“Our Lady Who Houses Murderous Subjects”

Directly on the heels of yesterday’s sad news that bookseller-turned-author Dilys Winn died last month, comes Sarah Weinman’s note this morning on her Facebook page about Winn having been a guest on the classic TV panel game show To Tell the Truth in 1972. “How insane were the 1970s,” writes Weinman, “that only a few months after Dilys Winn opened up Murder Ink, she appeared on To Tell the Truth, with Kitty Carlisle Hart, Gene Rayburn, and Alan Alda among the questioners.” The video showing Winn’s appearance is below.

Winn Lost

Irish-born advertising copywriter-turned-author Dilys Winn, who—as The Gumshoe Site reminds us today—“opened Murder Ink, America’s first mystery bookstore, in 1972 on West 87th in New York City,” died on February 5 in Asheville, North Carolina. She was 76 years old.

According to a paid death notice in The New York Times,

Dilys was born in Dublin on September 8, 1939, and came to the United States in December 1940, leaving behind her father, who after completing medical school at Trinity College and becoming a physician in Dublin, served throughout World War II in the British army. She attended public schools in Perth Amboy, New Jersey, and graduated from the Baldwin School in Philadelphia and Pembroke College before becoming an advertising copywriter.

In 1972, Dilys opened the doors of Murder Ink, America’s first bookstore devoted entirely to mysteries. In 1975 Dilys sold the bookstore [to Carol Brener] and began work on Murder Ink, an oversized collection of essays and opinions about mystery fiction. Murder Ink was not the first publication aimed specifically at mystery fans, but Murder Ink immediately became the indispensable companion for the mystery community, which it went far to create. It was especially noteworthy for the range of material it included, from the editor’s reminiscence of having tea with Frederic Dannay, the surviving partner of the cousins who had written as Ellery Queen, to her interview of novelist Donald Downes, a former OSS member who answered an advertisement she placed in The New York Times’ Personals column inviting anyone willing to talk about the profession of spying to contact her.

Dilys’ voice was even more influential. Witty, facetious, confident, well-informed, opinionated, often acerbic, but never snobbish, it established a chatty, appealing persona for a generation of fans who followed her in rescuing mystery fiction from both the gutter and the academy.

The Mystery Writers of America conferred a Special Edgar Allan Poe Award on Murder Ink in 1978. A sequel, Murderess Ink: The Better Half of the Mystery, followed in 1979, along with a television movie, Murder Ink, starring Tovah Feldshuh as a mystery bookstore owner the following year.

In the 1990s Dilys moved to Key West, Florida, and opened another bookstore, Miss Marple’s Parlour, where she sold mysteries and orchestrated one-night mystery shows. By then she had already begun a long period reviewing mysteries for Kirkus Reviews, where she eventually passed judgment on hundreds of titles before retiring from Kirkus in 2013.

The most important organizations Dilys influenced preceded her in death. The bookstore she founded, years after moving to Broadway and 92nd Street, closed its doors at the end of 2006. The Dilys, the annual award the Independent Mystery Booksellers Association established in 1992 for the mystery book its members had most enjoyed selling that year, was last conferred in 2014. The passing of both the award and the bookstore marked the dramatic decline in the number and financial health of independent bookstores across America—an institution with which Dilys remained powerfully identified for a generation.

We offer our condolences to Winn’s family and friends.

Dusting Off a True Classic

On the eve of The Black Orchid’s final anniversary party in New York City, Sarah Weinman’s moving tribute to that bookshop started me thinking about the various parts and components of the crime-fiction community. From the multitude of awards, to the proliferation and wide-ranging world of mystery blogs, the realm of crime-fiction fandom can trace its origin to a single reference work: Dilys Winn’s Murder Ink: The Mystery Reader’s Companion.

Murder Ink was the first of its kind: a hugely entertaining look at mysteries, their writers and readers. It made no claim to being comprehensive; indeed, the book is highly idiosyncratic and reflected the wit and taste of Winn, who opened the first mystery bookstore under that same name--a store that ultimately closed last year, a victim of rising rents in Manhattan.

The cover of the book tells you what you’re in for: a grim butler holding an ominous silver plate. Across the bottom of the image is written “Perpetrated by Dilys Winn.” The inside back cover, bathed in red, ends the book on a perfect coda: “This rich dark red exactly matches the color of arterial blood.” The black-and-white photographs that illustrate Winn’s work, heavy on silhouettes and shadows, add the perfect visual grace notes to the essays within, full of insight and love for the genre.

The contributors to Murder Ink are among the greatest (if often most under-heralded) names in crime fiction: William L. DeAndrea, Brian Garfield, H.R.F. Keating, James McClure, Marilyn Stasio, Lawrence Treat, Peter Dickinson, and Abraham Lincoln, whose 1846 short story “The Trailor Murder Mystery,” we learn, was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine in 1952.

Abby Adams wrote a whimsical piece about the trials of living with a highly prolific mystery writer who works under several names. (“I have lived with the consortium that calls itself Don Westlake for five years now, and I still can’t always be sure, when I get up in the morning, which of the mob I’ll have coffee with.”) Elsewhere in the book, Westlake and three of his various pseudonyms (Richard Stark, Tucker Coe, and Timothy J. Culver) gather for an interview to discuss “the state of their art.”

To my knowledge, Winn was the first writer to classify a traditional mystery tale with no sex, offstage violence, and a dearth of profanity, as a “cozy,” a term that was meant affectionately at the time, but is now just as often used as an unnecessary pejorative. However, Winn was not a pushover for just any hard-boiled writer. Of Raymond Chandler, she wrote, “Take your Chandler friend by the hand, put a piece of tape over his mouth, and tell him to just shut up and hear how it ought to be done. [Dashiell] Hammett’s style does not date, as does Chandler’s, and The Glass Key puts to shame every other hard-boiled writer.”

Murder Ink’s success led to a sequel, Murderess Ink: The Better Half of the Mystery, published in 1979. While just as stylish and interesting as its predecessor, Murderess Ink suffers the fate of sequels: diminished novelty.

There have been many mystery reference books since Murder Ink, including the fine 1993 entry, The Fine Art of Murder, edited by Ed Gorman, Martin H. Greenberg, Larry Segriff, and Jon Breen, which largely mimics the Murder Ink format. However, for my money, the first remains the best. Thank you, Dilys.

READ MORE: “Winn Lost,” by J. Kingston Pierce (The Rap Sheet).