9/9/1903 Phyllis A. Whitney arrives

September 9, 1903.  Phyllis A. Whitney was born on this date in Yokohama, Japan, of all places.  Not that there's anything wrong with Yokohama, but Whitney is thought of as an American author, which indeed she  was.  Her family spent her first few years in Asia.

Whitney was often described as an author of gothic novels, although she preferred the term romantic suspense.  Call it what you will, she was good at it.  Among her seventy novels were two Edgar winners for Best Juvenile Mysteries.  The MWA recognized her as a Grand Master in 1988.  She died at the ripe old age of 104. 

9/4/1900 Cyril Hare comes up

September 4, 1900.  Alfred Gordon Clark was born on this date in Surrey, England.  He became a barrister and later a judge, but he interests us because, under the name Cyril Hare, he wrote some great mystery novels.  His most important character was Francis Pettigrew, also a barrister.

8/16/1902 The mother of the historical romance is born

August 16, 1902.  You might say Georgette Heyer was born a century late.  Her most popular books were romances, set in the Regency period (early nineteenth century).

Naturally we are more concerned with her less popular books, the thrillers, the creation of which  she compared to solving crossword puzzles.  Sometimes the mechanical nature showed a little too much, as in the novel in which all the main characters names are alphabetical according to the order in which appear.

7/29/1909 Chester Himes is born

July 29, 1909.  Chester Himes, arguably the first great African-American mystery writer, was born this day in Jefferson City, Missouri.  He started writing while in prison for armed robbery.  He is best remembered for the Harlem Detectives novels he wrote, featuring Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones, two Harlem police detectives.  Three of them were made into movies, starting with Cotton Comes To Harlem in 1970.

The novelist Ishmael Reed wrote that Himes "taught me the difference between a black detective and Sherlock Holmes."

7/9/1905 Lionel White is born

July 9, 1905. Lionel White was born on this date in New York City.  He wrote many crime novels, and a lot of them were adapted into films.  For example, Stanley Kubrick turned Clean Break into his movie The Killing. 

But surely the weirdest adaptation of one of his books was what happened to The Snatch, a novel about kidnapping a child.  A gang of French criminals read the book and used it as the blueprint for a real crime.  It went beautifully until, as Donald E. Westlake out it, "They ran out of book."  Bragging about their accomplishments and spending money wildly, they were soon picked up.  They did not offer White any of the ransom money, alas.

6/29/1908 Bruno Fischer is born

June 29, 1908.  Bruno Fischer was born on this day in Germany.  His family moved to the U.S. in 1913.  He wrote paperbacks and stories for the pulp magazines, often in the gloomy noir style of Cornell Woolrich.

6/26/1904 Peter Lorre slithers into the world

June 26, 1904.  Think how much poorer our genre would be without Peter Lorre, who was born on this date in Austria-Hungary (now Slovakia).  His first big success was starring as a serial killer in the Fritz Lang masterpiece M.  When the Nazis took over Germany in 1933 he got the hell out (as did Lang).  His first English language flick was Alfred Hitchcock's The Man Who Knew Too Much (the first version).  He learned most of his lines for that one phonetically.

Among the American movies in which he played criminals are Crime and Punishment, Mad Love, The Maltese Falcon, and Casablanca.  The last two also featured Sidney Greenstreet, and those two went on to make seven more movies together.

He also starred in a series of movies about John P. Marquand's Japanese spy/detective Mr. Moto, a role he came to despise.  One of my favorite performances was as the hilarious plastic surgeon Dr. Einstein in Arsenic and Old Lace.

John Huston, who directed him in The Maltese Falcon, said  "He's always doing two things at the same time, thinking one thing and saying something else."  A great skill for an actor.

5/10/1904 Albert Campion's champion arrives

May 20, 1904.  Margery Allingham was born on this day in London.  Her breakthrough novel was The Crime At Black Dudley, which included a minor character, a bit of a rogue, named Albert Campion.  At her publisher's suggestion she moved him to the front in her next novel and he became her master sleuth.  Campion was somewhat mysterious; his family had royal connections that were never clarified.  He featured in more than a dozen novesl and several books of short stories.  Peter Davison played him on television starting in 1989.

 Allingham's husband, Pip Youngman Carter, created the covers for her books and sometimes collaborated with her.

5/13/1901 Lord Saltire Disappears

March 13, 190?.  This day saw the disappearance of Lord Saltire, ten year old son of the Duke of Holdernesse.  This event sent Sherlock Holmes into action in "The Adventure of the Priory School."  Arthur Conan Doyle's plot involves murder, blackmail, and horses disguised as cows.  Sort of.

3/26/1904 J.F. Straker born

March 26, 1904.  I can't tell you much about J.F. Straker because there isn't much about him on the web.  Born on this date in Kent, UK.  Served in the army during World War II.  Taught math.  And wrote some mystery novels with amazing titles, like Goodbye, Aunt Charlotte!,  Sin and Johnny Inch, and A Pity It Wasn't George.  His Hell is Empty (another great title) was filmed in 1967. 

