Pulling Threads: The Dalrymple Mystery and Editing the Dead in the Age of AI

This month, I'm honored to turn over my column to author, critic, scholar, and all-around swell person Angelic Rodgers. Angel has been one of my closest friends for more than twenty years, dating back to when we were both adjuncts at Auburn University. Of late she's been working on a project that I think will be of considerable interest to SleuthSayers readers, one that has a lot to tell us about the history of our genre--and in particular, one of the many women who made significant contributions to it, but are too often forgotten today. I've invited her to tell you about it, so take it away, Angel!

Angelic Rodgers

Pulling Threads: The Dalrymple Mystery and Editing the Dead in the Age of AI

by Angelic Rodgers

 

It’s not that I don’t read mysteries, because I long have. As a kid, I watched Scooby-Doo every day after school. Once I started reading chapter books, I gravitated toward Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden, Encyclopedia Brown, and Cherry Ames. My sister, our friend Will, and I used to play detective. I was the secretary of their detective agency, a classic younger-sibling assignment. Through undergrad and grad school when I wanted to read recreationally, I often opted for mystery series. Writers like Westlake, Cornwell, Grafton, Highsmith, and Vin Packer offered me an escape from the work of literary analysis. 

But I never took up mystery as anything other than recreational reading. That changed as I worked on preparing Octave Thanet’s The Dalrymple Mystery for release in November. The Dalrymple Mystery was originally serialized in The National Magazine from October 1913 to March 1914. It also ran as The Unterrified Citizen in Joseph Chapple’s Newsletter the year before. It is one of the writer’s few magazine stories that was never released in book form. Many of her short stories were collected and reprinted in bound volumes. Three of her novels, Expiation (1890), The Lion’s Share (1907), and By Inheritance (1910), for example, were first serialized. 

The project fascinated me from multiple angles—not only was Dalrymple never republished as a stand-alone, but it also was a full-blown mystery. While some of her other novels included mystery elements, Thanet has never (as far as I’m aware) been considered a mystery writer. 

When Joseph Walker suggested I do a guest post about my experience with editing and annotating Dalrymple, I wasn’t sure. My first reaction was that I don’t write mystery, crime fiction, or detective fiction. I’m a specialist in nineteenth century women’s fiction typically described as “domestic” or “local color” by training, and my fiction might be categorized as chick lit or lesfic. 

I first came across the name Octave Thanet while reading Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men. Faderman identifies her as a lesbian writer who lived part of the year with her partner in a small town in Arkansas. Faderman also pointed out that Thanet was one of the highest-paid and most successful writers for a thirty-year span. 

Faderman’s brief mention set me on a quest to find out who Thanet was. Her real name is Alice French. Born in 1850 (the year of The Scarlet Letter) to a well-connected family, Alice took a pen name for her first short story, “Hugo’s Waiting,” which appeared in 1871 under the name “Frances Essex.” Such androgynous pen names, of course, were common for female writers at the time. By 1878, when her “Communists and Capitalists: A Sketch from Life” appeared in Lippincott’s, she had switched to the pen name she would use for fiction until her death in January of 1934. “Octave Thanet” was supposedly chosen from the word “Thanet” that Alice saw on a train car once and from the name of her Abbott Academy roommate Octavia Putnam. 

The young Alice French

Despite my area of specialty being examining literary works by three-named American women writing between 1865 and 1914 who might or might not have been what we categorize as queer women today, I’d never heard of Alice French or Octave Thanet. Her contemporaries certainly had, though. Theodore Roosevelt was one of her biggest fans, and they wrote letters to each other. He reportedly traveled with a copy of her Stories of a Western Town (1893) in the “pigskin library” that he took on African safari (according to McMichael). He visited her at Thanford, the Arkansas plantation where she and her companion Jane “Jenny” Allen Crawford spent part of the year. She was well-regarded by contemporaries like W.D. Howells, Susan Glaspell, Sarah Orne Jewett, and other literary figures we are familiar with today. 

How is it possible such a successful writer, who lived a chunk of her life in the same state where I grew up, wasn’t covered in any of my undergraduate or graduate seminars? 

I became determined to learn more about her. What was it like living and writing as a queer woman in Arkansas at the turn of the century? Also, how could this woman-loving, cabinet-building, cross-genre best-selling author who carried a flask and a pistol everywhere she went be against women’s rights? 

Alice French, it turns out, was a complex woman. 

Her writing as Octave Thanet is most often categorized as local-color writing that sold well but is not considered valuable or of interest to modern readers. The idea that what was popular in the past is mere pulp today likely rings bells for fans of crime fiction, as well. I probably don’t need to convince crime writers that there’s gold in those pulps and dime novels just waiting to be mined. 

George McMichael’s biography, Journey to Obscurity: The Life of Octave Thanet, isn’t truly a critical biography. Crafted from his dissertation, the book largely focuses on the business side of her life as the public persona of “Octave Thanet.” He glosses over the really interesting stuff. After reading the work, I felt I knew more about her family’s socio-economic status and how they came to live in Davenport, Iowa, but many of the details of who Alice French was, what she thought, and how she lived a rich, full life are absent. He set out only to write about Octave Thanet’s life, not Alice French’s. 

But Octave Thanet was merely one facet of French’s identity. 

McMichael’s biography left me with plenty of threads to pull. 

