9/13/1916 Roald Dahl arrives

September 13, 1913.  Ask any fan of Alfred hItchcock's TV show about their favorite episodes and they are very likely to recall "Lamb to the Slaughter," based on a short story by Roald Dahl. Another Dahl/Hitchcock  favorite was "The Man From the South," starring Peter Lorre as a gambler with a strnage obsession.

Today Dahl is best remembered for his children's books (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, The BFG, etc. ) but he was a master of the suspenseful, sardonic short story.

8/25/1911 Ed Lacy is born

August 25, 1911.  Ed Lacy was born on this day.  He wrote about fifty novels, mostly mysteries.  He won the Edgar Award for Best Mystery Novel for Room to Swing which introduced an African-American private eye named Toussaint "Touie" Marcus Moore.

8/21/1916 Jackson Gillis is born

August 21, 1916.  One of the great writers of TV crime was born on this date in Kalama, Washington.  In 1953 Jackson Gillis became the main writer for a syndicated cop show called I'm The Law, starring George Raft.  In the years that followed he wrote for Perry Mason, Mannix, Mod Squad, Cannon, Ironside, The Man From Uncle, Hawaii Five-O, and tons of other series.


He was also a key figure in Columbo, with a hand in at least fifteen episodes.  His first script there was "Framed For Murder" with Ross Martin as the guest murderer, and some of us fondly remember that one for the cleverest clue and the most audacious "reveal" in the whole series.  He was nominated for an Emmy for it, losing to his bosses, the show's creators Levinson and Link.

His last script was for Lois and Clark, based on a story he wrote for The Adventures of Superman forty-years earlier.

Most of this information comes from an excellent article by Michael Mallory in a recent issue (#149) of Mystery Scene magazine.

8/9/1910 Robert Van Gulik is born

August 9, 1910.  Robert Van Gulik was born in the Zutphen in the Netherlands on this day.  While he was a diplomat, a musician, and man of other accomplishments, he is best remembered for his Judge Dee novels, inspired by an eighteenth century Chinese novel.  The real Judge Di lived in the seventh century, but the original novel (which Van Gulik translated) bumped him up to the Ming Dynasty, approximately a thousand years later.  

7/24/1915 Baby blue for the onesie

July 24, 1916.  This was the birthday of one of the most popular and prolific of American mystery writers, John D. MacDonald.  He is best remembered as the creator of "salvage expert" Travis McGee, but his other work included the novel The Executioners, filmed twice as Cape Fear.

The Mystery Writers of America named him a Grand Master in 1972. Or should we say they recognized him as one?

7/18/1917 Agatha Christie's century of murder

July 18, 1917.  One hundred years ago today  a woman was murdered at a mansion called Styles, beginning Agatha Christie's long killing spree.  The Mysterious Affair at Styles, published in 1920, is the first of her 66 mystery novels.  Her books are estimated to have sold 4 billion copies.

7/14/1914 A car crash inspires literature

July 14, 1014.  On this date an automobile driven by silk factory owner Henry Kaufman smashed into a horse-drawn wagon in the streets of Paterson, New Jersey.  The wagon was the property of three sisters, Constance, Norma, and Fleurette Kopp, who got badly banged up in the accident.  They demanded that Kaufman pay $50 to repair the wagon.  He refused, they persisted, and the result was months of terror that wound up in a trial in Newark the following summer.

All true, and it inspired Amy Stewart's charming novel, Girl Waits With Gun.  The title, by the way, is a headline from a newspaper story about the case.  And the "girl," Constance Kopp, was in her late thirties.  Ah, the good old days.

7/7/1918 Cain goes to war

July 7, 1918.  On this date a troop ship sailed for France full of  U.S. troops heade for World War I.  Among them was a young journalist named James M. Cain.  He didn't see much action but later he managed to pour plenty of violence into his noir novels.

6/15/191? An assassination is planned

June 15, 191?.  This is the planned date for the assassination whose prevention is the McGuffin that fuels John Buchan's first novel, The Thirty-nine Steps.

Jason Worden argued that Buchan actually invented a new subgenre: the story in which a civilian gets chased both by the bad guys, AND by the police who think he is the bad guy.  That paranoia made it perfect for Alfred Hitchcock, who not only filmed The Thirty-nine Steps, but used a similar plot in two other movies.

Buchan, by the way, went on to write a bunch of other novels. He was also one of the top figures in British Intelligence during the First World War.  Then he became the Governor General of Canada.  Not a bad resume for a thriller writer.

5/21/1917 Perry Mason and Robert T. Ironside is born

May 21, 1917.  Raymond Burr was born on this date New Westminster, British Columbia, in Canada.  In the forties and fifties he played villains, mostly in noir films.  The most meorable of those parts was Jimmy Stewart's mysterious neighbor in Rear Window.

In 1956 Raymond Burr applied for the part of prosecutor Hamilton Burger in the TV version of Perry Mason.  Erle Stanley Gardner, the creator of the character, supposedly took one look at Burr and shouted "That's Perry Mason!"  The show ran until 1966.

A year later Burr was on NBC, starring in Ironside, as the San Francisco chief of detectives, crippled by a sniper bullet. That one ran for another eight years.

Other series followed but Burr didn't find success again until the 1980s when he made two dozen TV movies as that famous defense attorney.  Erle Stanley Gardner certainly recognized his characters when he saw them.

