Doughboy Detectives

In honor of America’s Veterans Day holiday, it is only appropriate that B.V. Lawson of In Reference to Murder should have compiled a list of crime novelists and mystery series protagonists who once served in the military. That list is here.

Present and accounted for in the latter category are Ezekiel “Easy” Rawlins, Travis McGee, Lord Peter Wimsey, and others. But Lawson might also have added Inspector Ian Rutledge, Charles Todd’s World War I veteran (A Pale Horse); John Buchan’s secret agent, Richard Hannay (The Thirty-nine Steps); Max Allan Collins’ P.I., Nate Heller (Chicago Confidential); Ross Macdonald’s Lew Archer (The Blue Hammer); Rennie Airth’s Inspector John Madden (River of Darkness); Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Dr. John H. Watson, the chronicler of Sherlock Holmes’ adventures, who served with the British Army medical corps in Afghanistan, before being discharged due to an injury; Oscar Schiller, Douglas C. Jones’ deputy federal marshal in Arkansas (The Search for Temperance Moon, A Spider for Loco Shoat); Timothy Harris’ Thomas Kyd (Unfaithful Servant); Edward Wright’s movie star-turned-sleuth, John Ray Horn (Red Sky Lament), and of course Jeffrey Marks’ slightly re-imagined Ulysses S. Grant (The Ambush of My Name).

I’m undoubtedly missing many more names that I am recalling.

READ MORE: “Mysteries in the Trenches,” by Elizabeth Foxwell
(The Bunburyist).