Happy birthday, Edward Stratemeyer.

Edward Stratemeyer, creator of the Stratemeyer Syndicate that gave us Tom Swift (who bears some similarity to aviation pioneer Glenn Curtiss), the Hardy Boys, the Bobbsey Twins, Nancy Drew, and many other books with adventurous young people, was born today in 1862. A list of some of the syndicate pseudonyms follows at the bottom of this post.*

Stratemeyer began his career at the dime novel publisher Street & Smith as a writer and editor, creating the popular "Rover Boys" series in 1899. He began the syndicate in 1905, figuring out that "house names" plus armies of ghostwriters could spell profit. Peak periods for the syndicate were between 1912 and 1917 and 1922 and 1927, when it was producing approximately 50 series. Stratemeyer died in 1930, and the syndicate was taken over by his daughters, Harriet Adams and Edna Squier, and in time by Adams alone. Gradually, only the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew remained and were sold to Simon & Schuster after Adams's death in 1982. The syndicate records are now found in the New York Public Library.

*Nick Carter; Alice B. Emerson; Franklin W. Dixon; Mabel C. Hawley; Carolyn Keene, Arthur M. Winfield; Ralph Bonehill; Manager Henry Abbott; Horatio Alger, Jr.; Philip A. Alyer; P. T. Barnum, Jr.; Theodore Barnum; Emerson Bell; Captain Ralph Bonehill; Franklin Calkins; Louis Charles; Jim Daly; Theodore Edison; Julia Edwards; Albert Lee Ford; Ralph Hamilton; Hal Harkaway; Harvey Hicks; Captain Lew James; Peter Pad; Ned St. Meyer; E. Ward Strayer; Ed Ward; Tom Ward; Edna Winfield; Nat Woods; Oliver Optic; Clarence Young; Roy Rockwood

Happy birthday, Jack Finney.

Before the day is done: Author Jack Finney, best known for two works—The Body Snatchers (1955) and Time and Again (1970)—was born today in 1911. He died in 1995. The film Somewhere in Time (based on the novel Bid Time Return by Richard Matheson, who makes a cameo appearance in the film) pays homage to Finney when aspiring time traveler Christopher Reeve goes to consult "Professor Finney" about his plans.

The fourth and latest film adaptation of Body Snatchers, The Invasion, came and went fairly quickly, and I suspect for many, Kevin McCarthy (from the 1956 film version) will always be their man. The engaging Time and Again, featuring a government experiment in time travel set in Gilded Age New York, has seldom been out of print; at one time, it was rumored that Robert Redford was interested in a film version. "You write a book," Finney was quoted in Entertainment Weekly in 1995 about Time and Again, "and you don't expect it to hang around."

"When God hands you a gift, he also hands you a whip."

Truman Capote, who said the above in Music for Chameleons (1980), would have turned 83 today. He died in 1984. In Cold Blood, his pioneering nonfiction novel of 1965, has gone through more than 50 editions and generated four screen adaptations—two on the book itself (1967, 1996), two on its process (2005, 2006). It is often forgotten that Capote's close friend Harper Lee accompanied him to Kansas and assisted in the research of In Cold Blood; the book is dedicated to her.

Capote also scripted the Humphrey Bogart-John Huston film Beat the Devil (1953) and admitted to making a mistake in resolving the notorious ambiguity in his screen adaptation of Henry James's "The Turn of the Screw," The Innocents (1961).

My favorite of Capote's works is The Muses Are Heard, an acutely observed account of a Porgy and Bess troupe touring Russia in 1955. I was also struck by "Willa, Truman, Truman, Willa," a wonderful, woefully brief piece that appeared in the November 2006 issue of Vanity Fair, in which Capote describes a meeting with Willa Cather, one of his favorite authors.

Happy 80th birthday, Barbara Mertz.

MWA Grand Master Barbara Mertz, aka Barbara Michaels and Elizabeth Peters, turns 80 today. She published her first novel, The Master of Blacktower, in 1966, and it should be noted that long before the recent flurry of vampire novels, the Michaels novel The Dark on the Other Side (1970) dealt with an emotional vampire and can be read as a horror work (one friend told me that she had to turn on all the lights in her house after she read it—the greatest compliment to an author).

It also should be noted that Mertz, initially working in a publishing climate oriented to formulaic romantic suspense, struggled with her skeptical publishers to write the humorous mysteries with intelligent heroines that she was certain readers would enjoy. Many mystery authors who came after her owe a considerable debt to her persistence. Her redoubtable archaeologist Amelia Peabody Emerson first appeared in the H. Rider Haggard-inspired Crocodile on the Sandbank (1975); other series heroines include Mertz alter ego Jacqueline Kirby (debuted in The Seventh Sinner, 1972) and statuesque art historian Vicky Bliss (debuted in Borrower of the Night, 1973. Mertz is currently working on another Bliss book that will follow Night Train to Memphis. Night Train, a Peters book, features one of the funniest blurbs in blurbing history, written by one Barbara Michaels.)

