Hard-boiled detectives and libraries.

Philip Marlowe (Humphrey Bogart)
meets a librarian from the Hollywood Public
Library (Carole Douglas) in the trailer to
The Big Sleep (1946)

Peter Igelström, librarian at Linköping University's Valla Library, takes an entertaining look at the relationship of hardboiled detectives to libraries and librarians. "One wonders why the library is a potential stigma to a hard-boiled detective," he states.

Harvard on Darcy Glinto (Harold Ernest Kelly).

Harvard's Houghton Library blog features the evils of the cocaine trade via its copy of Snow Vogue (1941) by Darcy Glinto—a pseudonym of sci-fi, western, horror, and mystery writer Harold Ernest Kelly (1900–69). Kelly also was a publisher and wrote as Lance Carson, Gordon Holt, Hank Janson, Buck Toler, Preston Yorke, and Eugene Ascher (producing paranormal mysteries under the latter name).

There is an interesting 1942 newspaper clipping regarding charges against Kelly and writer Rene Raymond (aka James Hadley Chase, the author of No Orchids for Miss Blandish) for publishing obscene books—apparently pertaining to Kelly's Lady–Don't Turn Over (1940) and Road Floozie (1941) and Raymond's Miss Callaghan Comes to Grief (1941). The National Archives of Australia discusses here the banning of several Kelly books—including Road Floozie—and Mickey Spillane's novels.

Mike Hammer, anticommunist.

Ralph Meeker as Mike Hammer
in Kiss Me Deadly (1955)

Over on the International Spy Museum's blog, historian Mark Stout and author Michael Barson discuss books published since the 1950s that have dealt with the Soviet threat to the United States, including Mickey Spillane's One Lonely Night (1951).

Clues 29.2: Simenon, Stout, Sayers, et al.

Vol 29, no. 2 of Clues: A Journal of Detection has just been published, including the following topics:

• Analyses of two matchups of the detective vs. archcriminal. The first one is Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Arnold Zeck; John Littlejohn looks at Stout's reasons for creating a major adversary for Wolfe. The second is the Sara Martin Allegre's examination of the complex relationship between Ian Rankin's Inspector Rebus and his nemesis, "Big Ger" Cafferty.

• Detection Club president Simon Brett pays tribute to his late colleague H. R. F. Keating:  "Whenever I think of Harry, I think of the Olympic Diving competition."

• Dorothy L. Sayers's engagement with true crime between the wars by Victoria Stewart.

• Ahmet Mithat Efendi's Esrar-i Cinayat, the first Turkish detective novel (1884), by Zeynep Tufekcioglu

• The role of class in the 1930s Maigret novels of Georges Simenon by Bill Alder.

• The use of sound in the works of Raymond Chandler by Eric Rawson and the role of the automobile in the works of Chandler and James M. Cain by Shelby Smoak.

• Gender bending in Mickey Spillane's Vengeance Is Mine! (1950) by Heather Duerre Humann.

• The Montana-set police procedurals of Robert Sims Reid by Rachel Schaffer.

• Margaret Atwood's techniques that lead the reader to become a detective by Lisa A. Wellinghoff.

Faulkner on Gavin Stevens, "A Rose for Emily," and Spillane.

William Faulkner by Carl Van
Vechten, 1954. Library of
Congress, Prints and
Photographs Division

In both transcripts and audio from University of Virginia, William Faulkner talks about his lawyer character Gavin Stevens, his mystery-related story "A Rose for Emily," and the use of violence in his work, as well as takes a swipe at Mickey Spillane. He used to see James Joyce in Paris and tells of the role of Winesburg, Ohio's Sherwood Anderson in his first book.

Some of the Strand's rare mystery offerings.

Some of the Strand Bookstore's rare mystery-related offerings:

• Edward Gorey, 1st ed., Beastly Baby (1962): $750.

• Mickey Spillane, 1st ed., I, the Jury (1947):  $650.

• Rex Stout, limited ed., Corsage: A Bouquet of Rex Stout and Nero Wolfe (1977, includes article "Why Nero Wolfe Likes Orchids" by "Archie Goodwin" and last interview with Stout): $350.

• Black Mask "forgotten man" Raoul Whitfield, 1st ed., Silver Wings (1930):  $1100.

Vol 2 of Johnson's The Dark Page: Books That Inspired American Film Noir.

July's Fine Books and Collections looks at Kevin Johnson's The Dark Page: Books That Inspired American Film Noir, vol. 2 (covering the 1950s). Works mentioned in the piece include Fredric Brown's The Screaming Mimi (1949); Niven Busch's The Furies (1948); Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy (1925); Dorothy B. Hughes's In a Lonely Place (1947); Mickey Spillane's Kiss Me, Deadly (1952); and Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts (1933).

About the image: Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift in A Place in the Sun, dir. George Stevens, 1951; adaptation of Dreiser's An American Tragedy.

US comics corrupt innocent British youth.

I was vastly entertained by this podcast from the National Archives UK, "Kapow! Fifties Britain versus the Comics Menace," which discusses the great fear that we degenerate Yanks were corrupting the innocent youth of Britain with our comic books in the 1940s and 1950s. In reality, as the presenter shows, there was a substantial comics tradition in the UK well before our materials reached its shores. Interesting as well was the statement that in Britain, there was a concerted effort to destroy any copies of Mickey Spillane's I, the Jury that cropped up.

Also fascinating: this National Archives UK podcast on the real story behind the film The Great Escape, which discusses the breakout at Stalag Luft III, the deliberately planned murders of 50 escaping POWs, and the war crimes trials that occurred afterward.

Also of interest: "The Secret Life of Superman" by Jonathan Ross (Times of London)

About the images: Shazam! Captain Marvel from February 1940; Richard Attenborough (left) and Steve McQueen in The Great Escape (1963, dir. John Sturges)

Mystery-related photos in Life photo archive, Google.

You can now search the Life magazine photo archive on Google. When I typed "mystery" into the search box, photos of Mignon G. Eberhart (1960), Harry Stephen Keeler (1947), Mickey Spillane (1952), Rex Stout (1960), and Charlton Heston in a 1949 TV mystery production were some of the results that popped up. There also are several photos of author Craig Rice.

(Hat tip to the AHA blog.)