10/12/2017 Bouchercon commences today

October 12, 2017. Today is the start of Bouchercon, the international mystery convention.  It is getting underway at the Sheraton Centre in Toronto.  Guests of honor include Louise Penny, Megan Abbott, Christopher Brookmyre, Chris Grabenstein, and Margaret Cannon.  Toast masters will be Twist Phelan and Gary Phillips.   Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine will be honored.  John Buchan, former governor general of Canada and inventor of the good-guy-chased-by-the bad-guys-AND-police subgenre with The Thirty-nine Steps, will be honored as ghost of honor.

Sounds like a ball, doesn't it?

9/18/1886 Nick Carter bursts in

September 18, 1886.  Today's issue of New York Weekly featured the first of a 13-week serial called "The Old Detective's Pupil, or the Mysterious Crime of Madison Square," by Ormond G. Smith.  Catchy title, huh?  The story introduced detective Nick Carter whose popularity led to Nick Carter Weekly, which ran through 1915.  Carter returned as the star of a pulp magazine and a radio show, which went off the air in 1955.

But you can't keep a good character down, apparently.  In 1964 he changed his profession and became Nick Carter, Killmaster, in a series of almost 300 paperback thrillers.   Not bad for a septuagenarian.

9/17/2011 SleuthSayers gets a clue

September 17, 2011.  Six years ago today the SleuthSayers blog began.  Fourteen mystery writers taking turns with occasional pushing and shoving.  No, we've gotten along wonderfully.

Among our members, some of whom have come to their senses and some who are still with us:
Dale Andrews, John Floyd, Jan Grape, Dixon Hill, Thomas Pluck, Leigh Lundin, David Dean, Angela Zeman, Deborah Elliott-Upton,  Terence Faherty,  Janice Law, R.T. Lawton,  O'Neil De Noux, Fran Rizer, Stephen Ross, Susan Slater, Neil Schofield, Brian Thornton, Louis A. Willis, Jim Winter, Elizabeth Zelvin, Robert Lopresti, Melodie Campbell, Susan Rogers Cooper, Eve Fisher, Steve Liskow, David Edgerley Gates, Barb Goffman, Paul D. Marks, Art Taylor, Melissa Yi, and newbie Mary Fernando.



Special notice of B.K. Stevens, who passed away this summer.  We still miss her.

9/3/1960 Maigret is uncovered in Holland

September 3, 1966.  On this date a statue of Inspector Maigret was revealed in  Delfzijl, Holland.  It was commissioned to honor the great detective's visit as reported in Georges Simenon's novel Maigret in Holland.  You can find pictures of the statue and more information about it here.

9/1/1994 Lee Child starts to write

September 1, 1994. August of 1994 was a bad month for Jim Grant. He was fired after almost 20 years at British Granada Television.  So on September first he sat down with $6 worth of paper and pencils and began to write a book.  It was published as Killing Floor under the pen name Lee Child.

The first Jack Reacher novel was so successful that Child starts each new book on September first.  Millions of readers are glad of it.

8/30/1889 A dinner party that made literary history

August 30, 1889.  A major literary event happened on this night, which had great import for the mystery field.  You see, when Arthur Conan Doyle introduced Sherlock Holmes to the world in A Study in Scarlet, the world couldn't have cared less.  But when he wrote a historical novel called Micah Clarke it became a best-seller.  Joseph M. Stoddard, the publisher of Lippincott's Magazine, had published Study in Scarlet in America.  He was visiting  England that summer, and noted the popularity of Clarke.  So he invited Doyle to a dinner at the Langhorn Hotel and suggested he give Holmes another shot.  This led to The Sign of Four, and eventually to the short stories that made Holmes a household word.   Oh, Stoddard invited another writer to the event, one who became immediate friends with Doyle - a very unlikely pair.  Stoddard suggested that other man write something for the magazine as well.  So Oscar Wilde produced The Portrait of Dorian Gray.

Must have been quite an evening.

8/22/1933 Babcock breaks in to Black Mask

August 22, 1933.  On this date Dwight V. Babcock made his first sale of  a short story.  Incredible as it may seem, he broke into Black Mask.  Sounds like starting out on top to me.  "At the Bottom of Every Mess" appeared in the January 1934 issue.  He got $100 for it; good money in the Depression.

Babcock went on to write many short stories and some popular humorous crime novels.  But let's get back to that first sale to Black Mask, home of Hammett, Chandler, Gardner, etc.  He only submitted there because Underworld Magazine, which I have never even heard of, lost the copy he sent them.  Wow.

My first sale was to Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine.  Not quite so fancy.

This info came from James L. Traylor's article about Babcock in The Armchair Detective, volume 23, number 1.

7/28/1841 Mary Rogers is found dead

July 28, 1841.  On this date the body of Mary Rogers, a clerk in a New York tobacco store, was fished out of the Hudson River.  Many possible explanations of her death were offered but nothing was ever proved.

Only one explanation need concern us because it was offered by Edgar Allan Poe.  He wrote a thinly disguised version called "The Mystery of Marie Roget."  It took place in Paris and starred his amateur sleuth C. Auguste Dupin. 

This was the second of three Dupin stories.  In this trilogy Poe created not just the roman a clef, mystery (that is, one based on actual people and events), but the genius detective, the narrating "Watson," the bumbling cops, the "obvious" clue, the least likely suspect....

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.

