Writers Born Today - Joel Goldman

It's the birthday of Joel Goldman, born October 23, 1952 in Kansas City.  He began his career as a lawyer, but switched to another life of crime; a writer of legal thrillers.

While joking around with another attorney in his firm, Joel suggested the best way to handle a difficult colleague was to write a mystery and kill him off. It was a good joke, but it got Joel to thinking. The result was his first thriller, Motion To Kill, published in 2002. Publisher's Weekly said it was filled with  high tension and had an electrifying finish. Four more thrillers followed featuring his smart and sassy protagonist Lou Mason, including Deadlocked, which Mystery Scene Magazine called "a real page turner delivered by a pro." It seemed that Goldman could do no wrong. Then unexpected health problems ended his legal career. Rather than dwell on the matter, Goldman turned to writing full time and created a new hero, FBI Special Agent Jack Davis, and gave his hero the same health issues that plagued him  as a way to deal with the change in his life.

Not content to just write crime fiction, Joel got into the publishing business with a new company he started with fellow crime writer Lee Goldberg. They started Brash Books in 2014 with the ambitious goal of publishing "the best crime novels in existence". At first they focused on top notch authors whose works had gone out of print, and even went so far as to hire a private detective to track down one missing writer who they wanted to publish! Since the company started they have published dozens of award winning authors and over 80 novels.

"Ask yourself the question I ask myself each time I start writing a new mystery – what happens when things go wrong, especially when you think no one’s looking?"

- Joel Goldman

Writers Born Today - S. S. Van Dine

It's the birthday of Willard Huntington Wright, born October 15, 1888 in Charlottesville, Virginia. He wrote under the pen name S.S. Van Dine, in part because he was too embarrassed to admit to his high brow friends that he had stooped to writing "detective fiction". He created the dapper amateur detective Philo Vance, who was an immediate hit, both in print and on the silver screen, portrayed by such actors as William Powell and Basil Rathbone. Few people living today have ever read one of Van Dine's novels or even heard of him. Yet for a brief period of a dozen years, be was one of the most widely read authors on the planet.

Wright began his career as a critic, first for the Los Angeles Times and later for Smart Set, a jazz age magazine owned by the great writer H. L. Mencken, one of Wright's literary influences. Although Wright was known for his scathing reviews of romance and detective fiction, he never achieved the fame he felt he deserved, and after a series of personal and business setbacks, he was ordered complete bed rest by his doctors to deal with his drug abuse.

Bored, he began reading detective novels by the dozen, and to his surprise, found some of them quite entertaining. He decided to try his hand at a couple, but aware of his own reputation for slandering the mystery genre, came up with the pen name S.S. Van Dine to disguise his authorship. He created Philo Vance, a protagonist modeled after himself, or at least, how Wright saw himself...educated, cultured, wealthy, and an expert on any number of subjects, a man to admire with his fancy clothes and monocle. He was the perfect detective for the jazz age, a model for the boom years when it seemed everyone was destined to become wealthy and wise. First with The Benson Murder Case and the blockbuster The Canary Murder Case, Van Dine's writing formula was a hit. By the time the third Philo Vance novel was published, Wright was as rich as his main character. So popular were his books that they helped keep his publisher from going out of business during the Depression.

Wright even penned a guide for other writers with an essay he published called Twenty Rules For Writing Detective Stories. It holds up well and still has some good advice. Van Dine influenced many other writers of the mystery genre, perhaps the most famous being the writers who created Ellery Queen.

Van Dine's novels and trademark character lost popularity as the Jazz Age and the Roaring 20s gave way to the deepening Great Depression. By the mid 1930s his wealthy protagonist began to appear dated and out of place. New writers, such as Dashiell Hammett and James Cain emerged with a gritty, realistic style that caught the public's eye. By the time the last Philo Vance novel, The Winter Murder Case was published in 1939, Van Dine's literary shooting star had burnt out. And not just his career was over. He died on April 11 of that same year from heavy drinking and heart disease.

"There simply must be a corpse in a detective novel, and the deader the corpse, the better."

                                                                   - S.S. Van Dine

MYSTERY HISTORY - FIRST TRAIN ROBBERY

On October 6, 1866, the Reno Gang pulled the first moving train robbery in U.S. history near Seymour, Indiana. The four brothers made off with 10,000 dollars in gold and currency, worth over

166,000 dollars in today's money. It was a daring and inspired crime that set off a wave of copycats. 

For a while, it became the most profitable method of robbery in the Wild West. The transcontinental railroad had just been completed, uniting the country. Large sums of cash were being hauled around by rail to stock banks and mines with payroll money in the fast growing western territories. But the area was still sparsely populated. Robbers had plenty of isolated spots in which to ambush trains, and organizing a posse to chase the thieves was nearly impossible. Rugged landscapes provided countless hiding places.  Even the infamous crime duo Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid got in on what seemed to be easy pickings.

But it was not to last. Train owners didn't like being robbed (imagine that). They began to protect their cargo with larger safes, armored boxcars and armed guards. The Pinkerton Detective Agency was hired to chase down the gangs, sometimes with men on horseback leaping from special train cars. By the late 1880s, the good times were over.

It ended a lot sooner for the Reno Gang. Three of the brothers were arrested after a train robbery in 1868 in which a guard was beaten to death. An enraged mob of vigilantes stormed the jail where they were being held and hung them.