Suddenly Seventeen

I’m not the first person to mention that today would have been the 164th birthday of Sherlock Holmes creator Arthur Conan Doyle, born in Edinburgh, Scotland, on May 22, 1859. (Unfortunately, the author died in 1930.) But it’s another birthday, as well, that of the humble blog through which you’re currently scrolling.

Although it doesn’t seem as if so much time has passed, The Rap Sheet debuted on this date in 2006—a full 17 years ago!

All in all, I am pretty satisfied with how The Rap Sheet has grown and evolved. It has so far racked up just under 8.4 million pageviews, and boasts almost 8,600 posts. There are several editorial projects I have in mind for the near future, and at least one overall design modification I hope to tackle before 2023 is over.

At the same time, I’ve experienced a few frustrations in this undertaking, most recently the Blogger online publishing system’s seemingly random—and new, in my experience—practice of unpublishing a post here and there (claiming erroneously that its content “has violated our Malware and Viruses policy”), and then subsequently republishing it without adequate explanation of its acts or my having done a darn thing. My other chief annoyance is the need to update links as Web sites either go out of business or change the entirety of their post addresses. For instance, I continue to replace links to pages on The Thrilling Detective Web Site, following its disruptive server switch in 2021; and with the fine blog Bookgasm still offline after six months, I’ve been slowly but surely substituting links to archived copies of its stories and reviews as they appear on the wonderful Wayback Machine. (As editor Rod Lott informed me several months ago, this mess is the result of belligerent hacking.)

Despite abundant evidence that everything on the Internet is transient, and that readers will forgive that impermanence, I want The Rap Sheet to be as up-to-date as possible—even in its older material.

So as another blog birthday comes and goes, let me finish by thanking The Rap Sheet’s abundant readers. Without you and your encouragement, I’d have long since terminated this endeavor. I didn’t know in 2006 that I would still be writing about crime fiction—the books, the authors who produce them, the artists who develop their covers, and the movies and TV shows made from them—almost 20 years later. But here I am, damn proud to have made my small contribution to the genre and its future.