CRIMINAL BRIEF

It's been over a month since my last confession --- er, blog-entry. Been busy with various deadlines, the end of the school year, and a great trip to NYC for the Edgar Awards.

But enough about me.

I've got to tell you about a new project on the web, one that has been put together by James Lincoln Warren. (In case you don't know JLW, he's an LA based short story writer, creater of Alan Treviscoe, a 18th century insurance investigator. I have to be careful how I write this, because JLW is also a self-appointed Diction Cop, and I don't want to be at the wrong end of his billy club for dangling my modifiers).

CRIMINAL BRIEF is a web log dedicated to discussing and celebrating the mystery short story. has a rotating crew of contributors, each providing a weekly column. Check it out at www.criminalbrief.com.

Shelf Life.

People at the "Bookcases" forum at LibraryThing.com have been discussing do-it-yourself shelving units. Here's mine, built about 8 years ago.

I based my plan on the fact that most sheets of lumber come 4X8. One sheet of 3/4" lumber, cut lengthwise, gave me a 2X8' base and a 2X8' top. A second sheet cut into quarters gave me 4 2X4' sections.

Here's a top view showing two versions. (I used the bottom version). Both plans show a 2X8' base laying flat on the ground, with a 2X4' section vertical at each end. (The top plan shows two more 2X4' dividers with thin plywood sheets - approx. 31"X4' - separating front and back. In the bottom plan, I kept the thin plywood divider whole, but cut the two center 2X4' planks into four 1X4' planks. Confused?)











Here's another diagram showing the basic materials and how they were used:







Here's a few more views of the finished shelves:

Two Hundred and Twenty One Ace Doubles
AsYouKnow_Bob, a fellow member of LibraryThing, posted this photo of his Ace-Double collection at his Flickr page. This, according to Bob, is a complete run! It's a nice set. If you go to this page, you'll see a large version of the image and get a closer look at all these books.

Collecting
Dell Mapbacks

Between 1942 and 1962 (according to William H. Lyles, Putting Dell on the Map) Dell Publishing Company put out 2,168 paperbacks. Their first (Dell #1) was Philip Ketchum's Death in the Library The back cover sported an eye peeking through a keyhole, and the blurb:

This is a DELL BOOK
presenting a new exciting Mystery Series selected by the
Editors of America's Foremost Detective Magazines.

The second, third, and fourth books are pictured above, and bore the same back cover content. With Dell #5, Four Frightened Women by George Harmon Coxe, Dell decided to do something new. They included a "Scene of the Murder in 'Four Frightened Women'" on the back cover. It was a hit, and the tradition continued with a total of 577 maps, diagrams, or blueprints adorning their back covers.

(When Ellery Queen's The American Gun Mystery (Dell #4) was reprinted, a map was added to the back cover, replacing the original content).

Dell Mapbacks have fun cover art: sometimes gaudy, sometimes sexy, at times stunningly brilliant. The map on the back covers rarely adds anything but charm. (Notable exceptions are some of the more clever puzzle-mysteries such as Hake Talbot's Rim of the Pit and the mysteries of John Dickson Carr (AKA Carter Dickson). The map from Rim of the Pit pictured here was taken from sketch by the author).


Often the editors abridged the novels that they reprinted. According to Lyles, this abridgement was often pretty merciless.

On the positive side, Dell generally chose top quality mysteries to publish, with authors that included Margaret Millar, Dorothy B. Hughes, Agatha Christie, Brett Halliday, Rex Stout, as well as the aforementioned Queen, Carr, and Coxe. Dell also made it a tradition to include a list of dramatis personae, "The Persons This Mystery is About," before the title page.

The Mapbacks weren't all mysteries. There were some romance novels, adventures, science fiction novels, and some books that, if you judge by the cover, were only meant to titillate. I can't speak for the content of these books, but the covers are pretty fetching.

Below are a few interesting covers - some of them favorites of mine, others just curiosities. Note that the A.A. Fair (Erle Stanley Gardner) novel pictured below, Fools Die on Friday, was later reprinted (as Dell #1542) the woman pictured was showing considerably less skin.





Below are a bunch of the back cover maps. Feel free to click on them for a closer look.

Recent Acquisitions.

I love my books. Although my collecting tastes are eclectic, the following volumes - all recently acquired - show that there are patterns in my habit.

What do I like to collect?

Lawrence Block (about 140 volumes)
Fredric Brown
R. Austin Freemam
H.C. Bailey
Ellery Queen
Jacques Futrelle
Dwight V. Babcock
Doubleday Crime Club
Dell Mapbacks
Any mystery/crime novel with a Lewis Carroll allusion in the title (this started after I read Fredric Brown's Night of the Jabberwock).

I also have quite a few volumes of Rex Stout, John Dickson Carr, Erle Stanley Gardner, and Ed McBain, but so many of these are paperback reprints, so I'm not sure they're in the same ballpark. I have a lot of books by the three MacDonalds (Philip MacDonald, John D. MacDonald, and Ross Macdonald).

I came across this paperback of George Bagby's Mysteriouser and Mysteriouser, in which the Alice and Wonderland statue in Central Park plays prominently. Bagby is a pseudonym of Aaron Marc Stein's. I also have the hardcover first of this, which incidentally is a Doubleday Crime Club volume.

I met and had dinner with Bill DeAndrea at the Seattle Bouchercon in 1994. We corresponded briefly until his death a few years later. I liked him and his books, of which I own most titles. He wrote two books under the name Philip Degrave, Unholy Moses and Keep the Faith, Baby. I recently replaced my paperback (Paperjacks ©) copy with this Doubleday Crime Club first.

Larry Block has written under many pseudonyms, some that I'm sure he's rather forget about. While at Left Coast, I picked up two paperback firsts written under the name Paul Kavanaugh

Here are a few recently found Crime Clubs. Doubleday began publishing books with the Crime Club symbol (a composite of a guy with a gun, a guy falling, and the letters C-R-I-M-E) in 1928, and continued into the 1990s. Ellen Nehr was the authority on these for many years. After her death, Bill Deeck took up the mantle. I'm not sure if anyone is keeping up with the scholarship these days.

Anthony Berkeley's Silk Stocking Murder was published during the Crime Club's first year.


The Crime Conductor by Philip MacDonald, was published in 1931. Philip was the only one of the MacDonalds to be British (although he moved to California in the 1930s. He is probably best known for The List of Adrian Messenger and The Warrent for X.


H.C. Bailey wrote volumes of short stories featuring the cherubic physician Reggie Fortune. He also wrote numerous novels featuring a sly lawyer named Joshua Clunk. Bailey may be difficult reading for modern tastes, but a brilliant writer. Shadow on the Wall was the first novel-length "Reggie Fortune" story to be published.

Future blog postings will focus on Futrelle, Babcock, and whatever else strikes my fancy.