Remembering James Yaffe: "Dragon in the Den" (1963).

James Yaffe, right, with
Frederic Dannay, 1943.
Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Div.

James Yaffe, who sold his first story to EQMM at age 15 and was a longtime English professor at Colorado College, died on June 4 at age 90. One of his characters was Mom, who solves cases for her policeman son over dinner (she appears in A Nice Murder for Mom, Mom Meets Her Maker, and Mom Doth Murder Sleep, as well as in the Crippen and Landru collection My Mother, the Detective). Yaffe's other works include plays ("The Deadly Game"; "Cliffhanger"; "Dear Me, the Sky Is Falling") and screenplays for such TV series as Studio One, the U.S. Steel Hour, and the Alfred Hitchcock Hour. Another of his episodes was "Dragon in the Den" (1963) for the TV series Channing, which features William Shatner as a candidate for state attorney general who discovers there's no such thing as a clean campaign. Costarring are Henry Jones as Channing dean Fred Baker, Jason Evers as a Channing professor, and Denver Pyle as Shatner's campaign manager.