While technically speaking this blog is still on its August break, the garage is far too hot for me to spend as much time as I should be in getting it organized and “cleaned out.” So I’m doing what I can do inside instead, and that includes working on the Addenda for the Revised edition of Allen J. Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV.

   At the moment I’m working on the S’s in Part 3. The following caught my eye a couple of evenings ago, and as a result I spent some time making sure that I had all of the relationships identified and untangled for the four authors who were:

STRANGE, MARK. Joint pseudonym of Adrian Leslie Stephen, Karin Costelloe Stephen, Marjorie Colville Strachey, & Rachel Costelloe Strachey, q.q.v. Under this pen name, the author of one novel in the (Revised) Crime Fiction IV; see below:
         Midnight. Faber, hc, 1927. [Academia; England]

   Taking the co-authors one at a time, in alphabetical order:

STEPHEN, ADRIAN LESLIE. 1883-1948. Add both dates. Noted psychoanalyst; brother of author Virginia Woolf. Both were members of the Bloomsbury group. Married to Karin Costelloe Stephen, also a physician and psychiatrist. Joint pseudonym with Marjorie Colville Strachey, Rachel Costelloe Strachey & Karin Costelloe Stephen, qq.v.: Mark Strange, q.v.

STEPHEN, KARIN COSTELLOE. 1889-1953. Add both dates. A physician and psychiatrist; married to Adrian Leslie Stephen. Sister of Rachel Costelloe Strachey. Joint pseudonym with Adrian Leslie Stephen, Marjorie Colville Strachey, & Rachel Costelloe Strachey, qq.v.: Mark Strange, q.v.

STRACHEY, MARJORIE COLVILLE. 1882–1964. Add both dates. Sister of British writer & critic Lytton Strachey. Joint pseudonym with Adrian Leslie Stephen, Karen Costelloe Stephen & Rachel Costelloe Strachey, qq.v. : Mark Strange, q.v.

STRACHEY, RACHEL [“RAY”] (PEARSALL CONN), née COSTELLOE. 1887-1940. Add full name. Studied mathematics and electrical engineering before becoming actively involved with the British women’s suffrage movement. Sister of Karen Costelloe Stephen; married Oliver Strachey, a mathematician and cryptographer in the Foreign Office, and brother of Lytton Strachey. Joint pseudonym with Adrian Leslie Stephen, Karen Costelloe Stephen & Marjorie Colville Strachey, qq.v. : Mark Strange, q.v.

   If you’re interested in learning more about these jointly related and collaborating authors, the links will get you started, and Google will lead you to more. It has occurred to me to wonder what sort of book they might have written. Was it a spoof of the British thriller novel, with academic overtones, or did they take their story and plot completely seriously?

   I can’t answer the question, nor can I provide a color image of the cover. Not a single copy is offered for sale on the Internet; in fact, other than the CFIV page, there’s no mention of the book at all.

   For now, it’s yet another mystery.

[UPDATE] 08-20-07. Thanks to Jamie Sturgeon, some information on the book has come to light. Check out this later blog entry.

   In an article entitled “Mysteries That Bloom in Spring,” Time Magazine April 17, 1978, Michael Demarest reported on the Second International Congress of Crime Writers. The conference took place in Manhattan in March and was sponsored by the Mystery Writers of America. You can follow the link to read the entire piece, which is a “state of the art” report on the field of mystery fiction as it was nearly 30 years ago. Of major interest, though, at least to me, is the list of “ten current and compelling exemplars” of the crime fiction novel that’s included at the end.

   It is not clear who chose these titles. The implication is that the Congress of Crime Writers had some input, or it may have been Mr. Demarest alone, as he appears to have been fairly knowledgeable of the field. How well the choices stand up I leave for you to decide.

   [Thanks to Gonzalo Baeza for pointing the article out to me and the other members of the online rara-avis Yahoo group. Gonzalo’s own blog, Sweet Home Alameda, is in Spanish but is definitely recommended.]