Mertz's nonfiction Egyptology books Red Land, Black Land and Temples, Tombs, and Hieroglyphs are mainstays of undergraduate Egyptology courses—indeed, a revised edition of Temples will be issued by Morrow in December. She endowed a scholarship for mystery writing at Hood College in Maryland.

Go here to see a Webcast of a 2003 Mertz talk at the Library of Congress.

The last word belongs to Robert Barnard at the first Malice Domestic in 1989: "What can you say about Elizabeth Peters that she hasn't already said?"

Photo credit: Dennis Forbes

Happy birthday, Marcia Muller.

MWA Grand Master Marcia Muller, the creator of groundbreaking PI Sharon McCone, turns 63 today. It's hard to believe that McCone, the first modern female PI in a novel (Maxine O'Callaghan's Delilah West precedes her in a 1974 AHMM short story), celebrates her 30th anniversary in print this year; her debut, Edwin of the Iron Shoes, was published in 1977. It's even harder to believe that a writing instructor told Muller, according to her Web site, that "she would never be a writer because she had nothing to say." McCone's latest outing is The Ever-Running Man.

Go here to see a Webcast of Muller's 2005 appearance at the National Book Festival.

Photo credit: Tom Graves

Happy birthday, Roberta Gellis.

Revered historical novelist Roberta Gellis, who also has written mysteries and science fiction and fantasy works, turns 80 today. Her mystery series (including A Mortal Bane, A Personal Devil, and Bone of Contention) features Magdalene la Batarde, an enterprising madam in medieval England. The latest in the series is Chains of Folly (Five Star, 2006).

William Faulkner: Mystery Fan.

Today's birthday of William Faulkner (b. 1897, d. 1962) serves as a reminder that Faulkner was an avid mystery reader (according to A Companion to William Faulkner by Richard C. Moreland [373], Faulkner's library included works by John Dickson Carr, Dashiell Hammett, Dorothy L. Sayers, and Rex Stout). He also wrote some of his own, including Intruder in the Dust (1948) and six stories with lawyer Gavin Stevens that appear in Knight's Gambit (1949). The Providence Sunday Journal savaged Knight's Gambit with "[t]he result is Faulkner disemboweled and thunder without God" (reproduced in William Faulkner: The Contemporary Reviews 289).

Wow. And I thought I'd read some bad reviews.

Go here to see some vintage covers of Knight's Gambit and magazines with Faulkner's mystery work.

So We Beat On...

Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born today in St. Paul in 1896. He died in 1940 and is buried in Rockville, Maryland (Fitzgerald's father, a Confederate sympathizer, was originally from Maryland). Go here to see his grave (his wife, Zelda, and daughter, former Washington Post reporter Scottie Fitzgerald Lanahan Smith, are also buried here).

Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby was influenced by New Jersey's Hall-Mills case (involving a Johnson & Johnson heiress; see Henry C. Phelps, "Literary History/Unsolved Mystery: The Great Gatsby and the Hall-Mills Murder Case," ANQ 14.3 [2001]: 33-39). I wrote an article for Mystery Scene in 1999 on some youthful attempts by Fitzgerald to write mysteries, most of them unsuccessful ("F. Scott Fitzgerald: Mystery Writer?" MS #65). There is a promising ghost story, "The Room with Green Blinds" (1911), in which a young man inherits his grandfather's house and a mystery with it. The story can be found in The Apprentice Fiction of F. Scott Fitzgerald (ed. John Kuehl, Rutgers UP, 1965).

For an interesting article by Charles Scribner III on the original cover art for The Great Gatsby, go here.

A Matter of Life and Death.

Little irritates me more than reading a review in which a mystery is described as "transcending the genre," as if we genre fans will one day have a "road to Damascus" moment, see the error of our ways, and, yea, verily, trod the righteous paths of "real" fiction thereafter.

Snort.

Thus I tend to collect those accounts that show that being in the genre is not such a bad thing and illustrate what mysteries can mean to their readers. You may have seen my earlier post on mystery reading of WWII POWs. There's the woman I helped in the library recently who needed some suggestions for audiobooks: she cared for a bedridden elderly lady, whose greatest pleasure was listening to legal mysteries. There's the famous story of the nurse reading Agatha Christie's The Pale Horse, who realized that her critically ill patient bore the signs of thallium poisoning, which had been misdiagnosed as a case of encephalitis. Christie wrote about the poison's effects in the novel.

Most of all, there's this anecdote from Miracles on the Water (2006), by ABC News producer Tom Nagorski. It's about the SS City of Benares, which was carrying evacuee children from Britain in 1940 when it was torpedoed by a U-boat. One lifeboat was missed in the search for survivors, and its occupants (including Nagorski's great-uncle) endured a harrowing week alone on the stormy ocean with strictly rationed food and water, and people dying one by one.