4/12/1915 Cameron McCabe is born as Ernest Bornemann

April 12, 1915. Ernest Bornemann was born in Berlin on this date.  He wrote crime novels, mostly under the name Cameron McCabe, including The Face on the Cutting-Room Floor, which Julian Symons called the "detective story to end detective stories."  He wrote it before he turned 20, by the way.

As a Communist he left Germany in 1933 when the Nazis came to power.  When the war started the British shipped  him to Canada as an enemy alien.

He also wrote about the history of jazz and was a renowned sexologist.  Busy guy.

4/5/1917 Centennial: Robert Bloch is born

April 5, 1917.  Today is the 100th anniversary of Robert Bloch's birth.  He was a master of mystery, horror, and science fiction.  He wll always be associated with a serial killer named Ed Gein, whose crimes inspired Bloch to write the novel Psycho.  Alfred Hitchcock's movie adaptation changed the horror and suspense field forever. 

Bloch won the Hugo, Bram Stoker, and World Fantasy Awards.  THe Mystery Writers of America never gave him an Edgar, but they did elect him president.

Bloch once explained his writing success this way:  "I have the heart of a young boy. I keep it in a jar on my desk."

3/28/1912 Lucille Fletcher is born

March 28, 1912.  How many people are best known for writing radio drama?  One of them was Lucille Fletcher, who wrote the classic Sorry, Wrong Number.  Orson Welles, no slouch himself in the field, called it "the greatest single radio script ever written." She adapted it into a hit movie starring Barbara Stanwyck.  It has also been turned into not one but two operas.

Speaking of Orson Welles, he performed her radio drama "The Hitch-Hiker," which later appeared on The Twilight Zone.

Fletcher also wrote novels, but her heart belonged to the wireless.

3/9/1910 William Campbell Gault is born

March 9, 1910.  William Campbell Gault was born on this date.  He won the Edgar for Best First Novel in 1953, for Don't Cry For Me.  Exactly 30 years later he won the Shamus for Best Paperback P.I. novel for The Cana Diversion.  A year after that the Private Eye Writers of America gave him the Eye for lifetime achievement. His most famous character was Brock Callahan, football player turned Beverly Hills  private eye.

2/5/1915 Margaret Millar in view

February 5, 1915.  Margaret Millar was born on this date in Kitchener, Ontario.  She wrote more than twenty novels, including the Edgar Award-winning  Beast in  View.  The Mystery Writers of America named her Grand Master in 1983.  H.R.F. Keating called her "surely one of late twentieth-century crime fiction's best writers."

2/4/1911 The Locked Bag opens

February 4, 1911.  The issue of Saturday Evening Post with this cover date featured a courtroom tale called "The Locked Bag."  Melville Davisson Post wrote a lot of fiction, and created two famous characters: a sneaky New York lawyer named Rnadolph Mason, and a rural sleuth named Uncle Abner.

This story belongs to neither series.  You can read it here.

12/26/1917 Patricia McGerr is born

December 26, 1917.  Patricia McGerr, born on this day, was the author of more than 15 mystery novels, but she is best remembered for the ingenious concept of her first book, Pick Your Victim.

One member of a group of bored American soldiers at a base in the Arctic gets a package from home.  Among the wrappings is a scrap of his hometown newspaper, announcing that someone he knows has been convicted of murder - but the identity of the victim is not included.  So the soldiers pass the time by learning all that the recipient knows about the "suspects," trying to figure out who was killed.

Source of the date: Bill Malloy's Mystery Book of Days.

12/20/1918 Joseph Payne Brennan is born

December 20, 1918.  On this date Joseph Payne Brennan was born.  He wrote hundreds of short stories which have appeared in hundreds of anthologies.  His main work was horror, but he wrote close to 20 stories about Lucius Leffing, an occult detective.  The supernatural element of the tales ebbed and floed depending on the market he was writing for, but the structure was a salute to Arthur Conan Doyle, with Brennan himself playing the "Watson" role.

12/7/1915 "This Brackett guy" is born

December 7, 1915.  How is it I never heard of Leigh Brackett until Jake Hinkson wrote about her in the spring issue of Mystery Scene?  I probably did hear of her but never got the full picture.  Her first love was science fiction but she found that she couldn't make a living writing it, so she switched to hard-boiled novels.  Her No Good From A Corpse so impressed director Howard Hawks that he decided "this Brackett guy" was the man to adapt Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep for the movies.

So she not only co-scripted (with William freaking Faulkner!) the Bogart-Bacall flick which is on most lists of best private eye movies, but then went on to write  Rio Bravo, and just before she died she wrote the first draft of The Empire Strikes Back.  So she made history in the mystery, western and science fiction genres.


In between  she found time to write episodes of The Alfred Hitchcock Hour and The Rockford Files, not to mention Robert Altman's take on Chandler, The Long Goodbye.

There's an old saying that a woman has to be twice as good as a man to succeed in the same job.  Imagine being a female script writer in the forties.  Wow.

10/23/1918 Helen Nielsen arrives

October 23, 1918.  Helen Nielsen was born on this date in Roseville, Illinois.  During World War II she served as a draftsman, working on military aircraft.  Afterwards, she started writing crime novels, including Gold Coast Nocturne,  which was made into the movie Blackout.  She also wrote for TV shows such as Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Perry Mason.  She died in 2002.