One of the threads I decided to pull first: to locate the “unpublished and unlocated works” listed at the end of the book. McMichael’s discussion of Thanet’s actual writing is surface-level plot summary with details about where she submitted and the result (royalties, advances). Given the era the slim volume was written in and that it was originally McMichael’s dissertation, this surface-level analysis is not surprising. 

Like any good detective, though, I started looking for connections and unturned stones. 

While The Dalrymple Mystery isn’t designated as an unlocated or unpublished text, a story titled “The Mystery of the Red Hand” appears on the list. This led me on to McMichael’s index, where I found “The Red Hand.” McMichael mentions a short mystery story titled “The Red Hand” in 1909 and that the story was rejected by publishers twice. When checking for other mysteries mentioned, I found The Unterrified Citizen. McMichael does note that text was retitled and published as The Dalrymple Mystery. I suspect it is likely “The Red Hand” and “The Red Hand Mystery” evolved into the text published serially in The National Magazine as The Dalrymple Mystery from October 1913 to March 1914. 

Of Thanet’s foray into detective fiction, McMichael only states that in 1909, when she attempted to sell “The Red Hand Mystery” to magazines, she was simply trying to cash in on the trend started by Arthur Conan Doyle, Anna Katherine Green, and others. 

That didn’t lead me to expect much of the work. 

The process of compiling the text was fairly simple once I located it in a scanned volume of The National Magazine. Internet Archive has a treasure trove of periodicals digitized, and recovery (as long as the volumes are complete) is a matter of searching the massive PDFs for the installments. I’m a Mac user, so Preview makes whittling the massive digital file down into the serial installments relatively easy. Then, I used the Adobe Acrobat PDF to Word tool to get the manuscript in text form. With a bit more cleanup to get rid of text carried over from half pages Thanet’s work shared with other contributors, I was ready to begin the real editing work. 

I approached the work first as cleanup and fixing all of the scanning and conversion errors, and  I kind of expected that to be the most time-consuming aspect of the project. I didn’t expect the work to have much value or interest, as Thanet is not known for her mystery writing, and McMichael had nothing to say about it beyond that it was serialized. 

I should have known better—Dalrymple features numerous threads to pull. 

Anyone who has studied American literature between 1850 and 1920 may be familiar with Hawthorne’s 1855 lament about the “damned mob of scribbling women” who were outselling him. Mark Twain likewise struggled with sales and control over his content to the point that he became an early adopter of self-publishing in 1884 when he established Charles L. Webster and Company. While male writers of the time–Hawthorne, Melville, Twain–are well-known, the women who outsold them are often absent from reading lists. This creates a false sense of those texts being unworthy of study. And, I fell into that trap of thinking that because only one biography existed about Alice French and her work as Thanet, there wouldn’t be much heavy lifting to do. 

National blurb touting the story

Specifically, I assumed editing this text would largely be a mechanical exercise of my editing skills. I expected to fly through the edits and say some bland words about how this was a fun project. 

What I found was something far more exciting and engaging—the world of domestic mysteries and detective fiction written by women. 

Alice French’s work goes far beyond local-color writing about quaint old ladies with anxiety about marriage and family. French was well-read on the news of the day, both locally and nationally. Her nonfiction works include essays on Arkansas and on issues like losing her leg to diabetes as well as topics like labor strikes, suffrage, photography, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and the 1898 Trans- Mississippi and International Exhibition. She had a finger to the pulse of America. 

Her fiction, likewise, often focuses on reform. One of her stories condemning the practice of convict leasing in Arkansas, “Trusty, No. 49,” (1890) developed as a result of her interest in court cases. She subscribed to a weekly paper so she could track court cases that sounded interesting. She would then make the trip from Clover Bend to Walnut Ridge and observe cases in court. 

While there aren’t court scenes in The Dalrymple Mystery, the story does involve crime and two older women, the Dalrymple sisters, who are witness to a mystery and its resolution. The Dalrymple sisters awaken on an ordinary morning to find a corpse in their library. By the time the police arrive, the body has vanished and the game is afoot. Upon searching the property, in an attempt to locate the body, they come across a bloody handprint: 

Plain and ominous on the cement walk running past the porte cochére to the side door was a big red hand, the dexter finger pointing to the words above, “No. l,” daubed in the same blood red. There were faint footprints, but so trampled that it was not easy to distinguish them, and all about were flecks and splotches of blood.

With a tiny bit of help from the police, the Dalrymple sisters and their friends—a female newspaper reporter, two teen boys, and a physician critical of the justice system—set out to uncover the victim’s identity, as well as that of the murderer. 

Without revealing a lot of spoilers, I can tell you I pulled a lot of tiny and some very large threads from a text I expected to just clean up and reprint. Some of these threads ranged from minor things like clocked stockings to major crime syndicate issues like the early mafia’s Black Hand extortion schemes. Colonial Revival architecture, early electric cars, kimonos as fashion in the nineteenth century, and Sheraton dining room furniture are just a few of the other threads I followed. 

Thanet in later years

Thanet also left a clue about early American mystery novelists—Anna Katherine Green, in particular. 

Green has been discussed on this blog before, notably in Louise A. Willis’ “Three Firsts” in December of 2013 and in Leigh Lunden’s “Women in Mystery History” in March of 2014. 