Children were in this lifeboat (many of the children from the City of Benares showed more courage than the average adult), and their chaperone came up with the idea of inventing a suspense serial and telling a chapter each night, as a way of keeping the children, as well as the adults, occupied.

The star of this daily ritual? Sapper's heroic captain, Bulldog Drummond, pitted against nefarious Nazi agents.

It's quite clear from the account that the serial helped to keep the passengers' spirits up, preserve their sanity, and convey the message that as Drummond always triumphs, they would triumph too.

Not bad for a genre story.

Happy birthday, Herbert George Wells.

Science fiction pioneer and visionary H. G. Wells, author of The Time Machine (1895), The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Invisible Man (1897), The War of the Worlds (1898), and numerous other works, was born today in 1866. He died in 1946.

One of my favorite films is Time After Time (1979), written and directed by Nicholas Meyer, that pits Wells (played by Malcolm McDowell) against Jack the Ripper (played by a very scary David Warner). And here is an interesting 1940 radio encounter between Wells and Welles—Orson, that is—the creator of so much panic with the Mercury Theatre broadcast of War of the Worlds in 1938.

"Crime and bad lives are the measure of a State’s failure, all crime in the end is the crime of the community."—H. G. Wells, A Modern Utopia (1905)

Happy birthday, Upton Sinclair.

Muckraking journalist and political activist Upton Sinclair, best known for his landmark 1906 work The Jungle that reformed the Chicago meat-packing industry, was born today in Baltimore in 1878. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Dragon's Teeth (1942), a novel that examined the rise of the Nazis. Other notable works among his 90 books include King Coal (1917; dealing with Colorado coal mines), Oil! (1927; about the California oil industry, which has been adapted into the upcoming film There Will Be Blood), and Boston: A Documentary Novel of the Sacco-Vanzetti Case (1928). He also ran as a Democratic candidate for governor of California in 1934.

The Jungle has often been credited with the passage of the Pure Food and Drug Act of 1906, long advocated by Theodore Roosevelt.

Sinclair died in November 1968 in Bound Brook, New Jersey, a town located next to my hometown of Martinsville.

Mysteries Behind Bars (or Barbed Wire).

Today's Washington Post ran an op-ed by Woodrow Wilson Center scholar Haleh Esfandiari, who was just recently released from an Iranian prison. In it, she mentions that "Georges Simenon's police thrillers ... made excellent prison reading."

It reminded me that mysteries often have a more far-reaching impact than their writers think. A fascinating article is "'The Greatest Morale Factor Next to the Red Army': Books and Libraries in American and British Prisoners of War Camps in Germany in World War II," by David Shavit (Libraries & Culture 34.2 [1999]). He mentions that the library at Stalag Luft III (aka the setting for "The Great Escape") included "342 detective novels" (about 18 percent of the entire camp library), one POW noting that "we could not have lived without books." The Oflag 64 Item (oflags were camps that held officer POWs) reported that the most popular detectives among these servicemen were Perry Mason, Philo Vance, and Ellery Queen.

More recently, it was reported that the most popular authors at Gitmo included J. K. Rowling and Agatha Christie.

Make Way for Robert McCloskey...

... who was born today in 1914. His legendary Make Way for Ducklings was awarded the Caldecott Medal in 1942. He died in 2003. To see the Boston Public Garden sculpture by Nancy Schon inspired by McCloskey's book, go here.

... Agatha Christie, who was born today in 1890. She died in 1976. The summer 07 issue of CLUES has an article by Marty S. Knepper positing the real location of Miss Marple's St. Mary Mead.

... and humorist extraordinaire Robert Benchley (member of the famed Algonquin Round Table, author, actor, and grandfather of Jaws creator Peter), who was born today in 1889. He died in 1945.

"The surest way to make a monkey of a man is to quote him."--Robert Benchley, My Ten Years in a Quandary and How They Grew (1936)

Happy birthday, J. B. Priestley.

British author, broadcaster, and prolific man of letters J. B. Priestley, who wrote the play An Inspector Calls (1945), was born today in Yorkshire in 1894. He died in 1984.

An Inspector Calls involves the prosperous Birling family in pre-World War I England and what happens when an Inspector Goole arrives on their doorstep with news of a suicide.

Priestley also wrote Mystery of Greenfingers: A Comedy of Detection (1937) and Bright Shadow: A Play of Detection in Three Acts (1950). Other mystery-related works include Benighted (aka The Old Dark House, 1927); the spy spoof I'll Tell You Everything (1932; cowritten with Gerald Bullett); Blackout in Gretley (1942), a novel of Nazi espionage in England; and Salt Is Leaving (1966).

