The Case of the Missing Mystery Writers

OK, so we’re experimenting with something new here at The Rap Sheet. For a while now, I have been trying to figure out how to integrate Internet polling software into the site, and I finally stumbled across a simple method, thanks to Jeri Westerson’s blog. Provided free of charge (at least for the time being) by an enterprise called Pollhost, the software makes it possible for us to post, monitor, and change at will surveys related to books, authors, and other crime-fiction-related subject matter.

My first try at what I hope will become an amusing, irregular addition to this blog can be found in a silver box at the bottom of the right-hand column. The poll there asks: Which long-missing crime novelist would you most like to see turning out new books? It’s a question inspired by a note I received recently from author Michael Newton, asking me whatever happened to California novelist Martha C. Lawrence, who penned five books for St. Martin’s Minotaur featuring a San Diego private eye and parapsychologist named Elizabeth Chase before seemingly disappearing from the scene. Her last Chase novel was Ashes of Aries, published in 2001. (For those of you who are now also wondering about Lawrence’s fate, let it be known that I’ve sent her an e-note requesting just such information. I shall report whatever I hear back.)

Newton’s query got me to thinking about other writers in this genre whose work I once found interesting, but who appear to have fallen off the face of the planet. People such as Arthur Lyons, a Palm Springs restaurateur and the creator of Jacob Asch, the half-Jewish journalist turned private eye who appeared in 11 books, including Castles Burning (1980) and False Pretenses (1994); and Stephen Greenleaf, an Edgar-nominated lawyer who produced 14 novels starring San Francisco P.I. John Marshall Tanner, the last of which was Ellipsis (2000). Likewise, whatever became of Jonathan Valin, creator of Cincinnati sleuth Harry Stoner (The Lime Pit)? Or Karen Kijewski, the Anthony and Shamus award winner who gave us Sacramento, California, detective Kat Colorado (Katwalk)? Or Anthony Olcott, the Russian studies professor whose 1981 novel, Murder at the Red October, introduced Russian security officer Ivan Duvakin? Or, for that matter, William Jasperson, who birthed former baseball pitcher and fly fisherman Peter Boone, star of two promising novels from the 1980s, Lake Effect and Native Angels? Among the missing, as well, is A.E. Maxwell (the joint nom de plume of Ann and Evan Maxwell), who published eight action-filled books about a Los Angeles-based troubleshooter named Fiddler (Just Another Day in Paradise, Murder Hurts). And what of Australian William Marshall, who gave us the Yellowthread Street mysteries (The Hatchet Man, Skullduggery), along with a couple of 1880s thrillers (The New York Detective, Faces in the Crowd) led by New York City cop Virgil Tillman? Finally, what of R.D. Wingfield, the ex-oil businessman whose five adventures of British Detective Inspector Jack Frost spawned a popular UK TV series starring David Jason? He hasn’t delivered a new installment of his series since 1999’s Winter Frost.

To the best of my knowledge, none of these people has died in the last decade. They’ve merely stopped writing crime fiction, for whatever reasons. And I wish they’d resume production. Post haste.

But what do you think? Which of the 10 authors I have listed in this first-ever Rap Sheet poll would you most like to see turn out a new book? You can vote for more than one person, if you’d prefer. And suggestions of other missing mysterymakers are welcome in the Comments section of this post.

FOLLOW-UP: “The Please-Come-Back Kids,” by J. Kingston Pierce
(The Rap Sheet).