Jack Benny spoofs The Killers.

Jack Benny and guest star Dan Duryea poked fun at Ernest Hemingway's "The Killers" in "Death across the Lunch Counter," part of the 4 December 1960 episode of The Jack Benny Program.

Elmore Leonard speaks, 1984.

This interview with Elmore Leonard was part of the First Edition TV series on PBS station WNET cohosted by noted critic John Leonard (no relation) and Nancy Evans. In it, Elmore Leonard cites such diverse influences as Erich Maria Remarque, Ernest Hemingway, James M. Cain, and Mark Harris (Bang the Drum Slowly) and addresses his cross-genre works, his approach to dialogue, and the National Lampoon parody of his style.

The return of pioneering PI Race Williams.

Altus Press has issued Them That Lives by Their Guns: The Collected Hard-Boiled Stories of Race Williams, vol. 1, with an introduction by Clues contributor Brooks Hefner. The creator of Williams, Carroll John Daly, launched the hard-boiled style with such stories as "The False Burton Combs" (1922) and "It's All in the Game" (1923). "Burton Combs" predates Dashiell Hammett's first story for Black Mask by several months.

Perhaps this collection of 16 stories can help refute the jaw-dropping assertion in the BBC Radio 4 program A Coat, a Hat, and a Gun (hosted by Harriett Gilbert, daughter of British mystery author Michael Gilbert) that the hard-boiled "genre was really invented by ... Hemingway with a short story in 1928 called 'The Killers.'" In fact, "The Killers" is a March 1927 Scribner's magazine short story, which appeared several years after Daly's groundbreaking work.

Barry Day speaks on Raymond Chandler.

On Gary Shapiro's radio program From the Bookshelf, Barry Day (known for his works on Noel Coward) discusses his new book The World of Raymond Chandler: In His Own Words, in which he endeavors to show what Chandler thought of his own work. Day highlights Chandler's emphasis on language rather than plot or character, his admiration for the writing of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and his dislike of the work of Ernest Hemingway.

T'is the season.

Some past season's greetings in the literary world:

Detail from Xmas card
NYPL

• The first Christmas card, 1846.

• Holiday cards sent by Robert Frost illustrating his poems.

• 1952 Christmas card from the New York Public Library.

• Christmas card sent by Langston Hughes, with a painting by Rockwell Kent. 

• Rebecca West with her husband, Henry Andrews, for their 1957 Christmas card.

• Christmas greeting from Mark Twain to J. M. Barrie

And don't miss:

• This essay by James Thurber on the phenomenon of sending holiday cards and his Hemingwayesque spoof of "The Night before Christmas."

• Journalist C. J. Ciaramella's Chandleresque spoof of "The Night before Christmas."

Mystery films in CCNY exhibition.

Mystery-related movies in City College of New York Libraries' exhibition "Cinematic Allusions to Literary Works" include Blow-Up (dir. Michelangelo Antonioni, 1966) and The Killers (dir. Robert Siodmak, 1946). Mason Adams discussed the short story version of The Killers in "Hemingway's Nick Adams and the Creation of Raymond Chandler's Philip Marlowe" in Clues 26.2 (2010).

NEH's Edsitement: Not much mystery.

Theodore Dreiser, NYPL

The National Endowment for the Humanities' Edsitement offers K–12 lesson plans in literature, but I wish the site had beefier mystery-related content (at minimum, including some plans on teaching Alcott's thrillers, Conan Doyle, Christie, Hammett, and Chandler, not to mention black writers Rudolph Fisher and Chester Himes. How about something on teaching Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy?). The only somewhat related plans I can find are on Hemingway's Nick Adams and two lesson plans on Poe. Although Faulkner is included, there is nothing on his mystery-related work (such as Intruder in the Dust, "A Rose for Emily," and his Gavin Stevens stories).

Calling TJ Hooker: How to jump from a speeding car and other manly arts.

Page from a Walt Whitman
notebook, ca. 1860s. NYPL.

The Art of Manliness blog features such posts as "How to Jump from a Speeding Car" and "How to Fire a Handgun Safely and Correctly"; as well as one on the manly pocket notebook, carried by Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway, and others.

Happy birthday, Robert M. Coates.

New Yorker contributor and Lost Generation member Robert M. Coates—who also wrote novels including The Eater of Darkness (1926) and the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone work Wisteria Cottage (1948; filmed as an episode of Suspense, 1950, and Edge of Fury, 1958) and short stories such as "The Law" (1947) and "The Hour after Westerly" (1947)—was born today in New Haven in 1897. He died in 1973.

Go here for a letter from Ernest Hemingway objecting to Coates's review of Death in the Afternoon.