Photo: Evocative artwork by Holly Harrell for the 2006 production of An Inspector Calls, Regent University (VA)

The UK's Most Borrowed Books.

The United Kingdom's Public Lending Right Office maintains statistics on most borrowed authors and titles from libraries (as authors receive royalties from this program). I'll avoid the usual suspects (e.g., Rowling, Patterson, Dan Brown) and list a few selections from the Top 100 for 2005-06:

#10 Ian Rankin, Fleshmarket Close (Orion, 2004)
#16 Michael Connelly, The Closers (Orion, 2005)
#20 Lee Child, One Shot (Bantam, 2005)
#23 Jack Higgins, Without Mercy (HarperCollins, 2005)
#28 Ruth Rendell, End in Tears (Hutchinson, 2005)
#30 Elizabeth George, With No One as Witness (Hodder, 2005)
#33 Harlan Coben, The Innocent (Orion, 2005)
#53 Jeffery Deaver, The Twelfth Card (Hodder, 2005)
#54 P. D. James, The Lighthouse (Faber, 2005)
#64 Andrew Taylor, The American Boy (Harper, 2004)
#77 Minette Walters, The Devil's Feather (Macmillan, 2005)
#89 Frederick Forsyth, Avenger (Bantam, 2003)
#95 Reginald Hill, The Stranger House (HarperCollins, 2005)

For the most borrowed classic authors, the ones still going strong include Georgette Heyer, Daphne du Maurier (Rebecca, Jamaica Inn, The House on the Strand), and Agatha Christie (The Hollow, Taken at the Flood).

Happy birthday, O Henry.

Master of the twist ending William Sydney Porter, aka O Henry, was born today in Greensboro, North Carolina, in 1862.

He began his writing life as a journalist for the Detroit Free Press and the Houston Daily Post (he lived in Austin for a time). Porter served time for alleged embezzlement of funds from a poorly managed bank where he had worked (the charge was dubious, and he compounded it by fleeing the jurisdiction). While in prison, he began to publish stories under the pseudonym O Henry. After his release, he went to New York in 1902, writing 65 stories in 1904 and 50 in 1905. His best-known tales are probably "The Gift of the Magi" and "The Ransom of Red Chief." He died in 1910.

There is a hotel named in his honor in Greensboro, the O Henry Museum in Austin, and the O Henry Memorial Prize for short story writing.

The Disappearing Newspaper Book Review.

Steve Wasserman, former editor of the Los Angeles Times Book Review, discusses the vanishing newspaper book review in the most recent issue of the Columbia Journalism Review. He writes, "Nearly a quarter century ago, according to a 1984 study in the Newspaper Research Journal, the average American newspaper used three-quarters of a page to one page a week for book reviews. . . . Readers know . . . in their bones something newspapers forget at their peril: that without books, indeed, without the news of such books—without literacy—the good society vanishes and barbarism triumphs."

(Hat tip to Booklist's Likely Stories blog)

Rolled dough.
The noble librarians on the Fiction-L list have compiled a list of book titles and authors' names that their patrons have mangled. Take a look here.

My favorite is the late author "Rolled Dough," whose birthday is coming up on September 13. Mr. Roald Dahl (seen at left) might have been surprised at this unique version of his name...

(Hat tip to Sarah Johnson).

Happy birthday, Taylor Caldwell.

The bestselling Taylor Caldwell, author of Dear and Glorious Physician (about St. Luke), and family sagas such as The Captains and the Kings (later a miniseries starring the late Richard Jordan), Testimony of Two Men (later a miniseries starring David Birney and Steve Forrest), and numerous other novels, was born today in 1900. She died in 1985.

Caldwell, who was born in England, served in the U.S. Naval Reserve during World War I as a "yeomanette." Her first editor was the legendary Max Perkins of Scribner; Scribner published her first novel, Dynasty of Death, in 1938 and nine novels after that. Some letters from Perkins to Caldwell are reproduced in Editor to Author: The Letters of Maxwell E. Perkins (ed. John Hall Wheelock, 1950).

Caldwell's books are estimated to have sold more than 30 million copies. Caldwell, who struggled for many years to be published and was often criticized for overblown prose, once said her greatest inspiration was "the anticipation of big checks." More on her life can be found in her autobiography, On Growing Up Tough (1971).

Happy birthday, Frank Yerby.

Expatriate African American writer Frank Yerby was born today in Georgia in 1916. He died in Madrid in 1991.

Well known for his historical fiction, Yerby published The Foxes of Harrow in 1946, which sold more than 2 million copies in the 1940s and was adapted into a film with Rex Harrison and Maureen O'Hara. Much of his work draws on his Southern roots, such as Benton's Row (1954) and Captain Rebel (1956). The Voyage Unplanned (1974) deals with OSS and Resistance activities in World War II France. Yerby was also a fine short story writer, winning the O. Henry Memorial Prize in 1944 for "Health Card."

