Sat 26 Mar 2011
As a followup to the various lists posted here recently of favorite mystery writers and characters over the years, here’s yet another. This one was announced in the Fall 1994 issue of The Armchair Detective, the results of a survey the magazine had taken of its readers earlier that year.
ALL TIME FAVORITE MYSTERY WRITERS
1. Rex Stout
2. Agatha Christie
3. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
4. Raymond Chandler
5. Ross Macdonald
6. Dorothy L. Sayers
7. Dashiell Hammett
8. Ngaio Marsh
9. Josephine Tey
10. P. D. James
11. Robert B. Parker
12. John Dickson Carr
13. Erle Stanley Gardner
14. Dick Francis
15. James Lee Burke
FAVORITE CURRENTLY ACTIVE MYSTERY WRITERS
1, P. D. James
2. Lawrence Block
3. Robert B. Parker
4. Sue Grafton
5. Dick Francis
6. Tony Hillerman
7. Ed McBain
8. James Lee Burke
9. Martha Grimes
10. Elizabeth George
FAVORITE MYSTERY NOVELS
1. The Maltese Falcon
2. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd
3. The Hound of the Baskervilles
4. Gaudy Night
5. The Daughter of Time
FAVORITE MYSTERY SERIES CHARACTER
1. Sherlock Holmes
2. Nero Wolfe
3. Hercule Poirot
4. Miss Marple
5. Lew Archer
WRITER WHO WILL STILL BE READ FIFTY YEARS FROM NOW
1. P. D. James
2. Tony Hillerman
3. Dick Francis
4. Robert B. Parker
5T. Ruth Rendell
5T. Lawrence Block
On the reverse page of the poll results were the Mystery Bestseller Lists for May-June 1994, as reported by several specialty mystery bookshops:
HARDCOVERS
1. “K” Is for Killer, Sue Grafton
2. Tunnel Vision, Sara Paretsky
3. Shooting at Loons, Margaret Maron
4. The Burglar Who Traded Ted Williams, Lawrence Block
5T. Dead Man’s Heart, Aaron Elkins
5T. Tickled to Death, Joan Hess
7. Till the Butchers Cut Him Down, Marcia Muller
8. The Concrete Blonde, Michael Connelly
9. How to Murder Your Mother-in-Law, Dorothy Cannell
10. Dixie City Jam, James Lee Burke
PAPERBACKS
1. The Track of the Cat, Nevada Barr
2. Missing Joseph, Elizabeth George
3T. To Live and Die in Dixie, Kathy Hogan Trocheck
3T. Blooming Murder, Jean Hager
5. Dead Man’s Island, Carolyn Hart
6. Cruel and Unusual, Patricia Cornwell
7. J Is for Judgment, Sue Grafton
8T. Bootlegger’s Daughter, Margaret Maron
8T. Share in Death, Deborah Crombie
8T. Poisoned Pins, Joan Hess
11. Twice in a Blue Moon, Patricia Moyes
March 26th, 2011 at 3:01 pm
This supports what I posted earlier: Ellery Queen’s popularity and reputation was already in full decline by 1990.
Stout is the only Van Dine school represented: Ellery Queen is not the only Van Dinean forgotten..
Also: scientific detection is forgotten.
Crime queens and hard-boileds dominate these lists, plus Stout, and Carr.
Mass cultural amnesia, of the real, vast, diverse history of detection has already set in by 1994. Maybe long before!
It is NOT a recent development.
Here we have hard core mystery fans, who remember ONLY Crime queens and hard-boileds (plus Stout and Carr).
March 26th, 2011 at 4:13 pm
It’s exactly what I noticed, Mike. What’s as interesting as who’s on these lists is who it is that’s not — and Ellery Queen is very conspicuous by his absence.
What I’d like to see is how the survey was set up. Were the readers given a list of names to choose from (and add to, if they wished), or were their responses totally unprompted?
I don’t have easy access to the earlier issue to answer that question right now.
You also pointed out something that occurred to me also, and I think it’s important. This was a poll of hard core mystery fans, not the general public.
March 26th, 2011 at 7:18 pm
Steve
I think we nominated our own choices, but I can’t swear to that.
I definitely didn’t vote for GAUDY NIGHT as the best of Sayers or of anything — maybe most pretentious book set at Oxford pretending to be a detective story.
I doubt Lew Archer, however deserving, would make favorite mystery character today — Macdonald is in almost as much of a slump as Ellery Queen.
We likely read too much into these little flash polls like this. They are a portrait of the time they were taken in and certainly reflect that time, but historically they aren’t reliable.
Contemporary popularity is never a good judge of historical import. Somtimes the headlines are the same as the history books but as often as not they aren’t. I promise you not one newspaper in the world would have nominated the most important event of 1919 that a British scientist tested and proved Einstein’s Theory of Relativity by observing an eclipse — and yet that is far and away the most important event of that year in terms of historical weight even with the peace talks in Paris following WWI that led to WWII.