In Chapter Ten of The Dalrymple Mystery, she drops names: “Radcliffe was a devoted reader of Gaboriau, Doyle, Anna Katherine Green and all the newer workers of detective marvels in fiction.” I knew Doyle’s name, of course, but Anna Katherine Green’s name was new to me, so I knew that needed a note. First, I turned to McMichael’s biography to see if he mentioned Doyle or Green. And he had–Doyle is mentioned four times, Anna Katherine Green (as “Ann Katherine Greene”) once. 

Contrary to McMichael’s claims that Thanet was merely trend hopping and never completed a successful mystery for Bobbs-Merril, she did finish and successfully publish a mystery story. The Dalrymple Mystery was not only completed, but it is rich with cultural and historical references. 

We just have to pull the threads. 

One of the most interesting threads I pulled in annotating Dalrymple is William J. Flynn’s 1919 book The Barrel Mystery. Considered one of the first true crime books in the United States, the work focuses on the Black Hand and its role in a series of murders in 1903. Thanet would have read the 1903 newspaper coverage of the murder of Benedetto Madonio, whose body was found stuffed in a barrel on a Manhattan street in The New York Times and other outlets. Even though her story appeared before Flynn’s book, she was harvesting story ideas in real time from the same newspaper articles that covered his investigation. 

I never could have imagined that a forgotten serial by Octave Thanet would lead me to a foundational true crime account of forgery and Mafia killings. 

Not only were women writing serial mysteries and selling to magazines (Dalrymple was never published as a stand-alone novel in Thanet’s time), but many of the writers we do know from the time were writing thrillers and mysteries. Louisa May Alcott is a prime example. Even though it’s been decades since Stern & Rostenberg discovered Alcott’s “blood and thunder” thrillers published under her pen name of A.M. Barnard, the work Alcott is most known for is Little Women. Alcott, though, was far more cutting-edge, and her V.V. or Plots and Counterplots, an 1865 parody of Poe’s detective character C. Auguste Dupin, is now considered an important part of American mystery history. For more discussion of their work, see “Rostenberg & Stern: An Appreciation.” 

Text recovery and analysis like that done by Stern and Rostenberg is important work. The impulse to find and fully appreciate works by women in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is what drove my work as a graduate student and early scholar. It’s what motivated me in 2004 to learn who Alice French was and to try and understand how Octave Thanet has been dismissed as just another quaint female author despite her clear interest in politics, crime news, penal system reform, and court cases. 

We live in a horrifying age of fast fiction and digital literary schemes. In the post-Kindle era, public domain reprints have flooded the retail market. I’m often confused by people paying top dollar for texts that are ripped from Gutenberg or Internet Archive and reproduced with little to no editing, no annotations, and no introductory essays with context. From the beginning of KDP eBook publishing, simply repackaging public domain texts with eye-catching covers has been touted as a way to financial freedom. 

Basic preservation is also important work. We should be doing basic conservation and digitization of texts. And, I totally applaud the work of Standard eBooks. We should support the curation, editing, and formatting of works from the past. But we need to go further. 

In the early days of working on Dalrymple I kept telling myself that I was merely flexing my editing and annotation muscles. I had gotten lost in the sea of technology as king. I had to remember the basics. It’s easy to get lost in the speed that digitization and AI scraping have created. But in doing so we drown in the shallows. After all, the book market is flooded with reprints. Now, we can just feed public domain texts to AI bots and have it spit out books in the style of Octave Thanet or Anna Katherine Green. 

We’ve lost our ability to pull threads and reveal the patterns underneath the surface. We get lost in the “look what I found” moment and forget to answer why what we found matters. 

Now when I think about this edition of The Dalrymple Mystery, I think about work of recovery and exploration, rather than simply producing reprints with pretty covers. While university press editions like Duke’s 2003 The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight attempt to reintroduce foundational works to modern readers, those editions are often not truly accessible. Specifically, those reprints often are not palatable to a modern audience.  While I enjoy a pithy essay about domestic detective fiction that is heavily footnoted and rooted in literary criticism I might be able to track down on J-Stor, a lot of readers don’t. A university press imprint with a “critical introduction” written in academese often signals “boring” to a reader. 

Not everyone is willing to mine that introduction for the one or two golden nuggets it might provide. 

In addition, reprints from university and scholarly presses are not affordable to laypersons or even graduate students or contingent faculty. Some eBook editions, like Cambridge’s 2023 edition of Ganor’s Susan Glaspell in Context, cost $126 for the Kindle edition and $120 in hardcover. Even the original edition from University Press of Michigan sells for $33 in eBook, $35 in paperback, and $85 in hardback. The Duke reprint of Meta Victoria Fuller Victor’s novels is more affordable right now, but they still ring up at over  $17 for eBook, $33 for paperback, and over $90 for hardbacks. 

It’s not hard to see why folks aren’t buying those versions that provide some background and context for public domain texts. And, even though projects like Standard eBooks do a great job at providing beautiful digital reprints for free, they don’t tend to provide any context or analysis. 

Proofreading and repackaging is only the first step. If we’re going to combat the literacy crisis, we have to go further—we have to provide affordable reprints with enough context and analysis to make readers’ fingers itch to the point they start their own thread pulling. 

After all, true text recovery is detective work when done well. Once you start pulling threads, the text opens up and sends you on a million side quests. We live in an age where we can have a bot go out and put feelers across the internet looking for information. Despite the virtue signaling we see online about AI, we’re inundated with AI flyers, cartoon versions of photographs, deepfake videos, and even AI-authored novels. Tons of texts (some contemporary and some public domain) are likely entered into LLMs daily by giants like Anthropic and by individuals, looking to cash in somehow by training AI to output “books” that will make them rich.