Today's Washington Post.

Today's Washington Post looks at the wrap-up of David Simon's The Wire. For the article and some video, go here. Simon and I are both products of University of Maryland's College of Journalism, but we did not meet while on campus--he was a few years ahead of me and a distinguished editor of The Diamondback, and I worked on the campus radio station WMUC.

Today's paper also features an article by a former WEBR colleague of mine, Heather Taylor, who now has her own show about baby boomers on WMET in Washington, DC. Heather is an inspiration to anyone who would like to make a career change in mid-life.

Madeleine Stern, R.I.P.

I was distressed to learn of the Aug 18th death of Madeleine Stern, who, in conjunction with Leona Rostenberg, uncovered the pseudonyms and hidden thriller work of Louisa May Alcott. She was 95.

After a Guggenheim fellowship, Stern wrote a biography of Alcott and edited several collections of Alcott's thrillers. With Rostenberg, she wrote vastly entertaining memoirs about their antiquarian book business, such as Old Books, Rare Friends and Old Books in the Old World: Reminiscences of Book Buying Abroad. Stern sent me a gracious letter when I published an article on Alcott's thriller work (giving her and Rostenberg full credit, of course); the article is reprinted in Deadly Women (Carroll & Graf, 1998).

Memorial contributions may be made to Alcott's Orchard House.

Cornerstone: The Moving Toyshop by Edmund Crispin.

Note: This continues my occasional series on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list (those mysteries deemed essential by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen).

Edmund Crispin's Gervase Fen series has a delightful screwball quality to it, as evidenced in Crispin's Love Lies Bleeding: "... the boys sang [the school song] with the exuberance of reprieved assassins."

In The Moving Toyshop (1946), Oxford professor Fen (who sounds remarkably like the White Rabbit from Alice in Wonderland) seeks to resolve the mystery of a murder victim found in a toyshop, which is replaced by a grocery store the next day, with no sign that a corpse ever existed. A notable and hilarious sequence is when a cohort of Fen's enlists a group of inebriated Oxford undergraduates as muscle merely on the promise of a drink.

Crispin is the pseudonym of composer Robert Bruce Montgomery (1921-78), who worked on scores for six "Carry On" films and some of the "Doctor in the House" series; he also edited some science fiction collections. There's a new biography, Bruce Montgomery/Edmund Crispin: A Life in Music and Books by David Whittle, out from Ashgate.

Maggie Topkis's Felony & Mayhem Press has reprinted several titles in the Fen series: The Case of the Gilded Fly, Swan Song, and Holy Disorders, and will be reprinting Love Lies Bleeding (also an entry on the Haycraft-Queen list) later this fall.

Happy birthday, Theodore Dreiser.

Sister Carrie author Theodore Dreiser, who earns a place on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list via his novel An American Tragedy (1925), was born today in Indiana in 1871. He died in 1945.

An American Tragedy, made into the Elizabeth Taylor-Montgomery Clift film A Place in the Sun (1951) and a Met opera (2005), was based on the 1906 Grace Brown murder case in New York. Chester Gillette was convicted of the crime and died in the electric chair on March 30, 1908. An American Tragedy was banned in Boston in 1927, with one court charging that the book "manifestly tend[ed] to corrupt the morals of youth."

Happy birthday, Earl Derr Biggers.

Playwright and writer Earl Derr Biggers, the creator of wise Chinese Hawaiian detective Charlie Chan (played memorably by Warner Oland, left), was born today in Ohio in 1884.

Chan made his debut in The House without a Key (1925), which was followed by The Chinese Parrot (1926), Behind That Curtain (1928), The Black Camel (1929), Charlie Chan Carries On (1930), and The Keeper of the Keys (1932).

Wrote the New York Times a week after Biggers's death on April 5, 1933, "The creator of Charlie Chan will be missed all the more because the detective novel of today is in danger of becoming a mechanical and lumbering exercise [. . . Biggers] had . . . the swift forward movement of the true detective tale. With him we are on the trail of a slayer and not putting together a jigsaw puzzle."

Harte to Hart.

Popular Western writer and poet Bret Harte was born today in 1836 (he died in 1902), and multiaward-winning Carolyn Hart, creator of sleuths Annie Darling, Max Darling, and Henrie O and the pride of Oklahoma, turns 71 today. Hart's latest novel is Set Sail for Murder.

The illustration below is a poster for a ca. 1900 production of Harte's M'Liss.

Happy birthday, A. S. Byatt and Mason Williams.

A. S. Byatt, the author of Possession, one of my favorite novels of literary detection, turns 71 today; and Mason Williams, the Grammy-winning composer of "Classical Gas" and Smothers Brothers show writer, turns 69. Go here for a Williams performance of "Classical Gas."

Happy birthday, Vera Miles.