The importance of Ellery Queen may well be more as a historian and editor in the long run — much as I loved them the books may well be largely forgotten. But almost nothing in popular literature is completely lost. Who would have thought there would be two small presses reprinting Arsene Lupin in 2011 or Talbot Mundy and Harold Lamb would be in print? Karl May and Paul Feval are in print in English in 2011. I think in the long run Ellery Queen is safe.
There are an awful lot of paperback originals either being reprinted or available on-line or in print on demand format, and they were the definition of disposable.
I don’t worry a lot about trends. Right now the cozy and the thriller seem to have the stage, but it only takes one writer and one book to bring back any genre and it is impossible to predict who or what that would be. Before the Harry Potter series young adult books were a fairly small section over with the children’s books daminated by Judy Blume, now it is the hottest genre.
No, the Golden Age won’t come back, the classic hard boiled eye will be replaced with something newer, and as always it will all move on — sometimes improving, sometimes regressing, but change is the only constant.
The work of Ellery Queen, S.S. Van Dine, Freeman, Crofts, all the half forgotten names still exists, and will continue to. It will be read, remembered, hunted for, sought out, and evaluated by some readers and historians.
And if we are still around in thirty years and some young whipper snapper in his fifties or sixties says: “boy, they don’t write ’em like Dan Brown and Lee Child’s these days …” we’ll take a hit of the oxygen tank and recall the more things change the more they stay the same.
March 26th, 2011 at 7:34 pm
‘Daminated’
My Freudian slip is showing.
March 26th, 2011 at 8:46 pm
Polls like this are snapshots in time, all right, and you can read all kinds of things in them. Looking back at this one, here are a couple of things I see, some real, some maybe figments of my imagination.
First of all, as Mike Grost pointed out, no Ellery Queen. Will he make a comeback in terms of small press reprints? Or as I’m more inclined, is David right in saying he’ll be remembered more as an an editor and a historian?
Secondly, on the other side of the gender divide, no Margery Allingham and Albert Campion. I think they’ve made a bit of a comeback, the two of them, or has this renaissance been prompted by academic studies? Or are they actually being read?
Also note that ten of the top 15 all time favorite writers are male, and 6 of the top ten then current writers are as well. The percentage is about the same.
On the other hand, look at this. All eleven of the top-selling paperbacks in early 1994 were by women. Excluding trade paperbacks (not a major format in 1994) that may be close to the beginning of a pattern that I suspect has been true ever since.
March 27th, 2011 at 3:29 am
One thing that happens in publishing that we don’t always take into account is that one writer has a success — like Patricia Cornwell or Elizabeth George for example — and a large group of other writers follow. Just as Brand, and Rendell, and James followed Christie, and Sayers, and Allingham … Some of these trends can play out over two or three decades.
So a spate of bestselling women writers produce more and more women writers in the same vein and some of them become best sellers too. A never ending cycle.
I suspect the pendulum is changing even as we argue and discuss it. I won’t predict where it will go, but I can promise you the publishers will be at least a decade behind the curve — they always are.
Somewhere out there the next Steig Larsson, Dan Brown, J. K. Rowling — name your own phenomena — is penning their next book, and it will knock the publishing world on it’s ear, and then a flood of imitators will arrive — some as good or better than the original — but by then some other writer will be in the queue ready for his or her shot.
That’s the reason even in the 21rst Century publishing is an art and not a business. There is simply no way to predict, plan for, or guarantee the next trend or hit, and because of the unique time taken to write,publish, and distribute books (as compared to music and films) it’s always going to be the most difficult of areas to pinpoint and hold down.
That’s as true for genre fiction as for best sellers. But I will say this much, whenever in the past anything has become as predominant on the stands as the cozy is now, that genre was already gasping it’s dying breath and nobody knew it.
My own suspicion is that I am seeing a good many more books about strong more realistic female detectives — often in historical settings from between the wars but not always. Right now most of the series are in trade rather than mass market paperbacks, but if I had to predict that would be where I would look for the next trend.
March 29th, 2011 at 11:11 am
I like the names listed as being read “50 Years from now.” Rendell is already fading into non-printdom with only a handful of her early books having been recently resuscitated by a paperback publisher. Dick Francis’ books appear by the cartonful at the used book sales I frequent and no one is buying them there. Same goes for James, Hillerman, Block and Parker. The predictions failed and we’re only ten plus years from when they were made. No one could have predicted what happened to the publishing industry which I think has a large influence on what readers will “always” be reading.
I agree with David about awaiting the next Larsson, Rowling or Brown and the flood of imitators. This has been trend for the past 20 years. Look at all the vampire and zombie and Jane Austen junk out there- and (horror of horrors) combos of all three!
April 5th, 2011 at 1:11 am
I find it interesting that Stout is the favorite mystery writer here, yet I can’t recollect any serious academic studies of his work (there was a good popular biography from the seventies, I believe). Same with Erle Stanley Gardner and the unlisted Ellery Queen (outside Nevins book, nearly forty years old). Doug Greene did a biography of Carr in 95 and the Joshi book came out about the same time, but, oddly, they sparked no academic revival at all. Indeed, it was shortly after this that Carr was dropped by major publishers.
So I would say, yes, when it comes to Golden Age non-hardboiled men, they are hugely underrepresented in academic studies.