We can’t leave this kind of work to the bots. Bots have been trained on materials like McMichael’s biography that dismiss or ignore the connections. 

To fully engage with the texts, we must pull at the threads. Only then can we bridge the gap between the digitized versions of texts we can find in public domain sites like Gutenberg and the high-priced reprints put out by academic presses. 

In the beginning I worried my efforts to annotate and publish The Dalrymple Mystery would matter to anyone else. I told myself the process was the thing and kept going. And, I’m so glad to report that the process led me back to my roots as a literary detective. 

Angelic Rodgers is currently exploring the Lake Chapala area of Mexico when she’s not chasing down obscure and largely forgotten tidbits of writing by women in America. She is an editor, writer, and founder of The Octave Thanet Project. Her edition of The Dalrymple Mystery is set to release in mid-November from Thanet House Press. The cover for the upcoming reprint is seen here. This cover is from a lino-cut Angel's sister, Renee Rodgers, designed for the book. They researched cover designers of the time and after discovering Margaret Armstrong was in vogue (and designed covers for some of Octave Thanet’s works), Renee moved forward with a design inspired by Armstrong’s style. And, yes, that is the same sister mentioned in the piece.

In addition to her work on Thanet, she also writes fiction and creative nonfiction. You can find her most recent updates on her Substack and on her website at http://www.angelicrodgers.com.

AND NOW BACK TO JOE:

Thanks, Angel! Readers, once The Dalrymple Mystery is available for purchase, I'll include a reminder in my following column. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to see this important piece of our history,

IN OTHER NEWS . . . 

Another of the anthologies that was orphaned when Down & Out Books was shuttered has returned to shelves, this time with a very snazzy new cover! Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Material World, edited by Michael Bracken, collects tales of PIs at work in the 1980s. My story, "The Right Size of Favor," about a threatened shakedown of the Hands Across America charity event, was selected by fellow SleuthSayer Rob Lopresti as his "best mystery story I read this week" in May of last year, and was also chosen for the upcoming volume Best Private Eye Stories of the Year. Many thanks to Crimson Gate Books for getting this dynamite collection back out into the world!

I'm also in love with the cover for Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder!, the new anthology from Wildside Press, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley. Crime stories based on urban legends--it's a fantastic idea for an anthology, and I can tell you the writers here really came through on the assignment. My entry, "The Things We Remember," kicks off the book with a tale about the grisly legends on one college campus--and the even more grisly origins of one of them. Fun fact: the story mentions several campus legends, all of which (save the central one the story revolves around) are actual stories told on campuses where I studied or worked.

Thanks again to Angel. See you all next month!

 

See You in the Funny Pages

I started collecting comic books when I was about eight, and for many years took the hobby very seriously indeed--witness the twenty or so longboxes in my basement. Keeping up with the weekly grind of new issues eventually got to feeling too much like work, but by that time collected editions had become more popular, and many of the shelves in my home are filled with them.

My first comic

For several years, however, I barely read comics, for one reason: my eyes. They had deteriorated to such a degree that reading anything required bright light and a lot of concentration, and comics--where the text is often hand-written and cramped--presented especially acute challenges. Several months back, though, I had cataract surgery, and while my eyes will never be perfect, they're good enough that I can again read comics with pleasure, which has led to me revisiting a number of old favorites--some of which belong very much to the crime genre.

Comics and crime have a long history, of course. Dick Tracy remains one of the most popular comic strip characters ever created (and his adventures were penned for many years by superstar mystery writer Max Allan Collins). Batman first appeared in a periodical called Detective Comics, which was mostly about PIs and cops. And of course the lurid crime comics of the 1950s, particularly those from EC Comics, were so heavy with sex and violence that they helped usher in the Comics Code Authority. Today, though, I want to mention a few of my more contemporary favorites (keeping in mind that, as noted above, I've missed a lot of the most recent stuff). If you enjoy crime fiction, maybe you'd like checking out a few of these.

TOP 10. Created by the legendary Alan Moore, this short-lived title was about the cops of the tenth precinct in Neopolis--a city where everyone, including children and many animals, has super powers and alter egos. The streets of Neopolis are alive with aliens, robots, mutants and gods, and it's up to the overworked men, women and beasts of the tenth to keep order. The series balances a lot of elements that shouldn't work together, but do. The art, especially in crowded street scenes, is filled with comic book in-jokes and cameos. The cases, as you might expect, are often bizarre. The cops who make up the central cast, though, and the often fraught relationships between them, are presented with the depth, complexity and nuance of Hill Street Blues or the 87th Precinct novels of Ed McBain--even if the sergeant is a hyperintelligent dog in an exoskeleton and one of the main detectives a dark elf from another dimension. There were only twelve issues of the regular series, plus a prequel graphic novel and a five-issue spin-off, Smax (about the aforementioned elf visiting home) before Moore left, and you can safely ignore the attempts to continue it without him.

GOTHAM CENTRAL. In a somewhat similar vein, Gotham Central was an 87th Precinct-style series about the police officers in Batman's Gotham City, from writers Ed Brubaker (who wrote about the night shift) and Greg Rucka (who handled the day). This one lasted forty issues. It's a solid, gritty police procedural, with the added element of dealing with a masked vigilante and the maniacs he battles. Brubaker and Rucka keep the material grounded, and there's some really great character work done throughout the series. Despite its brief run, it's been very influential on later series, and some of the characters continue to play prominent roles in the DC universe today.

