Eyes Get the Prize

Congratulations to Mystery Scene magazine, which this month publishes its 100th issue. That’s a milestone of which to be proud, and the mag capitalizes on it with several features.

To begin, there’s a compilation of lists put together by “various experts” in the genre, including a rundown of Lawrence Block’s five favorite novels (from Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon to Donald E. Westlake’s 361) and Ron Miller’s inventory of TV sleuthing teams he’d like to see someday (Jim Rockford and Jane Tennison, anyone?). This issue also carries former MS editor Ed Gorman’s recollections of the magazine’s diapered days, and a look back by four of America’s best-known women detective novelists at how they broke into the biz a quarter-century ago. (“It was hard for me to get my first book published,” recalls Chicagoan Sara Paretsky, “but it was possible in the publishing climate of 25 years ago because there were about six times the number of active mainline publishers as exist today.”) And that’s even before we get to the contents not closely affiliated with this 100th-issue celebration: the cover profile of thriller writer Barry Eisler (Requiem for an Assassin), a chat with Arthur Ellis Award-winning Canadian writer Louise Penny (A Fatal Grace), a study of Daniel Hatadi’s Crimespace social-networking site, and much more.

My favorite piece in this edition, though, may be Kevin Burton Smith’s “100 Eyes of the Mystery Scene Era,” which looks back at the abundance of fictional private detectives who’ve “left their mark on the shamus game” over the last 22 years, since the first issue of Mystery Scene rolled off the presses. “Some of these guns for hire are personal favorites,” Smith writes, “and a few are guilty pleasures, some are no-brainers and there are even one or two I don’t particularly like, but can’t in all honesty ignore.”

Smith, for those two or three of you who don’t know, is the editor-creator of the indispensable Thrilling Detective Web Site, a humongous and pretty thorough database of information about gumshoes and their sidekicks, whether operating in print, on radio, in film, or on television over the last century and more. He’s also a friend of mine. But that shouldn’t bias you against my opinion. Because I don’t think there’s a crime-fiction fan out there who won’t be entertained by Smith’s catalogue of peepers in Mystery Scene.

Some of the names he mentions bring back fond memories, since we haven’t seen much of the characters in a while. I’m thinking here of Jeremiah Healy’s Boston P.I. John Francis Cuddy (whose last novel-length adventure was in Spiral, 1999), Robert Skinner’s Depression-era New Orleans nightclub owner-cum-snoop, Wesley Farrell (The Righteous Cut, 2002), and Benjamin J. Schultz’s Washington, D.C., investigator, Leo Haggerty (last seen in Mexico Is Forever, 1994). Other characters have much shorter pedigrees, including Helena Handbasket (introduced last year in Donna Moore’s Lefty Award-winning ... Go to Helena Handbasket), Declan Hughes’ Ed Loy (whose first outing was in The Wrong Kind of Blood, 2006), Andy Barker (the accountant-gumshoe portrayed by Andy Richter in this year’s short-lived NBC-TV sitcom Andy Barker, P.I.), and “defective detective” Lionel Essrog (who starred only in Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn). Then there are those characters whose continuing presence on bookshelves or movie screens makes me feel more optimistic about the genre, such as Robert Crais’ Elvis Cole (The Forgotten Man, The Watchman), Laura Lippman’s Tess Monaghan (No Good Deeds), and Patrick Kenzie and Angela Gennaro, who, though Dennis Lehane seems to have abandoned them in print, are at least continuing to make their marks in the theater (in Gone Baby Gone, due out later this year).

Naturally, there are a few characters I’m surprised Smith failed to mention. (This is where you start kicking yourself, Kevin.) 1960s Chicago P.I. Smokey Dalton, for one (the creation of Kris Nelscott, aka Kristine Kathryn Rusch). And how ’bout Edward Wright’s 1940s movie cowboy turned shoofly, John Ray Horn, star of last year’s Ellis Peters Historical Crime Award-winning Red Sky Lament? Then of course there’s Linda Barnes’ Carlotta Carlyle, the tough Beantown cabbie-detective who appeared most recently in Heart of the World (2006). None of these names made Mystery Scene’s list. All regrettable exclusions, indeed.

However, I have to give Smith tremendous credit for agreeing to write about 100 fictional detectives. My mind boggles at such an assignment. The only thing that could have been more daunting would have been to ask Smith to list those 100 in order of his preferences. Wisely, he chose to arrange them alphabetically, instead. Fewer hate letters will be aimed in his direction, as a result.