Actress Vera Miles turns 78 today. She played Henry Fonda's wife in Hitchcock's The Wrong Man (1956) and Janet Leigh's sister in Psycho (1960); her other numerous mystery credits include Burke's Law; Cannon; Checkmate; Columbo; Dan August; The Detectives Starring Robert Taylor; Ellery Queen; The FBI; The Fugitive, Hawaii Five-O; Ironside; I Spy; Judd for the Defense; Magnum, PI; Mannix; Owen Marshall, Counselor at Law; Matt Houston; Murder, She Wrote; Simon & Simon; The Streets of San Francisco; and 23 Paces to Baker Street.

Happy birthday, James Cozzens.

James Gould Cozzens, who won the Pulitzer Prize for his 1948 novel Guard of Honor but also has a place on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list for his 1942 novel The Just and the Unjust, was born today in 1903. He died in 1978.

The Just and the Unjust centers on a murder trial in a small Pennsylvania town, with Cozzens's careful attention to legal procedure and the main character, a young assistant district attorney who wrestles with questions of justice and ambition. Time magazine called The Just and the Unjust "as skillfully served up as The Postman Always Rings Twice [and . . .] the year's most interesting literary disappointment." Yet Time put Cozzens on the cover of its Sept. 2, 1957, issue, calling him "the Garbo of U.S. letters" in its accompanying story.

Happy birthday, Steve Hockensmith.

Edgar and Anthony nominee Steve Hockensmith, creator of those Western "deducifyin'" brothers Otto and Gustav Amlingmeyer, turns 39 today. The latest book in his entertaining series is On the Wrong Track. For my interview with Hockensmith, go here.

Happy birthday, Garry Disher.

Australian-born author Garry Disher turns 58 today. His latest police procedurals featuring Inspector Hal Challis are Snapshot and Chain of Evidence (published by Soho Press).

In addition to writing crime novels, Disher has taught creative writing and published children's books. Here are his rules on writing for children (although some, such as "You shall treat the outer and inner challenges of life with honesty, integrity and hard thought, avoiding easy answers, no answers and reductive sentimentality," can be applied more widely).

Quote for the Day.

"Detective authors, by the way, are nearly all as good as gold, because it is part of their job to believe and to maintain that Your Sin Will Find You Out. That is why Detective Fiction is, or should be, such a good influence to a degenerate world, and that, no doubt, is why so many bishops, school masters, eminent statesmen, and others with reputations to support, read detective stories, to improve their morals and to keep them out of mischief."

—Dorothy L. Sayers, introduction to the Third Omnibus of Crime (1935; 2)

Happy birthday, Mary Roberts Rinehart.

Born today in 1876 was author Mary Roberts Rinehart, whose highly lucrative writing career spanned nearly 50 years, from her first novel, The Circular Staircase, in 1908 and the creation of nurse-detective Hilda Adams, aka Miss Pinkerton, in 1914, to the collection of Letitia Carbury stories, The Best of Tish, in 1955. One of the earliest American women war correspondents and a trained nurse, she went to France to cover WWI for the Saturday Evening Post.

She died in 1958 and is buried in Arlington National Cemetery (her husband, Stanley, served in the US Army Medical Corps).

For a look at MRR's impact on the bestseller list, see Michael Korda, Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller, 1900–1999 (Barnes & Noble, 2001). Korda notes that the first time an American detective story appeared on the bestseller list was in 1909 (4). It was Mary Roberts Rinehart's The Man in Lower Ten, one of my favorite MRR works for its hilarious send-up of the amateur detective.

For a look at some vintage dustjackets of MRR's work, go here (note that the bookmark for The Man in Lower Ten is taken from artwork by Howard Chandler Christy; he illustrated the original edition).

Where's the Beef?

"I was just thinking," [Sergeant Beef] continued. "How useful it is to be the kind of detective I am. Ex-policeman. Ordinary sort of chap. None of your ritzy types with titles and private incomes." (Murder in Miniature 40)

Over the years, Academy Chicago Publishers has showcased gems of mystery literature in inexpensive editions (e.g., Celia Fremlin's Edgar-winning The Hours Before Dawn). That's certainly the case with Leo Bruce's Murder in Miniature and Other Stories, introduced by Margery Allingham Society chairman B. A. Pike. Bruce, aka Rupert Croft-Cooke, created the stalwart Sergeant Beef as the deliberate antithesis of aristocratic sleuths such as Lord Peter Wimsey. This collection of tales—which largely appeared in the Evening Standard in the early 1950s—feature him, the equally shrewd Sergeant Grebe, or others in delightful puzzle mysteries. In "Murder in Miniature," the title story, Beef confronts the body of a dwarf that literally tumbles into his lap on a train. I particularly enjoyed "On the Spot," in which a detective inspector believes he can commit the perfect crime.