SIN CITY. Not for the faint of heart. Sin City is writer/artist Frank Miller's love letter to noir and pulp fiction, heavily indebted to writers like Mickey Spillane and Jim Thompson. The black-and-white artwork is frequently stunning; the sex is usually graphic; and the violence is brutal and explicit. There's a large cast of characters, with different ones taking center stage for specific story arcs. The fact that those arcs have titles like "A Dame to Kill For" and "That Yellow Bastard" should give you an idea of the playground Miller is working in. There have been two movie adaptations. Avoid the second.

CRIMINAL. Today this is probably the best-known contemporary crime comic, and it's earned a number of awards and a devoted readership. Like Sin City, Criminal, from writer Ed Brubaker and artist Sean Phillips, is a series of interconnected story arcs with many recurring characters and settings. This is a much more realistic and emotionally layered piece of work, however, and at its best it can stand alongside the novels of people like Richard Stark and Lawrence Block. Absolutely fantastic character development and dialogue, with inventive plots. Start with the first collection, Coward, about the disgraced son of a legendary crook getting dragged into a big job.

STRAY BULLETS. This doesn't get the attention Criminal does, though it started earlier and, I think, was probably a significant influence on the later work. The creation of writer/artist David Lapham, the series once again is made up of a series of stories starring an overlapping set of characters, with special attention to some of the innocent (well, mostly innocent) victims of the mayhem the criminals in the series unleash. The series started in 1995, but there was a long hiatus from 2005 to 2014 with hardly any new material. Be warned: while the series is great, there's some pretty rough stuff in some issues, up to and including child abuse.

So--do you read crime comics? What are some of your favorites? What are some newer titles I should be seeking out?

The Gingerbread Man

In June, Level Short released Wish Upon a Crime: Crime Fiction Inspired by Fairy Tales, an anthology I edited with Michael Bracken. The stories range from light-hearted to noir. Fellow SleuthSayers, Joe Walker, Barb Goffman, and Michael Bracken, share insights about their amazing stories in previous posts and are worth checking out.

Deb Goldstein, Tom Milani, and Andrew Welsh- Huggins discuss the first two pages of their fabulous contributions at Art Taylor’s First Two Pages, also great reads.

Today, I am delighted to talk about my story, “The Gingerbread Man.”

THE GINGERBREAD MAN

Imagine The Princess Bride meets The Sopranos inside a bowling alley in the 1960’s—that’s my Hollywood-style pitch for this story. It is inspired by the fairy tale and the lost world of action bowling.

The story opens with Jack O’Conner and his grandson. Jack tells him a bedtime story, his version of the fairy tale, “The Gingerbread Man.”

Jack flashes back to the 1960’s in New York City, the center of “action bowling,” games that involve small-time gangsters who make high-stakes bets on players. 

Jack “Crazy-like-a-Fox” O’Connor was one of those bowlers. He’s leveraged by the police to become an informant to keep his wayward brother out of jail. His task, to find action bowler Francesco “The Gingerbread Man” Romano, the getaway driver for the Barnyard Gang that is linked to a series of convenience store robberies. 

Action bowlers had monikers, a clue about how they “ticked.” I used these nicknames as a vehicle to retell this iconic fairy tale.

Jack’s version of “The Gingerbread Man” takes readers into the unique world of action bowling. It’s filled with quirky characters and a twist that I hope readers will enjoy. 

THE TABLE OF CONTENTS

• “Hansel and Gretel” by Joseph S. Walker
• “Goldilocks and the Three Bears” by John M. Floyd
• “Rapunzel” by Adam Meyer
• “The Emperor’s New Clothes” by Laura Oles
•  “Three Billy Goats Gruff” by Michael Bracken
•  “Beauty and the Beast” by James A. Hearn
•  “The Bremen Musicians” by Debra H. Goldstein
•  “Jack and the Beanstalk” by Andrew Welsh-Huggins
•  “Cinderella” by Donna Andrews
•  “The Frog Prince” by Josh Pachter
•  “Little Red Riding Hood” by Barb Goffman
•  “The Briar Patch” by Tom Milani
•  “King o’ the Cats” by David Dean
•  “The Gingerbread Man” by Stacy Woodson

If you want to learn more about action bowling, check out PIN ACTION by Gianmarc Manzione. It’s a fun read and offers insights into the history and unique subculture of action bowling.

***

My latest story, "She Loves You," appears in Black Cat Weekly, Issue 255. "She Loves You" follows a lovesick country music singer who receives an unsolicited reading from a geriatric psychic and gets more than he bargained for in this twisted tale about loyalty, trust, and inevitable consequences.

Please Allow Me to Introduce Myself

For a little over a year, I've been attending the monthly meetings of a mystery book club at my local independent bookstore. It's been a lot of fun, particularly since they tend to choose books that don't quite match my normal reading tastes, with a strong emphasis on recent cozies and domestic thrillers. It's always good to read outside your comfort zone.

This month, though, the club made one of its periodic forays into classic territory, with Agatha Christie's The Mystery of the Blue Train. Several members, it turned out, are Christie enthusiasts who have read all her works, often more than once, while others were encountering her for the first time. This led the group to consider an interesting question: what book did the hardcore Christie fans think would make the best introduction to her work for a new reader?

