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Francis M. Nevins, professor of law, also is well known for his avocation as a mystery writer. Nevins has published numerous books and short stories in this genre and is a former Edgar Allan Poe Award winner from the Mystery Writers of America. So it was natural for Grand Connections to ask Nevins for his Top 10 Mystery Writers.
By Francis M. Nevins
I've read a lot of mysteries and liked a lot of what I read, and there's no way I can put together a Top 10 list without setting some arbitrary limits. In no particular order, here are my choices among those authors who are (1) American, (2) male and (3) dead.
Dashiell Hammett (1894-1961) in a very real sense invented American crime fiction. Not only is he one of the founding fathers of the private eye story, but his three major novels - Red Harvest (1929), The Maltese Falcoln (1930) and The Glass Key (1931) - are the first classics of the dark, downbeat genre we now call noir. He also was a master at devising plots of labyrinth complexity.
Raymond Chandler (1888-1959) tended to get lost in his own plots, but his private eye Philip Marlowe is such a vivid character and his style is so richly vivid that his finest novels - The Big Sleep (1939), Farewell My Lovely (1940) and The Long Goodbye (1954) - are endlessly rereadable.
Erle Stanlye Gardner (1889-1970) was a born-again social Darwinian who saw life and law practice as forms of combat, and in his dozens of Perry Mason novels (1933-70) he turned the trial into a form of art: martial art. Virtually every line of dialogue in his novels, whether in or out of court, is a thrust or parry in a never-ending duel. He wrote in the simplest business English, but with his whirlwind pace and zest for courtroom pyrotechnics and tight control of involved plots he hardly needed literary graces.
Cornell Woolrich (1903-1968), the Poe of the 20th century and the poet of its shadows, was a reclusive loner who, in a little under 15 years (1934-48), wrote more than a dozen novels and more than 200 shorter works of crime fiction so full of anguish and brimming with nail-biting suspense that he's revered today as one of the literary origins of film noir and as the Hitchcock of the written word. Hitchcock, by the way, based several of his films on Woolrich tales, the best known of them being Rear Window (1954).
David Goodis (1917-1967), another noir poet, wrote even more bleakly than Woolrich by eliminating the Woolrich hallmark: suspense. Woolrich stories sometimes end happily, sometimes in despair, and, because he used no series characters, the reader could never tell in advance whether a particular tale of his was light or dark, allegre or noir. In Goodis, whose novels are hard to take but unremittingly powerful, there is no suspense, and we are compelled to watch his anguished characters slide inevitably to doom.
John Dickson Carr (1906-1977), supreme master of the detective novel featuring crimes committed in locked rooms or other impossible circumstances, was born in Pennsylvania but set most of his books in England, where he lived for many years. His literary idol, G.K. Chesterton, was the model for his detective character Dr. Gideon Fell, but his haunting style owes more to Poe.
Ellery Queen (the joint byline of first cousins Frederic Dannay, 1905-1982, and Manfred B. Lee, 1905-1971) practiced the classic detective novel with devilish cunning and complete fairness to the reader (at least if the reader was a genius) from 1929 until Manny Lee's death more than 40 years later. Fred Dannay, the scholar and bibliophile of the duo, also founded Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine and served as editor-in-chief from its creation in 1941 until the last year of his life, launching the careers of several topflight mystery writers and countless minor talents, including me.
Rex Stout (1886-1975) gave American detective fiction a potent shot in the arm when he began his long-running series (1934-75) about the obese intellectual sleuth Nero Wolfe and that great American wiseass Archie Goodwin. His plots are nothing special, but the superb interaction of these two characters and the vivid evocation of their menage on New York's East 35th Street represent the closest any American has ever come to capturing the magic of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson and 221-B Baker Street. If only there had been a movie about Nero and Archie starring the middle-aged Orson Welles and the young James Garner!
Anthony Boucher (1911-1968) wrote mystery novels and short stories, science-fiction tales, mountains of essays and book reviews (mainly for the San Francisco Chronicle and the New York Times). He also edited countless mystery and science fiction anthologies, wrote up to three radio scripts a week, and was an aficionado of everything from football to limericks to opera to gourmet cooking to politics. He was the Renaissance man par excellence, and his multiple enthusiasms enliven everything he wrote.
Harry Stephen Keeler (1890-1967) wrote the wackiest, most bizarre books I have ever read - almost a hundred of them, the last few dozen so eccentric they were published only in Portugal or Spain. If ever there were a real-world original of Vonnegut's Kilgore Trout and Kesey's R.P. MacMurphy, it's the indescribable HSK. The Skull Of The Waltzing Clown, Y. Cheung Business Detective, The Case Of The Barking Clock - the mathematically constructed madness goes on and on. Check him out on the World Wide Web.
So there's my list of favorite mystery writers among those who are male, American and dead. Eliminate one or more of those qualifications, and the list would be quite different and certainly much longer. All of them except Goodis I discovered long before I was old enough to vote, and now that I'm a member of AARP I still dip into them as often as I can. Perhaps some of them will become your lifetime companions, too.