Popeye the Sailor and the Belgian boy reporter Tintin lead the class of characters and works of art becoming public domain in 2025.

Prince Harry's memoir “Spare” arrives in bookstores on Tuesday, providing a varied portrait of the Duke of Sussex and the royal family.

Sherlock Holmes is finally free to the American public in 2023.

Stephen Oates has died after a life that saw him become an award-winning Civil War historian who wrote biographies of Abraham Lincoln, Martin Luther King Jr., Clara Barton, William Faulkner and others.

Philip Marlowe, the most self-reliant of fictional detectives, had no boss and no one to boss around.

Members of the Mississippi Highway Safety Patrol Honor Guard prepare to raise the new Mississippi State flag at the Capitol in Jackson, Monday, Jan. 11, 2021. Tate Reeves signed a law that created the new state flag with magnolia at the center, six months after the state retired the last state flag in the U.S. that included the Confederate battle emblem. The law retiring the old flag also specified that the commission's proposed new flag would go on the Nov. 3 ballot for a yes-or-no vote. The Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups have waved the Confederate battle flag for decades. A few dozen people demonstrated on the south steps of the Mississippi Capitol in support of reviving the old flag.

NEW YORK – Two of crime fiction's most famous storytellers, Raymond Chandler and Agatha Christie, also knew how to get a laugh. According to Tony Medawar, producer of the International Agatha Christie Festival (in Devon, England), Christie likely drew upon her own childhood in setting a playful atmosphere, with the kids showing proper irreverence for the supposedly world famous detective. “Christmas Adventure" also is appearing in the upcoming Christie collection “Midwinter Murder,” which comes out Oct. 20. "‘Christmas Adventure’ is a particularly light-hearted story," Medawar says. Chandler's employer guide, according to Chandler scholar Dr. Sarah Trott, was likely written in the early 1950s, when Chandler hired a private secretary, Juanita Messick.