I immediately thought this would make good fodder for a SleuthSayers column. Considering some of my own favorite writers and series characters, what one book would I choose for a new reader, and why? What story would best capture what I loved about that author, and be most likely to bring the newbie back for more? 

So here's how I'd answer the question for ten (or nine, depending on how you count) members of my personal pantheon. 

REX STOUT: I've written before about my love for Nero Wolfe, Archie Goodwin, and the Manhattan brownstone they call home. This is definitely a series where I wouldn't give a new reader book #1 to start with. Fer-de-Lance is a fine novel, and Wolfe himself is already there almost complete, but I don't think Stout had yet refined Archie's voice. Given how important the brownstone is to what I find most appealing about the books, I'd also eliminate the entries where Wolfe ventures out into the wider world, though some of those (Some Buried Caesar, Too Many Cooks) are excellent. Ultimately, my choice would be And Be A Villain, in which a man is murdered during a live radio broadcast. Wolfe and Archie are at their sharpest, the key supporting characters are present in fine form, and the mystery itself is satisfyingly complex, with a surprising resolution. Some would object to this choice on the basis that the novel is the beginning of the "Zeck trilogy," introducing the only recurring villain in the Wolfe stories, but I think the book stands up fine on its own.

AGATHA CHRISTIE: It means forgoing the pleasures of Poirot, but in my view there's no finer way to meet Dame Agatha than And Then There Were None (hey, are all my choices going to start with "and"?). What's not to love? A fiendishly clever plot with plenty of inventive twists, an incredible setting, a cast of memorably nasty characters--everything great about Christie is on full view here, including the darkly cynical tone that gives her work such lasting depth. The atmosphere in this one is anything but cozy, and there's a reason writers are still ripping this premise off after almost a century. Now, if you must have Poirot and his little gray cells? It may be too easy an answer, but I'd have to go with Murder on the Orient Express. (If you must have Miss Marple, you must ask someone else, as the character's never done much for me.)

ROBERT B. PARKER: I've also written before about how formative the Spenser novels were for me when I began reading adult crime fiction. I still relish them, but there are particular challenges in introducing them to a new reader. The first Spenser, The Godwulf Manuscript, isn't much more than a Chandler pastiche, with little indication of what would later make the character distinctive. The second, God Save the Child, introduces Susan Silverman, but is one of several early books in the series with gender politics that have aged very poorly. The book I've reread most often, A Catskill Eagle, relies heavily on the reader's prior knowledge of Spenser and Susan's relationship. So my recommendation for the reader new to Spenser is The Judas Goat, in which our man goes to Europe to track down a group of terrorists. The case is fast-paced and exciting, and Spenser is formidable without yet being the invincible superman he'd be in the later books. The climatic showdown, at the 1980 Montreal Olympics, is a terrific action sequence. Most importantly, the book has the lively, funny interactions between Spenser and Hawk that are usually the highlights of any Spenser outing.

RICHARD STARK: Once again, I've written before of my devotion to Stark's novels about the coldly efficient professional thief Parker, for my money the best series of crime novels ever written. They're all great, but I think one perfect entry point is The Score, in which Parker joins a gang with a seemingly foolproof plan to rob every business in a small mining town in a single night. As always, things go wrong, and the pleasure comes from watching Parker scramble to deal with the multiple complications and still walk away with the loot. In addition to the novel, the comic book adaptation by the late, great Darwyn Cooke is most definitely worth seeking out.

DONALD E. WESTLAKE: Stark, of course, was a penname of Westlake's. While Stark's Parker novels are the best straight crime books ever written, Westlake used his own name on the Dortmunder series, about a thief cursed with the worst luck of anyone in the genre, and darned if they're not, by a mile, the best comic crime capers. It's kind of not fair that one guy should be so damn good at both. I think most Dortmunder fans would recommend new readers simply start with the first book, The Hot Rock, but I'd actually go with a much later entry, Drowned Hopes. Here, an ex-con recruits Dortmunder and his regular crew of misfits to help with an unusual problem: the town where he buried his loot is now underwater, thanks to a dam built while he was in prison. Worth the price of admission just for the scene where Dortmunder tries scuba diving. For bonus points, the novel also includes an unusual crossover: in one chapter, the characters from Joe Gores's DKA series make an appearance. Gores and Westlake cowrote the chapter, which also appears in the DKA novel 32 Cadillacs. So this book can actually introduce you to two top-tier crime series!

JOHN D. MACDONALD: Just as Hawk is vital to the best entries in the Spenser series, so the most memorable books about Travis McGee, MacDonald's "salvage consultant" hero, tend to be the ones with the most involvement from Meyer, the philosophically inclined economist who serves as McGee's unlikely best friend. So while it might seem perverse to choose the next-to-last novel in the series as an entry point, I'd still go with Cinnamon Skin, in which Meyer is central to the plot and present in almost every scene. When Meyer's beloved niece and her new husband are killed in a boat explosion, he and McGee set off on a cross-country quest to find and punish the guilty party. There's some great detective work in this one, and a memorably cold-blooded bad guy. Of course, the McGee books are only a fraction of the work put out by the highly prolific MacDonald. For a non-series taste, try The Executioners, which has been the basis of three (increasingly unfaithful) filmed versions under the title Cape Fear.

