The Fifteen Years Later Affair

Sometimes I wish I’d been more modest in my expectations for The Rap Sheet—which celebrates its 15th birthday today. I could have created this blog as a place to occasionally share random thoughts on crime, mystery, and thriller fiction, both new and vintage. At the least I could have been in the habit of posting less ardently. Instead, after having spent many years editing magazines and newspapers, I envisioned The Rap Sheet as a frequently updated resource to which fans of this genre could turn to find news, information, and commentary. I essentially wanted it to be CrimeReads, only without anywhere near the manpower or financial backing that that more youthful site claims. And when I have to take a hiatus of a week or two in order to finish a project for another publication? Well, visitors start to wonder at my absence. “Did this fuckin’ guy die?” an anonymous reader inquired after I’d let 13 days pass recently between posts.

None of this is to say that I’m unhappy about how The Rap Sheet has turned out. Quite the contrary, in fact. It has been a wonderful experience getting to know the magnitude of works in this genre, and to meet plenty of the writers who have provided that remarkable breadth. This blog has given me entrée into corners of the literary world that I would not otherwise have enjoyed, and led me into some invaluable friendships.

That The Rap Sheet has brought me more than a few frustrations is likewise true. I cringe every time I discover a broken link within an older post, and try my best to update those connections (often using the Wayback Machine). Last year’s sudden disappearance of most of the blog’s embedded videos almost convinced me to give up this enterprise completely. And the news in May that The Thrilling Detective Web Site had switched servers, and as a consequence hundreds (if not thousands) of links in this blog were now inoperable struck me as the even crueler part of a double whammy. (The only thing worse would have been for Wikipedia to go out of business!) Nonetheless, I persevered. While I still have various videos awaiting my attention, most have been replaced; and I remain hopeful that creator/editor Kevin Burton Smith will find a clever way to redirect The Thrilling Detective’s links, so I don’t need to change all of their Web addresses—a likely impossible task.

As I sit to compose this post, I think back on my launching The Rap Sheet in May 2006. I was then incredibly naïve in the business of blogging, but I imagined it as a way to share my curiosity about—and my knowledge of—crime and mystery fiction with readers. My wish was that their interest would push me to further investigation of the field. That’s certainly the way things have worked out. So maybe my ambitions weren’t ridiculous after all.

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