Sergeant Beef also can be seen in Academy Chicago's The Case for Three Detectives, where he is pitted against parodies of Wimsey, Poirot, and Father Brown.

In addition to producing his substantial fiction and nonfiction work, Croft-Cooke served as book critic for The Sketch. His play Banquo's Chair was adapted for Alfred Hitchcock Presents (1959).

Happy birthday, Dorothy B. Hughes and
Frances Noyes Hart.

MWA Grand Master Dorothy B. Hughes was born today in 1904, and author Frances Noyes Hart was born today in 1890.
Hughes (seen at left) is known for some legendary noir novels: In a Lonely Place (novel reissued by Feminist Press; film directed by Nicholas Ray and starring Humphrey Bogart); Ride the Pink Horse (memorably filmed by Robert Montgomery, who also appeared in a 1948 radio production of In a Lonely Place); The Fallen Sparrow (featuring a terrific John Garfield); and The Blackbirder, among others. In a Lonely Place provides a look into the mind of a serial killer, long before the modern spate of such novels, and Hughes skillfully shows the reader how the character became what he is.

A longtime mystery reviewer for the Albuquerque Tribune, Los Angeles Times, and other newspapers, Hughes died in 1993.

Frances Noyes Hart, a distant connection of Edith Wharton, served as a YMCA canteen worker in France during World War I and wrote three mystery novels, including The Bellamy Trial (1927, "probably ... the greatest mystery story written this century," wrote Herbert Carter in the American Mercury). Released as a film in 1929, The Bellamy Trial was based on New Jersey's Hall-Mills murder case, which also influenced F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby. Her other novels include the Halloween mystery Hide in the Dark (1929) and The Crooked Lane (1934). She also published a collection of short stories (Contact and Other Stories, 1923). Her story "Contact" won second place in the O Henry Memorial Prize competition in 1920 (other second-place winners were Fitzgerald and Alice Duer Miller). She died in 1943.

Both writers appear on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list: Hughes for her debut novel The So Blue Marble (1940), Hart for The Bellamy Trial. Both are out of print in the United States, although it appears you can still buy a French translation of The Bellamy Trial.

Haycraft-Queen, continued

As previously mentioned, I've been blogging on various and sundry entries on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list---those mysteries deemed essential by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen. (See the list at right for a round-up of these posts.)

I became curious as to how many titles on the list are out of print, so checked the list against Books in Print. My results: approximately one-third (55) of the entries on the list (181 books) are out of print in the United States. A very few (e.g., Francis Iles [Anthony Berkeley Cox], Before the Fact; Edmund Crispin [Robert Bruce Montgomery], The Moving Toyshop) are available in Britain. I've reluctantly had to categorize some titles that are only available through POD as in print, knowing that some readers would prefer a traditionally published book and would not like to pay the sometimes expensive prices for POD.

I've been concerned about the overall lack of knowledge about mystery history and fear the inevitable result: the fading away of vital works such as these. I do have to admit to a lack of total accord with Messrs. Haycraft and Queen on some of their choices; I could have jogged along quite happily without ever reading A. A. Milne's The Red House Mystery (1922), which I thought was pretty awful, was glad that Raymond Chandler concurred (in The Simple Art of Murder), and wondered what all the fuss was about.

My out-of-print list follows below.

Haycraft-Queen Out-of-Print Titles in the United States
(Compiled by Elizabeth Foxwell)