ED MCBAIN: Choosing a starting point for the 87th Precinct novels is just about impossible, partly because of the sheer scope of the series (55 novels over fifty years!), partly because it features a sprawling ensemble cast instead of a single hero. There are a few plot threads which run through several novels--Detective Steve Carella's relationship with his wife, the recurring villain The Deaf Man--but by and large you can read the series in pretty much any order. It's been persuasively argued that the books really constitute a single long novel, one of the greatest ever written about New York City (thinly fictionalized as Isola in McBain's universe). McBain didn't invent the police procedural, but the 87th Precinct is surely the grandest incarnation of the form in mystery fiction. Forced to choose an introduction, I might go with Eight Black Horses, in which the Deaf Man returns to exact revenge. It's got a clever plot and shows the main characters at their most human--but I might be choosing it just because it's one of the ones I've most recently reread.

LAWRENCE BLOCK: Two of the greatest figures in the history of the American PI were introduced in the 1970s. Robert B. Parker's Spenser is the paragon: well-read, absolutely committed to an admirable code of honor, a superb cook, irresistible to women, and very nearly undefeatable with either a gun or his fists. As much as I love Parker's writing, by the last third or so of the series, Spenser had become essentially superhuman, impervious even to aging, and the endless scenes of him and Susan congratulating each other on the perfection of their relationship had gotten a little old. Spenser's contemporary, Block's Matt Scudder, is a much different, and ultimately much more human and thus more compelling, character. Scudder tries to do the right thing, but he's deeply flawed, most notably by his alcoholism, which remains a central theme of the series even after he joins AA and sobers up. You could start the series from the beginning, but to jump in at a point where Block has fully mastered Scudder's voice and world, go with When the Sacred Ginmill Closes, a flashback novel set during Scudder's drinking days that features a compelling plot and one of the all-time great titles.

SUE GRAFTON: Sometimes the obvious answer is the correct one. There's no doubt that Grafton got better with experience, but there's also no doubt that her "alphabet" series about California PI Kinsey Milhone was strong from the start. Watching Milhone's character develop over the course of the series is one of its main pleasures, and best appreciated if you're with her from the start of her journey: "A" is for Alibi. It's not a perfect book (you'll see the end coming a mile away), but it will make you eager to spend more time with the character. It remains a tragedy that the series never reached Z. 

STUART M. KAMINSKY: The (IMHO) underappreciated Kaminsky had several series characters, including Florida process server Lew Fonesca, Chicago cop Abe Leiberman, and Moscow inspector Porfiry Rostnikov. I frequently return to them all with pleasure, but my favorite is Toby Peters, a down-on-his luck PI working in Hollywood in the 1930s and 40s. Peters works for a different celebrity in every book, and Kaminsky, an accomplished film scholar in his professional life, fleshes out the stories with rich detail about the period and the biographies of the real-life figures Peters encounters. As in all of Kaminsky's series, there's an expansive and highly entertaining cast of supporting characters and an engaging combination of melancholy and humor. Mostly because it's where I started, I'd direct new readers to the second Peters entry, Murder on the Yellow Brick Road.

Agree? Disagree? Who are your favorites, and what do you think would make the most effective starting points for readers new to them?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Edited by Adam Meyer, In Too Deep: Crime Fiction Inspired by the Songs of Genesis came out from Down & Out Books last year, shortly before that publisher went, well, down and out. As a result, the book never got the attention it deserved. I'm delighted that, earlier this month, a new edition of the book was published by Audecyn Books, and is now available in both print and electronic editions. It's a great set of crime stories, including contributions from my fellow SleuthSayers Stacy Woodson, Michael Bracken, and Barb Goffman. My story, "Just a Job to Do," is about a bodyguard, assigned to a mobster's wife, who develops her own ideas about what protection really means. Don't miss your second chance at this one!

The Beat of the Drums, Loud and Bold

During my daily walks, plus drives in my car, I've long been in the practice of listening to either audiobooks or podcasts. I've talked before in this column about my audiobook preferences. In terms of podcasts, I lean toward comedy (How Did This Get Made?), true crime (My Favorite Murder), or film (Team Deakins). Generally, I'll listen to a few episodes of something, get a little restless, and move on to something else.

(As an aside: Apple stopped making iPods in 2022, years after phone apps had made them redundant and functionally obsolete. The term "podcast," though, clearly isn't going away anytime soon, and will long outlive the device the format was originally named for. Language is weird.)

For the last several months I've been bingeing a podcast starting from its very first episode, and for once I haven't been tempted to switch to something else, even briefly. The podcast is A History of Rock Music in 500 Songs, and it's exactly what it sounds like: a history of rock, with each episode centered on a specific song. It's researched, written and narrated by a British man named Andrew Hickey, and I've found it so enjoyable, admirable and educational that I wanted to use this column to recommend it to anyone even vaguely interested in the topic.

I'd advise starting from the very first episode, which concerns the 1939 recording "Flying Home" by the Benny Goodman Sextet--a choice which should give you some indication of the wide-ranging scope of Hickey's project. While individual episodes can certainly be listened to with pleasure, Hickey is telling a single, overarching story here, and it's worth listening from the beginning in order to fully appreciate all the threads he's weaving together in complex and ambitious ways. In Hickey's telling (punctuated in each episode by carefully selected snippets of the dozens of songs he discusses), the history of rock is much more richly layered than the simplistic, conventional idea that "the blues had a baby and they named it rock and roll." Indeed, he argues that the influence of the blues has been greatly overstated, for reasons having to do with reductive notions about race, and that rock's more important roots are in jazz, swing, gospel, country, western (not the same thing as "country," as Hickey carefully explains), and r&b.

