“You’re a Good Man, Sister”

It’s not often I get to take credit as a source of inspiration, but I guess I do on this occasion. While relating the background of her newly purchased 1930s crime novel, Blue Murder (her first hardcover book after three Madeline Carter paperback mysteries, including last year’s Calculated Loss), Linda L. Richards, the editor of January Magazine and a Rap Sheet regular, explains on her personal blog that Blue Murder evolved from my suggestion that she pitch her two cents into a 2005 feature celebrating the 75th anniversary of the publication of Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon.

As Linda explains, “it had been so many years since I’d read Hammett, I needed to refresh my memory. I had a copy of The Maltese Falcon, but it was way in the back of a shelf somewhere, with a lot of dust on it. I blew the dust off, settled in and was swept away. It took me all of 45 seconds to remember why I’d been so enchanted all those years before.” That led her to revisit the works of Raymond Chandler, and to realize in the process that California private eyes Philip Marlowe and Sam Spade both drank too much to have accomplished all their creators gave them credit for; and Spade, as a consequence, may have owed at least part of his investigative success to the affection and organizational skills of his lanky, boyish-faced secretary, Effie Perrine. “She was probably dogging her boss’s steps,” Linda suggests, “making sure she did what needed doing, because the only way she could be sure she would see her pay is if she made certain he actually solved a case here and there.”

And thus was born Los Angeles secretary Kitty Pangborn, the bright, resourceful protagonist in Blue Murder, which Linda’s agent has sold to Thomas Dunne Books/St. Martin’s Minotaur, and which will likely see print in the winter of 2008. Pangborn “is not Effie,” Linda explains. “And Kitty’s boss, Dexter J. Theroux, is not Sam Spade. It would be just plain goofy to try and duplicate those two: Hammett did such an exquisite job with them already. But the idea of the youthful secretary surreptitiously helping the gin-soaked P.I. boss, that idea floated to me while reading Hammett.”

It’s more than a little generous for Linda to give me credit here; I had no idea what would become of that long-ago Hammett assignment. But I do find it funny that Linda is excelling as a crime novelist. When I first signed on with January way back in 1997, the online literary mag didn’t make an effort to review crime and mystery fiction. Now, a decade later, the publication boasts a Gumshoe Award-winning crime-fiction section and has spun off The Rap Sheet. Over that same period, I’ve seen Linda Richards grow more curious about the history and potential of this popular genre, to the point where she’s entered it as a much-praised novelist herself. It is odd but gratifying to see that my own love of crime fiction can be so infectious.