8/31/1928 Three Penny Opera is coined

August 31, 1928.  Three Penny Opera, by Kurt Weill and Bertold Brecht, opened in Berlin on this date.  It was adapted from the 18th century Beggar's Opera, written by John Gay.

It tells the story of MacHeath, alias Mack the Knife, a notorious London criminal.  The show is dark, political, and brilliant.  The most famous song, best known as "Mack The Knife" has been a huge hit in the United States.  "Pirate Jenny," alias "The Black Freighter," has been recorded by many artists as well.

Here is a video of Alan Cummings and Cyndi Lauper performing "Ballad of the Pimp" at the 2006 Tony Awards.

8/15/1929 Roman hat trick

August 15, 1929.  This date saw the beginning of one of the longest and most distinguished careers in mystery fiction.  It saw the publication of The Roman Hat Mystery, the first mystery written by Ellery Queen, featuring, of course, the detective Ellery Queen.

Cousins Manfred Lee and Frederic Dannay wrote the book for a contest and won, but the sponsoring organization promptly went out of business.  Fortunately Frederick Stokes published it and the Queen career was on its way.

8/5/1926 Yahoo for Wahloo

August 5, 1926.  Decades before some girl got a dragon tattoo, Scandanavian crime fiction consisted mostly of an excellent set of novels by Per Wahlöö (who was born on this day) and Maj Sjöwall.  These Swedes were very methodical and  blunt about their intentions: they were going to write ten police procedurals, each thirty chapters long. They wrote alternating chapters. The books were going to get more political - frankly Marxist - as the series went on.  And that is exactly what happened.

They called the entire series The Story of a Crime, which referred to Swedish society, not a mere murder or two.  The hero was the melancholy cop, Martin Beck. The Laughing Policeman won the Edgar for Best Mystery Novel.  It was made into a movie starring Walter Matthau.  Among the other actors who starred in movies based on their books is Derek Jacobi.

8/3/1920 P. D. James is born

August 3, 1920. P.D. James was born on this date in Oxford, England.  When her husband came back from World War II with mental issues she started working to support the family.  She started to write novels in the 1950s.  Her novels about police detective Adam Dalgliesh led her to fame and fortune.

Among her honors were the Grand Master Award from the Mystery Writers of America and a life peerage from that whole British government thing.

7/21/1923 Charles Goodrum circulates

July 21, 1923.  Today saw the birth of Charles Goodrum.  He served as director of research at the Library of Congress's Congressional Research Service, the people who pcik up the phone when a senator needs to know about the history of Haitian gambling laws, or a congressman wants to make sure that this punchy quotation he wants to use in a speech doesn't have a dubious history, like being used to defend Stalin, or something.

But then Goodrum went on to much more important tasks.  Namely, writing book-related mysteries.

7/20/1924 Who is Thomas Berger?

July 20, 1924.  Thomas Berger was born on this day in Cincinnati.  He was the author of many eccentric novels, most of which explored a different genre (although he said his subject was always the language, not the plot).

His western was Little Big Man, source for the Dustin Hoffman movie.  Several other movies based on his work followed.

Berger's Regiment of Women appears to be a science fiction attack on the feminist movement, but deeper down there is an exploration of sexist language.  If a successful man has a young mistress, what does a successful woman have?  A master?

In 1977 Who is Teddy Villanova? arrived.  It begins with private eye Russel Wren being beaten up because of the titular Villanova, whom he has never heard of.  Then a bunch of corpses start showing up everywhere.  Well, technically, the same corpse keeps showing up.  And the cops, all named for Protestant theologians, are filming a TV series called The Reformers.

A decade later Russel Wren returns for a case that takes him to a strange and distant land.  Nowhere is Berger's version of a utopian novel.  One memorable scene involves a coroner explaining that in this land the cause of death is always listed as heart failure.  Hey, shoot someone or cut off their head and their heart will stop. 

6/20/1925 Hugh Pentecost enters Room Number 23

June 20, 1925.  The issue of Flynn's Magazine with this cover date featured "Room Number 23," the first published story by a Columbia University student named Judson Philips.  He went on to write more than one hundred crime novels, mostly under the name Hugh Pentecost. The Mystery Writers of America gave him the Grand Masters Award in 1973.   

6/16/1920 Isabelle Holland is born

June 16, 1920.  Isabelle Holland was born on this date in Basel, Switzerland to American parents.  She wrote mostly young adult novels on controversial subjects, and gothic mysteries.  Mel Gibson's movie The Man Without a Face was based on her novel of the same name.   She didn't get published until she passed forty, but she wrote more than fifty books. 

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.

5/24/192? Ellery Queen takes a powder

May 25, 192?.  On this date a model in the show window of a New York City department store pushed a button on a folding bed, which unfolded, revealing a dead body.  Thus began The French Powder Mystery, the second novel written by Ellery Queen, starring mystery writer Ellery Queen, who is not the mystery writer who wrote the book... Oh, you know what I mean.

5/15/1926 The Shaffer twins arrive

May 15, 1926.  Twin brothers Anthony and Peter Shaffer were born on this day.  Anthony is best remembered for the classic crime dramedy Sleuth, which won him two Edgars (Best Play and later Best Screenplay)  He also wrote the screenplay for Alfred Hitchcock's return-to-England movie, Frenzy.