7/2/1951 Boucher goes critical

July 2, 1951.  On this day William Anthony Parker White (doing business as Anthony Boucher)  began reviewing mysteries at the New York Times. He also wrote mysteries and science fiction and co-founded The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction.  Many people feel that Boucher's reviews raised the respect of the whole mystery field.  The annual world mystery convention was named Bouchercon in his honor, and the awards given out there are called the Anthonys.

John Ball's home invasion

April 4, 1976.  John Ball was a successful writer from the start.  His first novel In The Heat Of The Night, introduced his most successful character, Virgil Tibbs, won the Edgar for Best First Novel, and was made into an Oscar-winning movie and a TV series. 

One thing he did with his new money was start collecting jade.  Unfortunately those precious stones collected unwanted attention.  On this date, early in the morning, Ball opened the door and found himself looking at a huge man with a .38 automatic in his hand.  Ball, with a black belt in karate, decided not to fight.  He was soon bound in masking tape, barely able to breath.  In less than twenty minutes the precious jade figurines "some of which I had carried back from the Orient on my lap to guard against breakage," had been dumped into a pillow case and carried off.

The cops, using a variety of methods - including hypnosis! - identified the bad guy, who was caught and convicted. 

You can read Ball's whole account of the ordeal (titled "211 Dossier") in I, Witness, a remarkable collection of essays by mystery writers about their experiences with true crimes.  My favorite part of his essay is the TV reporter who asked him to "please remove the bust of Hitler from the mantlepiece" before they started filming.  Ball explained that it was Poe not Hitler (his Edgar award), and it wasn't going anywhere.

4/3/1953 Chester Himes moves to Europe

April 3, 1953.  On this date Chester Himes left the United States for Europe, thinking a Black man might have an easier time in France than in New York.  He joined a group of ex-patriates that included Richard Wright and James Baldwin.

He will always be remembered for his books about Harlem cops Coffin Ed Johnson and Gravedigger Jones.

3/15/1948 Ludwig Wittgenstein praises you-know-what

March 15, 1948.  Ludwig Wittgenstein was one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century.  One doesn't necessarily think of such folks as reading hard-boiled detective fiction, but one might be wrong.

On this date he wrote a letter in which he compared philosophy journals to crime publications: "Your mags are wonderful.  How people can read Mind if they could read Street & Smith ['s Detective Story Magazine] beats me.  If philosophy has anything to do with wisdom there’s certainly not a grain of that in Mind, and quite often a grain in the detective stories.”

A few years earlier he had jokingly complained about the end of the lend-lease agreement between the United States and his adopted home of Great Britain: "if the U.S.A. won’t give us detective mags we can’t give them philosophy ...”


You can read more about this at Mystery*FIle's article.

3/13/1963 Miranda arrest

March 13, 1963.  On this date Ernesto Miranda was arrested by the Phoenix, Arizona police.  He signed a confession of kidnapping and rape, saying he had "full knowledge of his legal rights," but no one had told him he was entitled to a lawyer, nor to remain silent.

Eventually the Supreme Court ruled that was unconstitutional, leading to the Miranda Warning, famous in many court cases and thousands of crime novels.

3/6/1831 They can't make a soldier out of Poe

March 6, 1831.  On this date Edgar Allan Poe was expelled from West Point.  No good will ever come of that boy.

2/25/1981 EQMM is forty

February 25, 1981.  The issue of Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine with this cover date celebrated the fortieth anniversary of that great institution.  It featured stories by Ruth Rendell, Simon Brett, Michael Gilbert, James Holding, and (of course) Edward D. Hoch, among others.

1/15/1926 Father Knox's radio scandal

January 15, 1926.  The Reverend Ronald Knox was a man of many talends, including mystery writing.  If he is remembered today it is mostly for his Decalogue, ten rules for writing fair detective fiction.

But on this date, in less than fifteen minutes, he managed to shock a good portion of the British public and cause an amazing stink for the new BBC.  Sitting in a cramped studio behind a music shop in Edinburgh, Knox presented "Broadcasting From The Barricades,"  It began with news  of  a disturbance in Trafalgar Square, led my a Mr. Poppleberry, leader of the National Movement for Abolishing Theatre Queues.  Things get worse and one authority is "roasted alive" on his way to the studio, meaning that, regrettably, "he will therefore be unable to deliver his lecture to you."

It sounds so absurd it seems impossible that anyone could have fallen for the hoax (if you can even justify it with that name). But there were reports of people fainting, demands that the Navy sail up the Thames against the rioters, and so on.  To be fair, radio was still pretty new, and the Bolshevik Revolution was still fresh in people's minds.

All of this happened a decade before Orson Welles terrified some Americans with his dramatization of The War of the Worlds.  And, of course, almost a century before people started screaming about "fake news."

1/12/1972 Highsmith starts a game

January 12, 1972.  On this date Patricia Highsmith came up with the first sentence of Ripley's Game.  It is her third novel about the immoral Tom Ripley who hates murder, "unless absolutely necessary."  It has been filmed twice, in German and in English.

1/6/1927 The Hardy Boys get signed up

January 6, 1927.  On this date Leslie McFarlane signed a contract with the Stratemeyer Syndicate to write the first books in a new series: the Hardy Boys, which were published under the house pseudonym, Franklin W. Dixon.  McFarlane wrote 19 of the first 25 highly successful books.