Catch Me: Kill Me, by William H. Hallahan (Bobbs-Merrill; $7.95). New Jersey-based Hallahan, 52, a former adman, won his Edgar with a thriller that scurries from the lower depths of Manhattan to the higher reaches of Washington, D.C., and Moscow, with a side trip to the underside of Rome. Its main sleuths, a burnt-out CIA agent and a doughty Immigration official, set out separately to solve the mystery of the disappearance of a minor Russian poet whose scattered dactyls are the clues to a major East-West confrontation. A masterpiece of bamboozlement, Catch Me is a kind of catch-22 between rival and riven U.S. agencies, written in a style that ranges from hardest-boiled yegg to soufflé, with nothing poached.

Copper Gold, by Pauline Glen Winslow (St. Martin’s; $8.95). A former Fleet Street court reporter who now lives in Greenwich Village, Winslow, fortyish, focuses on swingin’ London’s demimonde with Hogarthian relish. Her world of pushers, prossies, punks and rotting Establishment pillars is counterpointed by the decent, diligent coppers who come a cropper. What might otherwise have been a merely expert Scotland Yard procedural is elevated by Soho low jinks and, believe it or not, a pervasive and finally persuasive romanticism.

The Blond Baboon, by Janwillem van de Wetering (Houghton Mifflin; $7.95). The Dutch-born author, 47, who has sojourned in many exotic places and once lived in a Buddhist monastery in Japan, now inhabits Maine and writes cleaner English prose than many a Yankee aspirant. However, his stories are still set, with occasional departures (The Japanese Corpse), in Amsterdam, where his sleuths have taken over the turf once occupied by Nicolas Freeling’s late, lamented Inspector Van der Valk. Van de Wetering’s latest Dutch treat, starring the familiar trio of Detectives Grijpstra and de Gier and their commissaris, is cerebral, comradely and sensual, within the generous Hollander dollops that make KLM a perennially popular airline.

Nightwing, by Martin Cruz Smith (Norton; $8.95). In a tour de non-force suspense novel that mixes virology and American Indian mythology, Hopi hopes and bureaucratic horrors, Author Smith, 35, weaves an all too believable parable of tribal endangerment. His unlikely detectives, a flaky young Indian deputy and an obsessed paleface scientist, encounter a mass killer of a different sort: a vast horde of plague-spreading vampire bats. Smith, who is one-half Pueblo, explicates the Indian psyche and bat pathology as deftly as he creates blood-filled characters.

Gone, No Forwarding, by Joe Gores (Random House; $6.95). Gores, 46, who was a card-carrying private eye in California before switching to literary license, dissects a Mob-connected conspiracy to sue, harass and murder the Bay Area-based Dan Kearny Associates detective agency out of business. DKA, as in two previous novels, survives – after an adrenaline-pumping, nationwide search for a missing witness, conducted in large part by the niftiest black op in the literature.

Death of an Expert Witness, by P.D. James (Scribner’s; $8.95). Since James, 57, is English and a woman, she is frequently hailed as a worthy successor to Christie, Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh. James’ knowledge of locale (in this case, East Anglia’s murky, misty fen country) and contemporary mores (some pretty kinky), her familiarity with forensic science (which is what Expert’s plot is mostly about) and keen psychological insight, all mark her as an original. Her seventh and best mystery novel brings back Scotland Yard’s Adam Dalgliesh, who writes offbeat poetry.

The Enemy, by Desmond Bagley (Doubleday; $7.95). One of Europe’s bestselling suspense writers concocts drama of genetic manipulation, incidental assassination, government machination and Russian marination. Bagley, 54, who knows his computers and test tubes, is equally at home with his locales (England and Sweden, in this book) and his personae, who can be both touching and tough. The Bagleyan denouement raises his novel from mere artifice to the artful.

