Q&A with Michael Mallory, author of It's a Mystery!

Q&A with Michael Mallory, author of It's a Mystery! 

Q:        What prompted you to write this book?

A:        This is a collection of articles I wrote for Mystery Scene Magazine over a period of seventeen years. While some of the pieces cover other media such as television, radio, and even comic books, most of them focus on print authors who were enormously popular in their day, but with time have fallen into obscurity. A couple of them were so famous in their heyday that they appeared on the cover of Time Magazine. I was curious as to why their popularity had not lasted in the same way that such contemporaries as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Agatha Christie, Rex Stout, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler have, particularly since many of the forgotten authors were equally innovative.

Q:        How did you select your subjects, or even find them if they’ve been forgotten?

A:        Some I already knew about, such as Anna Katharine Green, who wrote the first recognized American mystery novel, but I didn’t know anything beyond her name and achievement, so I researched her. Others were authors I remembered when I was a fledgling mystery fan in the 1960s, who were being reprinted, and wondered what happened to them. Years ago, I stumbled over an old book in the library called “Who’s Who in Mystery,” and for every Rex Stout or Ross Macdonald there were three or four total unknowns…at least to me. So I checked them out. Credits on old films were also good resources, and sometimes Kate Stine, the editor of Mystery Scene, would ask me to do a piece on a particular author. It was Kate, incidentally, who suggested I assemble the pieces into a book, after the magazine ceased publication. Once I started, I realized they fit together as puzzle pieces for the bigger picture of the development of the genre.

Q:        How did you research them?

A:        It was not always easy, because there was often not much in the public record about them. For every author I profiled, I read as many books of theirs as I was able to, taking note of their styles and characterization. A lot of information came from introductions or authors’ notes in those books. The majority of the authors in It’s A Mystery! remain out of print, so I spent a lot of time at the Los Angeles Public Library, requesting very old volumes from the storage stacks.

Q:        Some of the people in the book can hardly be called obscure, though. I’m thinking of Mark Twain and Ray Bradbury, and even Scooby-Doo.

A:        That’s true, but a lot of people don’t know that both Twain and Bradbury wrote mysteries as well as the classic works for which they’re best known. The same with Erle Stanley Gardner, who of course created “Perry Mason,” a character that continues to live on. But far lesser known is his character “Doug Selby,” who was a district attorney, Mason’s natural enemy. When I came across the Selby books, I found it fascinating that Gardner worked at both tables in the courtroom ─ presenting each side as the hero ─ instead of exclusively for the defense. As for Scooby-Doo, there’s probably no more popular or enduring cartoon character to emerge from the last half-century, so he’s hardly forgotten. But it is often overlooked just how groundbreaking the original show Scooby-Doo Where Are You! [sic] was in the medium, particularly for Saturday morning cartoons.

Q:        Is there any one person profiled in the book one who seems more unjustly forgotten than the others?

A:        Not really. I think everyone included in It’s A Mystery! deserves to be read and remembered more fondly today. But there is one writer with whom I’m fascinated, because he had all the ingredients to become a major mid-century author, but it just didn’t happen. His name is Steve Fisher and he was all over the place in the 1940s through the ‘70s, jumping from publishing to film to television and back, in all genres, not just crime fiction. He was a contemporary of Raymond Chandler, James M. Cain, and Cornell Woolrich, and why he never broke through into genre stardom is puzzling, particularly since he wrote one classic, innovative novel, I Wake up Screaming, which was filmed twice. The only reason I can figure is that he was simply too prolific for his own good and therefore taken for granted. On the media side, which is included in the book, there’s an early 1970s late night program called ABC’s Wide World of Mystery that has completely faded into the ether. The reason for that is unique, though: unlike the vast majority of all television programs, it can’t be rerun since it was shot on videotape, and after airing, the tapes were erased for reuse! So it effectively no longer exists, except in the memories of former school kids like me who stayed up late to watch it.

Q:        You are called a “pop culture historian” in the blurbs for this book. What exactly does that mean?

A:        [Laughs] It’s a nice way of saying “TV, movie, and paperback book nerd.” I was in the first television generation, and became an inveterate credit watch as a very small child. While most kids could tell you who played for what baseball team, I could tell you who directed Bonanza and did the voices for Rocky and Bullwinkle. I began writing articles about film, TV, and animation in the late 1980s and that developed into writing about movies and television for the Variety, The Los Angeles Times, and dozens of other publications. I’ve also written books about horror and sci-fi films, comic books, and cartoons, and continue to do work for the Motion Picture Academy’s Oral History Program. For the record, I also write fiction.

Q:        Was there anything that surprised you about some of the authors you’ve written about?

A:        In general, how good they were, although there were one or two I began researching and then quickly dropped, having concluded that obscurity was the best place for them. I was also surprised at how modern some of them read, particularly Wilkie Collins. While he’s not exactly forgotten, Collins is on the Required Reading B-list, even though his style reads quite contemporary and not like dusty Victorian exercises. The Moonstone and The Women in White stylistically could have been written in the mid-20th century instead of the mid-19th.

Q:        Who is the most recent mystery writer to have become forgotten?

A:        Hmmm…that’s a good question. There’s a fellow named Thomas Walsh, who pioneered the police procedural in the 1950s, for which he gets little or no credit. Richard and Francis Lockridge, whose “Mr. and Mrs. North” characters conquered all media including the stage, are largely unread these days, even though Richard published into the 1980s. You know the old saying about everyone having fifteen minutes of fame. Over the past thirty years I’ve seen so many “meteors” appear in the sky ─ authors who come out of nowhere to become huge in the field and win awards, and then seem to burn out after a handful of books. This is a challenging field through which to become iconic.

Q:        Do you have a favorite writer out of those you’ve chronicled here?

A:        Well…no offense to any of the others, but I’d say Lillian de la Torre, who wrote the “Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector” series of short stories. Turning Dr. Johnson and James Boswell into a kind of Holmes and Watson team was a brilliant idea, but in lesser hands it could have simply been a gimmick. De la Torre’s stories are wonderful, and frequently present her own personal solutions to actual historical mysteries. 

Q:        So, why have the writers profiled in this book fallen into obscurity despite their initial popularity?

A:        That’s why I called the book It’s A Mystery!  Because in a lot of instances, it is a mystery. But I think there are several general reasons outside of the fact that some simply catch lightning in a bottle and others don’t. One is changing times and tastes. The effete, upper-class elitism of S. S. Van Dyne’s “Philo Vance,” so popular in the ‘20s and early ‘30s, played far less well in the era of Raymond Chandler. In some instances, an author’s death meant their works fell out of print. Other factors are that some wrote largely, even exclusively in the realm of the short story, which have much shorter shelf-lives than novels; or they never created that one indelible character that could be exploited. My hope is that It’s A Mystery! will encourage readers to seek out these authors and their works wherever they can be found. Libraries and used bookstores are great places to start!