Showing posts with label Today in Mystery History. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Today in Mystery History. Show all posts

01 February 2023

Today in Mystery History: February 1


 

Today is our 12th exciting journey into the past of our amazing field.  Hang onto your blunt instrument.

February 1, 1878.  H.C. Bailey was born in London.  His most prominent creation was  a surgeon and amateur detective, Reggie Fortune.  He also wrote about an attorney, the unfortunately named Joshua Clunk.

February 1, 1920. British novelist Colin Watson was born.  He wrote about Inspector Purbright and Lucilla Teatime (another interesting name).  He also produced a history of crime novels between the wars called Snobbery with Violence.

 February 1, 1924.  "Night Shots" appeared in Black Mask Magazine.  It was Dashiell Hammett's seventh story about the Continental Op.  

February 1, 1925. Top Notch Magazine featured "The Case of the Misplaced Thumb" (and now the titles are getting weird).  It was Erle Stanley Gardner's first novelette about Speed Dash (another name for the books), a human-fly turned crime fighter.  I don't mean that he was a character from the movie The Fly.  He was an acrobat, able to climb walls unaided.

February 1, 1929. Dashiell Hammett's novel Red Harvest was released.  It was his second novel about the Continental Op.

February 1, 1976. Robert Martin died. In the forties he wrote for Black Mask, Dime Detective, and other pulps.  In the fifties he started writing novels, many about Cleveland private eye Jim Bennett.  Bill Pronzini, who corresponded with him in his later years, called Martin "a genuinely nice man." 

February 1, 1989.  P.D. James' novel Devices and Desires was published.  It was the eighth appearance by Adam Dalgleish.


February 1, 1993.
Publication date for Marissa Piesman's Heading Uptown.  Piesman and her protagonist were both Jewish New York attorneys.  The books were funny.  She used to write them on the subway on the way to work but, alas, she changed jobs , shortened her commute, and stopped writing them.

February 1, 2000. Peter Levi passed away.  This English author was an interesting fella.  He was a Jesuit priest until his forties.  He became Oxford Professor of Poetry and discovered (in California!) a poem he claimed was written by William Shakespeare.  Most scholars disagreed.  He  wrote several mysteries starting with the wonderfully titled The Head in the Soup in 1979. 

 

 



05 January 2022

Today in Mystery History: January 5


 
This is our tenth adventure in stalking the history of our genre. 

January 5, 1909.   Harry Kurnitz was born on this date in New York City.  He wrote mysteries under the name Marco Page.  MGM bought the rights to his book Fast Company and brought him to Hollywood to write the screenplay.  Among the more than forty movies he wrote were Witness for the Prosecution, and How to Steal a Million.

January 5, 1921.  Friedrich Durrenmatt was born in Bern, Switzerland.  Best known as a playwright, he wrote three crime novels which are considered classics: The Judge and his Hangman, Suspicion, and The Pledge.  The last of these was made into an excellent movie directed by Sean Penn and starring Jack Nicholson as a cop who, on the day he retires, promises parents that he will find the man who murdered their daughter.


January 5, 1932.
  Umberto Eco was born in Piedmont, Italy.  He was known as a philosopher until he wrote the astonishingly successful medieval crime novel, The Name of the Rose, in which a monk named William of Baskerville investigates a series of grisly murders in a monastery.

January 5, 1939.  Homicide Bureau was released. Bruce Cabot starred as a cop under pressure to solve crimes without violating suspects' civil rights (hmm... sounds vaguely familiar). Rita Hayworth  plays the head of internal affairs.

January 5, 1946.  Arthur Lyons was born in Los Angeles.  Most of his novels were about reporter-turned-private-eye Jacob Asch.  The movie Slow Burn was based on his novel Castle Burning. 

January 5, 195?. On this date the action begins in John LeCarre's Call For The Dead, which means master spy George Smiley is introduced to the world.  Smiley quits his employment in this book, which is no surprise.  In most of the novels about him he quits the Circus or gets rehired there.  Man can't seem to keep a job.

January 5, 1965.  On this date Mrs. Rachel Bruner came to Nero Wolfe with an impossible assignment: make the FBI stop bothering her.  Naturally, he succeeds and The Doorbell Rang became Rex Stout's biggest success, pushing his fame and sales to unheard of levels.   Reporters who asked the FBI for comments on the book were referred to the Criminal Division, with the implication that something vaguely illegal was involved in criticizing the Bureau and its director.

January 5, 1970.  This date saw something doubly rare: fiction in Sports Illustrated, and a short story by novelist Dick Francis.  "A Carrot for a Chestnut" is one of my fifty favorite crime stories.  If you don't happen to keep half a century worth of old magazines around you can find it in Francis's collection Field of Thirteen. 

January 5, 1974. Vincent Starrett died in Chicago.  Canadian born, he was an early member of the Baker Street Irregulars and wrote "The Adventure of the Unique 'Hamlet,'"  and The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes.  (No relation to the later movie with the same title.)