Waxwork, by Peter Lovesey (Pantheon; $7.95). Lovesey’s mysteries are set in late 19th century London, which in too many other authors’ hands now seems exclusively Sherlockian. He writes with accurate verbal and social perception about the upper and lower reaches of Victorian sanctimony and contrivance. Waxwork, 41-year-old Lovesey’s eighth novel, is at once charming, chilling and as convincing as if his tale had unfolded in the “Police Intelligence” column of April 1888.

The Baby Sitters, by John Salisbury (Atheneum; $9.95). John Salisbury is the well-guarded nom de plume of a fortyish British historian, political writer and playwright – which adds spice to his first political thriller right from page 1. It is the story of an Orwellian attempt (in 1981) to turn Britain into a fascist state, led by a fanatical Muslim group riding high on Arab oil and abetted by some of England’s leading politicians. The conspiracy is defused by Bill Ellison, a brilliant Fleet Street digger whose investigative team resembles the London Sunday Times’s muckraking groups. Salisbury gives his improbable tale crackling credibility — and is already working on a sequel.

Talon, by James Coltrane (Bobbs-Merrill; $8.95). In his first suspense novel, James Coltrane – in real life a Hawaii-based lawyer named James P. Wohl, 41 – shows himself a young master of the medium. His antihero, Joe Talon, is a superefficient analyst of satellite photos for the CIA in Manhattan. He is also an unrepentantly laid-back hankerer for the surf-and-grass California scene. When Talon detects a curious and erroneous – or doctored? – cloud cover masking a remote area of Nepal, he bucks the Establishment to prove his suspicions, survives sundry assassination attempts and blows open a nasty conspiracy within the Company. He also manages a rather touching love affair and some motorcycle exploits worthy of Evel Knievel.

  Hi Steve,

   Well, Death of a Punk seems never to actually die. I’m flattered that you went to such effort to track me down, although I liked the idea of being the 87 year old guy.

   To answer your questions:

   I wrote the book because in the 70’s, I was a big Raymond Chandler fan and also an habitué of the nascent Punk Rock scene (although we referred to it at the time as “New Wave”) in the Lower East Side of NYC. I used to hang out at CBGB’s in the early days to hear yet-to-be-signed bands like Television, The Ramones, The Talking Heads, Patti Smith, Blondie, and many other less famous ones. I simply decided to create a kind of fat, bald, failed Marlowe and drop him into the craziness of that scene.

   One band I went to see a lot was The Mumps, whose lead singer was Lance Loud of An American Family fame. I got to know his minor-celebrity mother, Pat Loud, who at the time worked at a literary agency. I mentioned to her that I’d written about 40 pages of a trashy detective novel set in the New Wave scene and she said, to my genuine surprise, to send it to her at the agency. She read it and told me that if I finished it, her agency would represent me. I was flabbergasted because I had been writing it simply to entertain myself; I had NO idea of getting it published or even of TRYING to get it published.

   Shortly after I finished it, Ann Patty, a young editor at Pocket Books (who is now executive editor at Harcourt), bought it. And the rest, as they say, is history. Or, put another way, it sank like a stone. There were pockets of high volume sales, which not-so-coincidentally were located in the only places in the US at the time where New Wave Rock was popular: NYC of course, LA & SF, but also Cleveland, Boston, Athens, GA, and Seattle. I got a lot of fan mail from those towns.

   Foreign rights were sold to Germany (where it went through two printings as Tod eines Punk with the worst cover ever; I’ve never been able to collect royalties) and France, as you found. I sold the movie rights three times because certain producers smelled an album tie-in, and I was paid by one to write a screenplay adaptation, but nothing ever came of it. Is this more than you want to know?

   Why has the price skyrocketed? Well, I started buying up copies on the Internet in the early 90’s. I refused to pay more than five bucks per copy and very few cost more than that. Gradually the prices started to climb. I think it was in 1995 that I was astonished to see that a store in Minneapolis wanted $29.95 for it. I even wrote the guy and asked what was up with that. He wrote back that he was buying up all the cheapo copies he could find because they sold for his price as fast as he could list them. In the next few years, the cheapos pretty much disappeared. Soon the average price had risen to about $50. I couldn’t believe it.

   I started getting fan mail again because, like you, readers were able to find me. Then, around 5 years ago, I saw one on abe.com for more than $100. I wrote to the vendor in San Diego and asked him why he was charging such an outlandish sum for it. He responded that every copy he listed sold immediately no matter what the price and that the $100 one had also just sold. He told me he was going to raise the price again if he came across more copies. Prices started to climb into three figures and stayed there.

   About two years ago, they started selling for lower four figures; I think the post on your blog about those prices must be correct. I can’t believe anyone would actually pay that much in any case. You can get Hemingway first editions for less. As for WHY it’s selling for so much… I think it’s because it’s set in that now-famous time and place, and many of the peripheral characters seem to be based on now-famous people, although I vehemently deny that vicious canard; any resemblance to persons living, dead, or otherwise is purely coincidental and exists wholly in the fevered imaginations of certain wacky readers. Judging from the fan mail, people seem to find it funny and entertaining too.

   Why is it scarce? When it came out, it had no advertising budget. Pocket Books was putting all their chips on the paperback edition of The World According to Garp, releasing it with six different covers and a huge promotional budget. The pleasant middle-aged ladies in the publicity department didn’t know what to make of D.o.a.P. (I even had a glowing blurb from Debbie Harry that they refused to use because they hadn’t really heard of her) and advised me to go to bookstores and buy copies to extend its shelf-life.

   They set up a few radio interviews but I did most of the promoting myself through my connections in the music world. I did manage to steal a box of promo copies from the PR office, which I distributed as judiciously as I could to media types. While it got rave reviews in hip-but-little-read places like Andy Warhol’s Interview Magazine, the few reviewers in the mainstream press who wrote about it were a bit nonplussed; the Denver Post paired its review of it with an alternate-history novel about World War III by an ex-general . The reviewer segued into the D.o.a.P. portion thusly: “Going from the globe to the gutter…”

   I liked that very much. If D.o.a.P. is ever re-published, I want the cover copy to read: “It Goes From the Globe To the Gutter!”

   What’s up with Who Killed the Snowman?: After an editorial meeting at Pocket Books, it was decided to change the title to W.K.t.S.? When they told me about the change, they also showed me a mockup of the cover. Basically they wanted to take a book that had to do with the edgy part of the pop music world (which they didn’t understand) and change it to the generic part of the drug culture (which they did understand).

   While no expert in marketing, I didn’t think it took much brainpower to understand that marketing a book as though it’s about one thing when it actually isn’t, pretty much guaranteed failure. I went into Ann Patty’s office, stamped my feet, flailed my arms, and pouted until she agreed to try to get it changed back to Death of a Punk. In the end, we prevailed but not before they’d registered the ISBN as Who Killed the Snowman? That’s why one can still find mention of Snowman in hoary medieval databases.

   One side story: The cover with “The Punk” was painted by the best Pocket Books house artist, whose name escapes me now. He’d done many classic paperback covers in the 60’s and 70’s. The reason the Punk’s left hand is in that goofy position is that in the original painting he was holding a cigarette.

   The same marketing geniuses who’d come up with W.K.t.S? decided that potential buyers who didn’t smoke or who wanted to quit might subconsciously be deterred from buying the book by the presence of the cigarette. As you can imagine, I stamped, flailed, and pouted again, but to no avail. They had STATISTICS, and a marketing person with stats is as immovable as a large stone and just as smart.

   Anyway, I’m sure this is much more than you wanted to know, but in the event that you would like more D.o.a.P. (or Dope, as I call it) info, don’t hesitate. And if you or one of your fellow bloggers actually READS the book, I’d love to know whether it was enjoyed or if it induced sleep…

   John P. Browner was the author of Death of a Punk (Pocket, pbo, 1980), a PI novel which as you may recall, was profiled here on the blog not so very long ago.

   At stated then, and so credited in Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV, the other book that Browner is said to have written was Who Killed the Snowman? (Pocket, pbo, 1979).

   While Death of a Punk is a book not easily found, it can be obtained if you’re willing to pay the price that’s currently being asked for it online. Or you can wait for it to show up while visiting used bookstores or library sales. It does exist.

   On the other hand, there are no copies of Who Killed the Snowman? offered for sale online anywhere at all. The suspicion that there weren’t any to be found began to grow. And who was John P. Browner anyway?

   To answer the second question first, Al Hubin, working under the assumption that that was Browner’s real name, reports his findings:

   There’s nothing very conclusive here, but I agree with Al that the Florida-New York state Browner is the most likely candidate. Unfortunately, no address or telephone number has been obtained for him, and here is where the trail has temporarily ended.

   As for Who Killed the Snowman? It doesn’t exist. Here, from Victor Berch, is the evidence:

   The latest batch of covers uploaded to Bill Deeck’s Murder at 3 Cents a Day website are those for the Dodge Publishing Company, 1935-1938, some of which were designated as “Blue Streak Mysteries.”

   Here’s Bill Pronzini’s introduction to the page containing the publisher’s line of detective fiction:

   Besides the one shown, other authors and titles in the short-lived series include Theodore Roscoe with two books, one of which is I’ll Grind Their Bones; Joseph T. Shaw’s Blood on the Curb; George Bruce’s Claim of the Fleshless Corpse; and a small handful of others.

   In case you were wondering, Geoffrey Coffin was the joint byline of Van Wyck Mason and Helen Brawner, whose series character Inspector Scott Stuart of the US Department of Justice made his first appearance (of two) in Murder in the Senate.

   I’m still on vacation mode, but as I promised I might, I’m posting a short piece on a book that I just discovered that I have but didn’t know anything about until just now. And I can’t wait until September to tell you about it.

   It’s a private eye novel, one by John P. Browner, who is in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, but about whom he also knows nothing more. The complete entry for the author reads like this:

      BROWNER, JOHN P.
         * -Who Killed the Snowman? (n.) Pocket Books 1979
         * Death of a Punk (n.) Pocket Books 1980 [New York City, NY]

   It’s the second book of the pair which I’ve just discovered that I own. I found it in a box in my garage that I opened this afternoon to see what was in it (the box, that is). At the moment there’s not a single copy of Who Killed the Snowman? up for sale on the Internet, and Google brings up not a single mention of it, so I have no idea what it’s about. There is one copy of Death of a Punk on Amazon.com with an asking price of $75.00, but unless you’re more resourceful than I am, all of the other copies you’ll find there or anywhere else will set you back $300 or more. And, yes, you read that right.

   A word to the early bird. If the $75 one is gone by the time you read this, you weren’t early enough.

   The blurb on the front cover reads as follows: “Beyond the Law, Behind the Eight-Ball, Trapped in a Drug War … and Framed for Murder!”

   From the back cover:

   About the “ZZZ.” That’s the first word in the ad that Hornblower puts in the Village Voice every week. Rather than having it show up at the top of the list in the classified section, he makes sure that it appears at the bottom.

   There is a French version of this book, or at least I assume that it’s the same book, my French having disappeared on me about the same time I passed my last French exam, which would have been in 1964 or 1965. Here’s the bibliographic information from Amazon’s French website, along with a cover scan:

   Description du livre: Gallimard, 1981. État : Bon état. NRF 248p. N̊1824, première édition. N̊ de réf. du libraire 1928.

   If you’ll check back, I think you’ll see that the Mystery*File blog has been up and running for seven months, as of today.

   I didn’t think I had anything to say when I started, but I guess I proved myself wrong. I’m fairly happy with all of the blog entries, and really really pleased with a few of them.

   The heading for this particular post says that I’m taking a break, which means that for the most part, I’ll be taking the rest of the summer off. I’ve not run out of things to say. Far from it! It’s the other way around, by a full 180 degrees — and I’m totally frustrated that I’ve not been able to follow through on a large number of things I’ve been planning on doing and just haven’t gotten to, yet.

   But the time has come for a short recess from blogging and to do a good many other more mundane things instead, like cleaning the garage and organizing my book and magazine collection, as if those two chores were not really one and the same thing. I also have a basement full of books plus three storage areas and they are all calling me, and not so softly in recent days and weeks.

   And there are a few other matters which will keep me away from this keyboard for a while. Working outside and doing a general long-delayed yard clean-up, scrubbing the deck, and believe it or not, no painting. I hate painting.

   I’m not going away. I’ll answer emails — even reply to some emails that I haven’t managed to get to in the last few months or so — and there will be an occasional post when an article or long piece is ready and it just doesn’t want to wait until September.

   I will also be working on the Addenda to Al Hubin’s Crime Fiction IV and continuing to add cover images to Bill Deeck’s Murder on 3 Cents a Day website, so I’ll not be all that far away from the computer, after all.

   A big thank you is due from me to all of the people who’ve stopped by, especially those who’ve left comments and have emailed me behind the scenes. A number of friends have been reunited through these blog entries, for example, and moments such as those have pleased me more than almost anything else. Thanks, too, to everyone who’s contributed. You know who you are, and I’m counting on you for more.

   Except for, as I say, an occasional post, you’ll hear from me again in the fall. Watch this space.

   Taken from an obituary which appeared in the online edition of The Guardian:

   His entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, even slightly expanded, is relatively modest:

   Of Beneath the Stone, one online bookseller described it thusly: “The story of two men, a German and an Englishman – captor and captive – who meet for one night in a Balkan valley to dine…”

   A Time Magazine review of Original Sin says: “George Tabori […] seems to have written this psycho-thriller with his left foot. A khamseen howls for days in Cairo, wearing tempers thin as the hot, gritty sand seeps through the doors and windows of the pension […] On the fifth morning of the storm, Adela Manasse, wife of the pension’s proprietor, is found dead in her tub, naked and smiling a ‘kindly’ smile. How did she die and why did she smile? Original Sin explores this problem amid swirls of windblown sand and snarls of plot typical of Cosmopolitan magazine fiction – which is, in fact, what this novel is.”

   From the front cover of The Good One: “The story of an honest police chief helplessly caught up in the seething violence and bloody fighting of a revolt in a West African colony.”

    — Thanks once again to John Herrington for passing the news along to Al Hubin.

   Excerpted from an obituary in the online edition of The Guardian:

   Below is Curzon’s entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J.Hubin. As you can see, not much had been known about the author until now, not even that the name he used was not his:

   More about either of the books or Major Lennox has proven difficult to obtain:

   Of Balloon, one online bookseller says only: “R.A.F. mystery.”

   Of Ostrich, another bookseller says: “This is a humorous mystery story about an officer in the US Signal Corps and his disaster prone fiancee.”

   Any additional information provided about the books would be welcome.

   What’s a barrage balloon? That I can tell you. From wikipedia: “A barrage balloon is a large balloon tethered with metal cables, used to defend against bombardment by aircraft by damaging the aircraft on collision with the cables. Some versions carried small explosive charges that would be pulled up against the aircraft to ensure its destruction. Barrage balloons were only regularly employed against low-flying aircraft, the weight of a longer cable making them impractical for higher altitudes.”

    — Thanks to John Herrington for spotting the obituary and sending the link on to Al Hubin.

   In today’s Hartford Courant, Bob Englehart’s editorial cartoon summarizes the state of the state very nicely, as usual:

   On his blog, Englehart adds the following:

    “As a rule, I don’t do memorial cartoons about victims of crime, but this is too much. This goes too far.

    “This is an argument for an arsenal of guns in every home, a pit bull kennel in the basement of every house, armed security guards, gated communities and the death penalty. The temptation is to fight evil with evil.

    “A cooler head will prevail in time, but not today. Today I vent with prose and cry with my cartoon, as does Connecticut.”