1/31/1941 "Watson Was A Woman"

January 31, 1941.  Rex Stout, the author of more than 30 novels about private eye Nero Wolfe, shocked the world today when he spoke at a meeting of the Baker Street Irregulars.  His topic?  "Watson Was A Woman."

The Irregulars are fans of Sherlock Holmes, dedicated to the "great game," the careful study and interpretation of Arthur Conan Doyle's work, grounded in the assumption that Holmes was real and Doyle merely Dr. Watson's "literary agent."  But no one expected Stout to announce his discovery that Watson was the Great Detective's wife.

Here is Stout quoting from the Canon, and then explicating:

The reader may set me down as a hopeless busybody, and when I confess how much this man stimulated my curiosity, and how often I endeavored to break through the reticence which he showed on all that concerned himself.

You bet she did. She would. Poor Holmes! She doesn't even bother to employ one of the stock euphemisms such as, "I wanted to understand him better," or, "I wanted to share things with him." She proclaims it with brutal directness, "I endeavored to break through the reticence." I shuddered and for the first time in my life felt that Sherlock Holmes was not a god, but human--human by his suffering. Also, from that one page I regarded the question of the Watson person's sex as settled for good. 

Not surprisingly, Stout's tongue-in-cheek theorizing did not achieve overwhelming support.  But it was published in the Saturday Review, and has been in print more or less ever since.

1/30/1977 The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew hit TV

January 30, 1977.  Ah, those seventies Farrah-style haircuts.  This was very good day for the Stratemeyer Syndicate, the family-run business of book-packagers who had created both Franklin W. Dixon and Carolyn Keene, the alleged authors of the most popular teen sleuths in history.  Today The Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew Mysteries premiered on ABC, starring Parker Stevenson, Shaun Cassidy, and Pamela Sue Martin.  The boys didn't meet the girl until the second season.  The show shifted emphases, titles and actors before ending in 1979.

1/29/1845 Quoth the Raven

January 29, 1845.  Well, arguably "The Raven" has nothing to do with mystery, but who would deny it a place in our field (or on the bust of Pallas)?  MWA even uses it as the name for awards not directly related to writing.  Edgar Allan Poe's most famous work appeared in the Evening Mirror on this date.  (It also appeared in the February issue of The American Review under a pseudonym, so that might have hit the newsstands first.)  It made him a celebrity immediately.

1/28/1946 Craig Rice graces Time

January 28, 1946.  Craig Rice was the first mystery writer to make the cover of Time Magazine.  Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig is not so well remembered  these days, but her comic mysteries about Hildegarde Withers, Helene Justus, John J. Malone, and others were very successful in the mid-twentieth century, and several were made into movies, such as Home Sweet Homicide.  

(Thanks to Noah Stewart for catching my mistake.  Hildegarde Withers was created by Stuart Palmer.  Rice and Palmer collaborated on one book.)

1/27/2012 One For The Money hits the screen

January 27, 2012.  Janet Evanovich's Stephanie Plum hit the big screen on this day, in the form of Katherine Heigl in One For The Money, directed by Julie Anne Robinson.

1/26/1931 The Glass Key is turned

January 26, 1931.  What a terrible cover.  Dashiell Hammett's fourth (and favorite) novel, The Glass Key, was published by Knopf on this date in England, and in the U.S. three months later.  It is the grim story of Ned Beaumont, a gambler, who investigates the murder of a senator's son for his friend, a crooked political boss.

The book has been filmed twice, and inspired such movies as Yojimbo, and Miller's Crossing.  The prize for the best Nordic crime novel is the Glass Key Award.

1/25/2014 Isabel Allende rips the mystery field

January 25, 2014.  Isabel Allende is a bestselling mainstream novelist.  When her crime novel Ripper came out she appeared on NPR and said a few things that didn't go well with the mystery world.

The book is tongue in cheek. It's very ironic ... and I'm not a fan of mysteries, so to prepare for this experience of writing a mystery I started reading the most successful ones in the market in 2012. ... And I realized I cannot write that kind of book. It's too gruesome, too violent, too dark; there's no redemption there. And the characters are just awful. Bad people. Very entertaining, but really bad people. So I thought, I will take the genre, write a mystery that is faithful to the formula and to what the readers expect, but it is a joke. My sleuth will not be this handsome detective or journalist or policeman or whatever. It will be a young, 16-year-old nerd. My female protagonist will not be this promiscuous, beautiful, dark-haired, thin lady. It will be a plump, blond, healer, and so forth.

Nothing to win new fans like announcing you're slumming in their field.  By the time she apologized in February her book had received tons of publicity.  Perhaps that was the point of the exercise?