The sheer depth of Hickey's research and storytelling is staggering (especially considering that, in addition to the regular installments on the "official" list of 500, he's produced hundreds of bonus episodes for Patreon backers about additional songs). Every episode integrates detailed biographical information about the people who made the music, extensive analysis of the influences and ideas that went into the song itself, and commentary on the historical and cultural moment, with special attention to the racial tensions that are so important to the story. Hickey is going way beyond Wikipedia here--in fact, he frequently points out places where Wikipedia has something flatly wrong. I'll confess that the music theory sometimes goes over my head (I can barely tell a major key from a minor one, and when Hickey starts talking about things like chromatic scales or the mixolydian mode I'm simply lost), but I've never once been bored.

Hickey has a gift for illuminating his vast cast of characters and their nuanced, shifting identities and relationships. I've learned about Little Richard's struggles to reconcile his sexuality with his deeply felt religious faith; that the Everly Brothers, despite their gorgeous harmonies, loathed each other for much of their lives; that the young Aretha Franklin was so painfully shy that she had difficulty making eye contact with anyone outside her family. Perhaps not surprisingly, I've learned that many of the most influential people in rock history--especially the men--were essentially monsters in their personal lives, treating women, children and associates in abominable ways. Once in a while Hickey discusses a figure who, he notes with some surprise, nobody has anything bad to say about (Fats Domino and Cass Elliot, for example), but, unfortunately, abusers like Ike Turner, exploitative opportunists like Alan Freed, out-of-control drunks and addicts like Gene Vincent, and raging egomaniacs like Jan Berry (of Jan & Dean) are far more common.

Really, there's no end to the fascinating tidbits Hickey includes. Sam Phillips, of Sun Records, was such an idealist that he tried to place a phone call to Fidel Castro during the Cuban missile crisis, convinced that a reasonable discussion between two rational men could resolve the whole silly misunderstanding (he ended up talking to Raul Castro for an hour). The OPEC oil crisis led record companies to make LPs thinner to save on material, which in turn made it more likely that the needle would skip, which in turn led to less use of bass and an untick in lighter tones--hello, yacht rock. There are endless examples of how seemingly dry topics like musicians' union rules and copyright law have completely changed the course of popular music. And if you're looking for crime connections, you'll find no shortage of murder, extortion, assault, robbery, financial fraud and drugs--to say nothing of the huge role the Mafia played in the music industry for decades.

With so much to cover, the episodes have ballooned considerably. They started out being around thirty or forty minutes, but I've just listened to episode 150, on "All You Need is Love," which weighed in at some four hours and covered, among other things, the creation and social impact of satellite communications, the growing influence of Indian music in the West, the development of the avant-garde London art scene, the nearly fatal consequences of the Beatles snubbing Ferdinand Marcos, John Lennon's lifelong struggle with depression and why he switched from contacts to glasses, the many studio innovations of George Martin, the tragic and somewhat mysterious death of Brian Epstein, the television show The Prisoner, and the first signs of the tensions that would ultimately see the Fab Four break up. I loved every minute.

Sadly, Hickey has been experiencing health problems which have greatly slowed the pace of releases. The series was weekly when it began, in 2018, but the most recent episode--#183, on "Pinball Wizard"--came out in March, and it's not clear when the next one will be released. Even if no more are ever made, though, what Hickey has already produced is an astounding work of popular history well worth your time. And as a bonus, because he relies on Patreon backers, the podcast itself is ad-free. Those of you who have wearied of podcast hosts looking for elegant ways to start talking about mattresses or online therapy services will understand how welcome that is.

I think part of what I find fascinating about the series is how it makes the familiar new again. You've heard "Johnny B. Goode" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand" and "Louie Louie" and "The Twist" hundreds of times, maybe thousands. They seem etched in stone, their forms so fixed as to appear inevitable--of course that's what they sound like. Hickey's stories demonstrate just how easily they might have sounded completely different, or never have happened at all. He lets you listen to the songs with fresh ears and discover them all over again.

Maybe somebody should put together A History of Crime Fiction in 500 Stories. Cain and Abel would make a great first episode.

So what are your favorite podcasts?  What's your favorite rock song? The best concert you've ever been to? And what's a topic you'd like to see treated in this kind of detail?

AND NOW, THE NEWS

Speaking of crime stories, just a quick mention of two new publications. The July/August issue of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine includes my story "Hunters," a wicked little tale of family bonding, birdwatching--and MURDER! Given the recent printing problems with the magazine, I'm not sure when physical copies will be out, but the digital issue is available now.

Over the last couple of years, my fellow SleuthSayer Barb Goffman has invited me to write some holiday-themed stories for Black Cat Weekly, including yarns about Christmas and Talk Like A Pirate Day. The latest, "It's Flag Day on Fairview," came out in issue #249. I had a lot of fun with this one, about a neighborhood rivalry that gets way out of hand.

And finally, I wanted to express my gratitude to Jon Larsen at Thrilling Detective and Vicki Weisfeld at Crime Fiction Lover for their recent thoughtful reviews of my collection Crime Scenes. It's not easy getting attention for short story collections these days, so I'm very appreciative for their time and insightful comments. It's always gratifying to know somebody enjoyed your work!