Wednesday, July 25: Tune It Or Die!
WHERE WERE YOU WHEN IT HAPPENED?
by Rob Lopresti
So, like the title says: Do you remember where you were when it happened?
I’m not talking about the day a great leader died, or a plane crashed, or any of the other events that usually spark that question. I’m talking about a much more personal event that many of you reading this column experienced.
It was the moment that turned you from a person who reads many kinds of books into a mystery reader. Do you remember?
In my case, I can think of three such moments, three stages if you will, but I know exactly which one was the fatal dose, so to speak.
First and Last
The first moment was when I was ten years old and started reading The Three Investigators, a series of Hardy Boys imitations, featuring cameos by none other than Alfred Hitchcock. The first set was written by Robert Arthur and they had wonderful scary titles like The Mystery of the Screaming Clock.
The third moment came when I was about thirteen and hiding from a librarian. At the Plainfield, NJ, public library in those days, they felt that children should be seen in the children’s room and not heard in the adult section. The best way to avoid being banished pack to the kiddy books was to stay out of sight – and the mystery section was out of sight. That’s where I discovered Rex Stout. I have all thirty-three of his Nero Wolfe novels, and I still reread them from time to time.
The Defining Moment
So both Arthur and Stout have their spots in my hall of memory, but neither has the place of honor. No, the moment I became a convert, a helpless lifelong sucker for this kind of literature, occurred when I was about twelve. I was sitting on the screened-in side porch of our house on a glorious sunny day (when I probably should have been out playing).
Instead I was reading. I was enjoying the book, but I can’t say it was a big deal. Then I reached the sentence that changed my life. I can truly say I wasn’t the same person at the end of that sentence as I was when I started reading it. It changed me that much. I can still remember the chill that went down my spine when I read it.
I looked up and was surprised that it was a summer afternoon in modern New Jersey, and not a chilly morning in Victorian England.
By now some of you have already guessed what the sentence was.
“Mr. Holmes, they were the footprints of a gigantic hound!â€
Wow, The Mystery of the Screaming Clock, that brought back memories. The Three Investigators with Alfred Hitchcock were among the first mysteries I ever read: Screaming Clock, Whispering Mummy, Green Ghost, etc., along with the Encyclopedia Brown mysteries. TV was a major influence too — the Ellery Queen series I remember was a must-see favorite. Hooked for life at an impressionable age.
I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t a mystery fan.
Early on, I read a lot of science fiction too, which my aunt and father seemed to understand, but my mother felt that alien worlds were, well, alien, and therefore less acceptable than murder and mayhem and even sex.
Probably worried I’d turn out pretty much as I eventually did.
The first book I remember choosing on my own was when I was 11. Mickey Spillane’s I, THE JURY changed my life. I’d already been stricken by Rod Serling’s “The Twilight Zone,” but Spillane turned me toward mystery. Then when I discovered Ray Bradbury, I had no choice left but become a writer. These guys made life so much more interesting. I wanted to be like them.
I’m a little older than you guys, and I think it was network radio that turned me on to mysteries: Mr. Keen, Tracer of Lost Persons; Mr. Chameleon; Hearthstone of the Death Squad; and of course the better-known Sam Spade, Nick Carter, and the Shadow. And while I never heard the Ellery Queen radio show (that old I’m not), the ghost-written Ellery Queen, Jr. novels were even more influential juvenile reading for me than the Hardy Boys. My reading of adult mystery fiction started with Kelley Roos’s THE FRIGHTENED STIFF, Patrick Quentin’s THE BLACK WIDOW (in a Reader’s Digest Condensed Book version), but it didn’t take me long to get to Sherlock Holmes.
Jon, your comment gives me the chance to point out that Ellery Queen (well, half of him) wrote a wonderful essay once about discovering mysteries throught Sherlock Holmes. He describes his sadness at discovering as a child that all of the Sherlock Holmes stories filled only a few books – he had imagined shelves of them. Of course, now there are that many, if you count all the copyists.
If you still enjoy mystery radio, make sure to listen to Crow’s Avenue at the top of this page.
OMG!!!! Robert Arthur??!! His short fantasy stories started me on the path to wanting to be a fantasy writer. Mystery came later. (I was about 12 when I read the Arthur-edited Alfred Hitchcock’s Ghostly Gallery, I’m 47 now!)And yes, I read the 3 Investigators, but I prefer RA’s originals.