Brother Peter, on the other hand, is best known for writing the plays Equus and Amadeus.  TOgether they wrote some mystery novels under the name Peter Anthony.  Quite a talented pair.

4/23/1923 Avram Davidson is born

April 23, 1923.  Avram Davidson was born on this date in Yonkers, NY.  Man led an interesting life.  Navy medic during World War II. Talmudic scholar.  Besides winning the Edgar Award he won several fantasy and science fiction awards.

 I discovered him when his "The Lord of Central Park" appeared in Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine under the title "A Manhattan Night's Entertainment."  (Editor Frederic Dannay was a notorious title tinkerer.)  This novella involved an innocent young lady from the midwest, a pickpocket, the Mafia, the Nafia, Hudson River pirates, a plot to blow up the Brooklyn Navy Yards, and a British earl who lives in a cave in Central Park with his pet falcon.

 He crossed the fantasy-mystery line with his tales of Dr. Esterhazy, who lived in Scythia-Pannonia-Transbalkania.  
 He also ghost-wrote two late Ellery Queen novels. 

4/17/1919 The first Edgar winner is born

April 17, 1919.  Julian Fast was born on this day.  In 1946 he won the very first Edgar Award from the Mystery Writers of America, for his novel, Watchful At Night, which he wrote while serving in the Army Medical Corps.  He wrote several more detective novels but is perhaps most famous for his pop psychology books, especially Body Language (1970).  His big brother, Howard Fast, was also a the author of many books, including mysteries under the name E.V. Cunningham..

While serving in the army he also managed to edit a famous fantasy collection called Out of This World, compiled from sources he found in army base libraries.

4/10/1925 A gangster moves to Long Island

April 10, 1925.  This date saw the publication of one of the great noir novels, The Great Gatsby. 

Wait a minute.  Noir?  Heavens, no.  It isn't genre dreck, it's literature!

Right.  About a gangster who tries to be more because of his love for a woman, who betrays him, leading to his downfall.

All of which is so noir as to be cliche. 

3/3/1927 Nicolas Freeling born

March 3, 1927.  Nicolas Freeling was born on this date in London.  He created an Amsterdam police detective named Van Der Valk but finally got sick of him and killed him.  Unlike Holmes, Van Der Valk agreed to stay dead.  He then created a French cop, Henri Castang.

His novel The King of the Rainy Country won the Edgar for Best Mystery in 1967.

3/2/1929 The Saint goes short

March 2, 1929.  The issue of The Thriller  with this cover date featured "Story of a Dead Man," by Leslie Charteris.  (And what a great cover!)  It was the first short story to feature his most famous creation, The Saint.  Simon Templar had already appeared in a 1928 novel, Meet the Tiger.  Since then he has appeared in movies, TV, radio, and probably Egyptian heiroglyphics.

2/26/1922 The Presence of Jack Ritchie

February 26, 1922.  One of the truly great authors of humorous short mysteries was born on this date in Milwaukee, a city where many of his works were set.  His greatest character was Henry Turnbuckle, a police detective whose unearned self-confidence was matched by his bad luck.  You see, Henry read all the crime novels and expected reality to conform to its cliches.  But in a Turnbuckle story if two of the suspects are identical twins that will turn out to have nothing to do with the solution.  And in one story after Henry gloriously announces the identity of the killer the assembled suspects not only proves him wrong but then conclude that the killer was someone else - a person no one had ever mentioned to Henry at all.

Another great Ritchie character was Cardula, a private eye who happens to be a vampire.

He also invented (or at least perfected) a subgenre I call the Unknown Narrator, where the reader knows nothing about the main character except what other people say about him, which turns out to be dramatically wrong.  One example is "The Absence of Emily," which won him an Edgar.

But Ritchie;s biggest success may have been "The Green Heart," which begins "We had been married three months and I rather thought it was time to get rid of my wife."  This tale of a would-be homicidal husband was made into the movie A New Leaf, and later into a Broadway play.

Ritchie's curse was that he was a master of the short when audiences demanded long.  As Donald E. Westlake said, he was, "a miniaturist in the age of elephantiasis."

2/19/1926 Ross Thomas hits the scene

February 19, 1926.  Ross Thomas was born on this day in Oklahoma City.  His The Cold War Swap won the Edgar for Best First Novel.  Thomas wrote about con men, spies, and borderline honest folks, and you couldn't usually tell the difference.

His best-loved characters included Artie Wu and Quincy Durant, definitely of the conman variety, but basically good guys. Also Mac and Padillo, past and maybe present agents. And under the name Oliver Bleeck he wrote about Philip St. Ives, who worked as a go-between between thieves and owners/insurers.

1/30/1924 Margaret Yorke arrives

January 30, 1924.  On this date the world welcomed Margaret Yorke (although that was a pen name.)  She wrote dozens of novels but is best remembered for her mysteries about Oxford don Patrick Grant.  The Crime Writers Association awarded her the Cartier Diamond Dagger in 1999. She died in 2012.

1/25/1921 Russell Braddon is born

January 25, 1921.  Australian author Russell Braddon was born on this day.  He first became famous with The Naked Island, his memoir of a Japanese prisoner-of-war camp.  He wrote many kinds of books - the eco-political satire The Year of the Angry Rabbit is well worth a read - but he entered the mystery field with Funnelweb, in which the bad guy uses the titular arachnid, an Australian native, to kill rivals.