holmes. As Lindsey shows, Bell, like Holmes, acted as a consulting detective for Edinburgh police while they investigated murders. Illustration from the satirical magazine Puck depicting Arthur Conan Doyle as shackled to Sherlock Holmes, the fictional character he cou

Today, we're joined by author Jack El-Hai to talk about his new book, The Case of the Autographed Corpse. It's all about Erle Stanley Gardner, inventor of the beloved fictional criminal defense attorney Perry Mason, and how Gardner took action to help exonerate wrongfully convicted prisoners in real life. One such prison inmate was Silas John Edwards, an Apache medicine man convicted of murder. Above: Raymond Burr in the role of Perry Mason, in a 1958 episode of teh TV series

Today, we're joined by cultural historian Isaac Butler, author of The Perfect Moment, an eye-opening new chronicle of the birth of America's culture wars in the 1980s. Above: Piss Christ by Andres Sorano, which shows a crucifix submerged in a pool of Sorano's urine. This photograph sparked controversy and made Sorano famous more or less overnight.