6/11/1923 George Baxt is born

June 11, 1923.  George Baxt was born on this date in Brooklyn.  After years as a screenwriter, he produced his first novel, A Queer Kind of Death, in 1966.  Talk about groundbreaking: his private eye, Pharaoh Love, was gay and Black, either of which was pretty unusual in a mystery hero back then.  Anthony Boucher, in the New York Times, said "you must not miss it."

Baxt wrote four more novels about Pharoah Love, and about twenty other books, many of them historical mysteries set around Hollywood.