Among the various pieces of data that Al Hubin is always on the lookout for, in terms of adding and correcting information in Crime Fiction IV, his all-inclusive bibliography of the field, are the death dates of authors who have passed away, but for whom this information has never been recorded, for whatever reason.

   This does not include the giants of the field, of course. It’s almost always the lesser known writers, those who were popular at one time but whose career in the area of mystery fiction faded away after their death; or those who wrote only a handful of books to begin with, perhaps more for the love of the field rather than for the money, and so never had a following at all.

   Most of these authors were active and their careers ending before the Internet came along. With a few exceptions, most of today’s authors have their own web pages or have been interviewed often enough online or in the print media that we know as much about them as we could possibly want to know.

   What I’m grouping together this evening are some of the authors whose deaths have been recently discovered. There is no other factor that they have in common than that. Truthfully, each of these deserves a blog entry of their own, and if I ever accumulate enough interesting facts about any one of them, that is exactly what will I will do.

[UPDATE] 07-01-07. And that is exactly what I have done. Each of the authors in this original post now has his or her own entries, dated the same day as this first one. Follow the links to find each of the author’s new entries: