After a Patti Abbott hiatus, when the very capable Evan Lewis, Kerrie Smith, Todd Mason and George Kelley filled in, the Queen of Friday's Forgotten Books returns today, and a big "Welcome Back!" to Patti.
The Edgar Awards Banquet is fast approaching: winners of the annual Mystery Writers of America awards will be named in just a little over two months, on April 28. While browsing through the shelves at my local public library, I stumbled across an anthology from 1980, The Edgar Winners, the 33rd Annual Anthology of the Mystery Writers of America.
It's edited by Bill Pronzini, who notes in his introduction that this anthology is
"The first anthology to bring together in one volume only those stories that have received the coveted Edgar as the Best Mystery Short Story of its year....These twenty-four stories include some of the finest mystery fiction to be published in the past four decades. Moreover, they represent the widest possible variety of types, themes, styles and authors--testimony to the fact that the mystery story, contrary to what certain critics would have us believe, is by no means a limited and hidebound genre."
A little history is in order, too, as the first two years of the Edgar Award for the short story were given for bodies of work; the third went to Ellery Queen's Mytery Magazine; and the next four were given to one-volume single-author collections. The current policy of honoring a single story didn't begin until 1954, and thus, Pronzini chose representative stories from the pre-1954 categories to be included here.
The stories are printed chronologically, from 1947's "The Adventure of the Mad Tea Party," by Ellery Queen (Frederic Dannay and Manford Bennington Lee), up through "The Cloud Beneath the Eave" by Barbara Owens, the winner from 1978. Other names are indeed a "Who's Who" of giants in crime fiction, short or long forms, including William Irish (a/k/a Cornell Woolrich), Lawrence G. Blochman, Philip MacDonald, Roadl Dahl, Stanley Ellin, Edward D. Hoch, Joe Gores and Robert L. Fish. On the other hand, it's interesting to see how many of the winning stories were penned by authors who, for whatever reason, never went on to widespread name recognition, like William O'Farrell, David Ely, Warner Law, Margery Finn Brown.
The themes and styles Pronzini alluded to above range from detective stories to psychological suspense, police procedurals, character studies, morality plays, social commentaries, and "gently nostalgic glimpses of the past, even what might be termed an avant-garde literary exercise." If you're looking for a book than provides an overview of the best writing in a variety of short mystery fiction sub-genres, then this is a good place to start.
As a reminder and nod to the latest possibilities for inclusion in a future Edgar-winning anthology, here are this year's nominated stories:
- "The Scent of Lilacs" – Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine by Doug Allyn (Dell Magazines)
- "The Plot" – First Thrills by Jeffery Deaver (Tom Doherty – Forge Books)
- "A Good Safe Place" – Thin Ice by Judith Green (Level Best Books)
- "Monsieur Alice is Absent" – Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine by Stephen Ross (Dell Magazines)
- "The Creative Writing Murders" – Dark End of the Street by Edmund White (Bloomsbury)
Good luck to all!
It's a fine book, and it was a surprise that MWA didn't get around to doing this this way until this volume.
Though David Ely, particularly, was a well-known writer...mostly of best-selling suspense novels and slick magazine suspense stories, many adapted for for film (such as SECONDS, borderline sf) and television (the typically not too swift NIGHT GALLERY adaptation of his "The Academy"). He's kind of in the same niche as Richard Condon, William Sambrot, and a slew of others...Ira Levin was probably the most consistently successful of guys in this class.
William O'Farrell had a fairly film-oriented career, iinm. Though I think you're right about the paucity of Warner Law's other work...a handful of memorable stories such as "Little Foxes Sleep Warm" and then silence. Margery Finn Brown seems to have had a writing career rather peripheral to crime fiction, or fiction generally...
http://thisibelieve.org/essay/16407/
Posted by: Todd Mason | February 18, 2011 at 06:59 PM
Hm. "Many" Ely adaptations is overstating it; though several more were optioned for film, at least, IMDb only lists these two.
Posted by: Todd Mason | February 18, 2011 at 07:05 PM
I've heard many an author discuss the after-effects of winning a major award like an Edgar, with most saying it didn't necessarily translate into bigger sales or better name recognition. It's a little sad to see folks win these awards and then drop off the radar; there's too much unfulfilled promise in the world as it is.
Posted by: BV Lawson | February 19, 2011 at 10:59 AM
Well, in these cases, the folks weren't on your radar in large part because they were mostly flying in other airspace altogether (to distend the metaphor!)...though I'm surprised you hadn't come across Ely. I don't think the award had much to do with it at all, in any of these cases, though I would be interested in why Warner Law seemed to quite writing so quickly (though Barry Malzberg has noted to me more than once those who did indeed decide they could express themselves creatively in some other arena after hearing extended silence after an awards or similar splash).
Posted by: Todd Mason | February 19, 2011 at 01:18 PM
Ely is certainly a success in his own right, and by that token, I probably shouldn't have included him in the less-well-known category. However, my thoughts were more along the lines of folks whose success is *mostly* in the crime-fiction realm, and most people classify Ely in the "literary" vein (I dislike that term, by the way, preferring general fiction); Harlan Ellison won an Edgar for a short story, too! Definitely a successful author, albeit mostly in scifi. A look at Ely's published short stories, however, do indicate he wrote more of them as crime fiction. At any rate, I'm sure his Edgar was well-deserved. The borders between "genre" and "non-genre" continue slip and meld together as the years progress.
Posted by: BV Lawson | February 19, 2011 at 02:37 PM
I doubt a short story writer gets as much bounce from an Edgar as a novel writer, but it still must be nice.
Posted by: Patti Abbott | February 19, 2011 at 11:05 PM
Probably more of a bounce toward an agent if they go looking to sell a novel, I'd imagine; or, including the "Edgar award-winning" author so-and-so in the credits for an anthology might help sell more copies. Or not! This business is very unpredictable sometimes.
Posted by: BV Lawson | February 20, 2011 at 07:15 AM
Well, of course, a career such as David Ely's (or William Harrison's, or Jack Finney's) always meant the boundaries between "genre" and "non-genre" were pointlessly artificial at best, pernicious more often. You may not know how much I agree with you that "literary" and "mainstream" are other artificial/pernicious terms (I tend to refer to contemporary mimetic fiction in this fashion, when that's what's meant, and bestsellers as bestsellers, as far as those measures can be determined given all the industry obfuscation over the decades). But Ely, who wrote a lot of borderline sf (please, rather than "sci-fi"), simply didn't write much for the cf magazines, hence wasn't too much cloven to by the CF community...he wrote for the PLAYBOYs and COSMOs instead...and one shouldn't assume that the short story writer necessarily wants to be a novelist, at least not primarily, though of course it's been tougher for a while to be a commercial success that way, at least since the collapse of the big markets for short fiction (SEP, COLLIER'S, etc.) throughout the '50s and '60s...Algis Budrys is another Edgarist whose work mostly is sf, rather than being an "amphibian" such as Avram Davidson, Fredric Brown, Miriam Allen deFord, Robert Bloch, Richard Matheson, Kate Wilhelm, et al. While Ellison has published a lot more fantasy (and some of it criminous) than sf, he's certainly another example.
Posted by: Todd Mason | February 20, 2011 at 03:00 PM
All good points, Todd! Thanks very much for the notes and added details. (Do you have an eidetic memory, perhaps? Something I wished for, but the gene passed me by.) As always, your encyclopedia knowledge is much appreciated.
Posted by: BV Lawson | February 20, 2011 at 05:03 PM
No, a very porous memory, alas...but what's important to me sometimes sticks...
Posted by: Todd Mason | February 25, 2011 at 02:48 PM
As someone who has battled a Swiss-cheese memory all her life, I'm amazed by anyone who can recall as much information as you, Todd! I know it's easy to look things up in this digital age, but I'd much rather have it lodged permanently in the little human gray cells.
Posted by: BV Lawson | February 25, 2011 at 03:12 PM