Anderson Frederick Irving - The Book of Murder - 1930
Armstrong Charlotte - The Unsuspected - 1946
Bailey H. C. - The Red Castle - 1932
Benson G. R. - Tracks in the Snow - 1906
Carr John Dickson - The Crooked Hinge - 1938
Carr John Dickson - The Judas Window - 1938
Charteris Leslie [Leslie Charles Bowyer Yin] - Meet the Tiger - 1928
Coates Robert M. - Wisteria Cottage - 1948
Cole G. D. H. [G. D. H. Cole and Margaret Cole] - The Brooklyn Murders - 1923
Coles Manning [Cyril Henry Coles and Adelaide Frances Oke Manning] - Pray Silence - 1940
Crispin Edmund [Robert Bruce Montgomery] - The Moving Toyshop - 1946
Dane Clemence [Winifred Ashton] and Helen Simpson - Re-enter Sir John - 1932
Davis Dorothy Salisbury - A Gentle Murderer - 1951
De la Torre Lillian [Lillian McCue] - Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector - 1946
Dickson Carter [John Dickson Carr] - Lord of the Sorcerers - 1946
Dunsany Lord - The Little Tales of Smethers - 1952
Eberhart Mignon G. - The Patient in Room 18 - 1929
Ellin Stanley - Dreadful Summit - 1948
Eustis Helen - The Horizontal Man - 1946
Frome David - The Hammersmith Murders - 1930
Gardner Erle Stanley - The Case of the Sulky Girl - 1933
Halsey Harlan Page - Old Sleuth, the Detective - 1872
Hammett Dashiell - The Adventures of Sam Spade - 1944
Hart Frances Noyes - The Bellamy Trial - 1927
Heard H. F. - A Taste for Honey - 1941
Hughes Dorothy B. - The So Blue Marble - 1940
Iles Francis [Anthony Berkeley Cox] - Before the Fact - 1932
King Rufus - Murder by the Clock - 1929
Lawrence Hilda - Blood Upon the Snow - 1944
Lipsky Eleazar - The People Against O’Hara - 1950
Lockridge Frances and Richard Lockridge - The Norths Meet Murder - 1940
Lustgarten Edgar - A Case to Answer - 1947
MacDonald Philip - The Rasp - 1924
MacDonald Philip - The Nursemaid Who Disappeared [aka Warrant for X] - 1938
MacHarg William and Edwin Balmer - The Achievements of Luther Trant - 1910
Marquand John P. - No Hero - 1935
McCloy Helen - Through a Glass, Darkly - 1950
O’Higgins Harvey J. - Detective Duff Unravels It - 1929
Paul Elliot - The Mysterious Mickey Finn - 1939
Piper Evelyn - The Motive - 1950
Rawson Clayton - Death from a Top Hat - 1938
Rhode John - The Murders in Praed Street - 1928
Rhode John - The Paddington Mystery - 1925
Rice Craig - Trial by Fury - 1941
Rohmer Sax [Arthur Henry Sarsfield Ward] - The Mystery of Dr. Fu-Manchu - 1908
Ross Barnaby [Ellery Queen] - The Tragedy of Y - 1932
Seeley Mabel - The Listening House - 1938
Stribling T. S. - Clues of the Caribbees - 1929
Trevor Glen [James Hilton] - Murder at School [aka Was It Murder?] - 1931
Van Dine S. S. [Willard Huntington Wright] - The Benson Murder Case - 1926
Vickers Roy - The Department of Dead Ends - 1946
Walling R. A. J. - The Fatal Five Minutes - 1932
Walsh Thomas - Nightmare in Manhattan - 1950
Waters [William Russell] - Recollections of a Detective Police Officer - 1856
Wells Carolyn - The Clue - 1909

Happy birthday, David Raksin.

Film composer and two-time Oscar nominee David Raksin, well known for his haunting theme for the 1944 film Laura, was born today in 1912. He died in 2004.

In addition to Laura, Raksin's mystery music credits include The Hound of the Baskervilles (1939), The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes (1939), Fallen Angel (1945), Force of Evil (1948), Whirlpool (1949), and Al Capone (1959). Nonmystery music work includes The Secret Life of Walter Mitty (1947), Forever Amber (1947), and the TV series Ben Casey (1961).

Cornerstone: Was It Murder? (1931)

Note: This continues my occasional series on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list (those mysteries deemed essential by Howard Haycraft and Ellery Queen).

Trevor, Glen [James Hilton]. Was It Murder? [aka Murder at School]. 1931. New York: HarperPerennial, 1980.

". . . the theories of a generation reared on crook dramas and
detective novels are hardly worth taking seriously"
(Was It Murder? 65–66).

Colin Revell, an Oxford graduate halfheartedly working on "a full-length satirical epic in the manner and metre of Don Juan," is summoned by the headmaster of his alma mater Oakington school because of his reputation as a "neat solver of mysteries" (2–3). A wealthy young pupil has met with an "accidental" death, leaving his fatuous cousin, a teacher at the school, as the prime suspect. Soon the appearance of two additional bodies and an attempt on Revell's life complicate the case.

Obviously, both Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Was It Murder? benefit from Hilton's background---his father was a schoolmaster. Hilton's pacifist sentiments are evident in the novel, as seen in the remarks of the shellshocked teacher Lambourne: "After seeing three years of purposeless slaughter backed by all the forces of law and religion, I find it hard to share in the general indignation when somebody tries on a little purposeful though no doubt unofficial slaughter on his own" (49). An interesting twist is the failure of the amateur sleuth and the triumph of the shrewd professional policeman, contrary to the usual brilliant amateur/bumbling official scenario.

Was It Murder? is not currently in print, but a number of used paperback editions are available (e.g., Dover, Bantam).

James Hilton (1900-1954) is best known for his novels (and subsequent films of) Lost Horizon (1933); Goodbye, Mr. Chips (1934); and Random Harvest (1941); he also won an Oscar for his work on the screenplay for Mrs. Miniver (1942). At the time of his death, it was estimated that Goodbye, Mr. Chips and Lost Horizon had each sold over 3 million copies.

In addition to Was It Murder?, Hilton wrote three stories for Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine: "The Mallet" (Sept. 1942; rpt. The Queen's Taste, 1946), "The Perfect Plan" (March 1946), and "The King of the Bats" (March 1953).