3/17/1904 Patrick Hamilton is born

March 17, 1904.  Happy St Patrick's Day.  This holiday no doubt had something to do with the first name of today's subject.  Patrick Hamilton was born near Brighton, England on this date.  Doris Lessing called him "a marvelous novelist who's grossly neglected," but we are mostly interested in two plays he wrote; Gaslight and Rope..Yes, that is where the idea of gaslighting someone (to make them think they are going crazy) came from.  And Rope was made into a very creepy movie by Alfred Hitchcock, remembered today mostly because Jimmy Stewart played a somewhat sinister philosophy professor who inspires the bad guys to murder, and because Hitchcock filmed it as if it were one long camera shot.  (Many years later Birdman used the same stunt.)

2/17/1900 Lawrence Blochman arrives

February 17, 1900.  Lawrence G. Blochman was a child of  a brand-new century.   He wrote more that fifty books, many of them mystery novels.  His short story "Diagnosis: Homicide," won the Edgar in 1951.

2/13/1903 Simenon arrives

February 13, 1903.  Georges Simenon was born in Liège, Belgium on this day.  He wrote almost 200 novels, including more than seventy about French policeman Jules Maigret, one of the most popular detectives in literature. My favorite line from M. Simenon:  “Novel finished. I re-enter life.”

2/2/1908 RIchard Wormser hits the scene

February 2, 1908.  Richard Wormser was born in New York City on this date.  He became a prolific author of mysteries and westerns.  His last novel, The Invader, won the Edgar Award in 1973.

I think it did.  Well, it definitely did.  But was it his?  Some sources say it was his last book and others say it was the first book by another Richard Wormser, born in New York in 1933, and best known for The Rise and Fall of Jim Crow.  Thematically it seems like The Invader probably belongs to Richard the First, don't you think?

2/24/1909 August Derleth arrives

February 24, 1909.  August Derleth was born on this day in Sauk City, Wisconsin.  He is probably best remembered today as H.P. Lovecraft's number one fanboy, being the first to publish the horror master's works in books, and also the first to carry on the Cthulu Mythos.  He founded Arkham House (named after the fictional city where much of Lovecraft's horrors took place), which became the major publisher opf horror.

But our main interest in him is through the creation of Solar Pons, a consulting detective who lived in London with a physician friend who narrated his cases.   In short, the Pons stories were pastiches of Sherlock Holmes  - as close as Derleth could get to writing about the Master without incurring the rather of Arthur Conan Doyle's estate.  (In 1946 the family tried to stop him anyway.  They failed.)

Derleth's stories were considered by many, including Ellery Queen, to be among the best of pseudo-Sherlock.

1/29/1909 Harold Q. Masur is born

January 29, 1909.  Harold Q.Masur was born on this date in New York City.  He was an attorney and the author of more than ten mystery novels, mostly about lawyer Scott Jordan.

"The sole serious fault in the novels of Harold Q. Masur is their infrequency."  -Anthony Boucher.

11/5/1900 Philip MacDonald is born

November 5, 1900.  Mystery writer Philip MacDonald was born on this day (and he should not be confused with mystery writers John D. MacDonald, Ross Macdonald, or Gregory MacDonald).  He wrote more than thirty novels, under several names, and wrote screenplays based on his own work and others. 

10/20/1905 Half of Ellery Queen is born

October 20, 1905.  Daniel Nathan was born on this day in Brooklyn, New York.  Writing under the name Frederick Dannay, with his cousin Manfred Lee, they created the author Ellery Queen, who wrote about the character Ellery Queen.  Complicated names, huh?  And I didn't even mention that Lee's real name was Emanuel Lepofsky.

They wrote more than thirty books, sometimes bringing in a ghost writer to do part of the work.  Ellery Queen, the author, loved complicated fair play plots in the early days, with Challenges To The Reader:  You know what Ellery knows.  Can you solve the puzzle?  Their style changed over the decades, as they were willing to experiment  more than many of their era.

The character went onto movies, radio, and television, not to mention comic books.  But the half of Queen whose birth we celebrate today was also the main force behind Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, which he edited for forty years.  Now in its seventies, EQMM is one of the oldest surviving magazines in the U.S., and has been a steering force in mystery fiction,e specially the short story. 

9/30/1906 Michael Innes arrives

September 30, 1906.  J.I.M.Stewart was born on this date in Edinburgh, Scotland.  He wrote mainstream novels under his own name and crime  novels as Michael Innes.  He called those latter books - nore than forty of them - "entertainments."  His most famous invention was Detective Inspector Sir John Appleby.

9/27/1906 Jim Thompson's first night in jail

September 27, 1906.  Jim Thompson, the great noir writer, used to brag that he was born in jail.  To be precise, he was born in a jailhouse.  His father, James Thompson, was the sheriff of Caddo County, Oklahoma, and like many lawmen of the time, his family got free living quarters over the jail, in return for merely providing 24/7 service to the prisoners.

It's worth noting that Thompson's books are full of violent, amoral, and downright crazy sheriffs.