ELEMENTARY

by Steven Steinbock

Last week I made a passing reference in my column to a newsletter that I wrote and edited for the last dozen years. The newsletter was called “The Vorpal Blade.” The name came to me from Lewis Carroll’s poem Jabberwocky via the indirect route of Fredric Brown’s delightful thriller Night of the Jabberwock.

In Night of the Jabberwock, the editor of a rural weekly newspaper is bemoaning that fact that nothing newsworthy ever happens. Doc Stoeger, the editor of the Carmel City Clarion, had been a professor of English and an expert on Lewis Carroll. Now he does little more than drink with the locals and complain about his boring newspaper in his boring town.

That is, until the night in question, when a strange little man comes to his place and tells him a bizarre story. “Yehudi Smith” claims to represent an organization called “The Vorpal Blades,” a group of men with unique knowledge – that the world described by Lewis Carroll in the two “Alice” fantasies were not fantasies at all, but realities. Smith shows Doc Stoeger a newspaper clipping about a recent slaying of a man “by unknown beast.” Smith invites Stoeger to join him for an important and dangerous meeting.

Is there a global conspiracy at work that Lewis Carroll had special knowledge of, knowledge that today is only known by members of “The Vorpal Blades?” Or is Yehudi Smith just a lunatic? That’s the premise of Brown’s book. It’s funny, clever, and well worth tracking down.

I, too, belong to a secret society. It isn’t all that secret. After all, I’m about to tell you about it here, and it was described in detail by Marvin Lachman in his history of mystery fandom, The Heirs of Anthony Boucher. The secret society is called DAPA-EM. I had heard whisperings of it in the back halls of mystery conventions, but wasn’t fully indoctrinated until 1998, when I was visiting Marv Lachman (this year’s Fan Guest of Honor at Left Coast Crime, later this month) in his home in Santa Fe.

Like Doc Stoeger faced with the ravings of Yehudi Smith, I listened to Marv explain how DAPA-EM was an Amateur Press Association, something quite common in the science fiction community. But since its inception in 1973, DAPA-EM was the only Amateur Press Association active in the mystery community. Six times a year its members would each put together their own newsletters or fanzines, print out forty-or-so copies, and mail them to Art Scott (our “Emperor”) who would collate them, and mail bound sets to the membership. It was sort of like a blog, except without the Internet.

I was invited to join. I accepted the challenge, and had to come up with a name. I’d recently read Night of the Jabberwock, so “The Vorpal Blades” were still fresh in my head. The newspaper aspects of that book had me thinking that “Vorpal Blade” would be a good name for a newsletter. After all, Ohio has The Toledo Blade. Why couldn’t I publish The Vorpal Blade. I did. Just over a decade.

We were a glorious print-format dinosaur in an age of streamlined webpages. But sadly, after nearly thirty years, DAPA-EM suspended regular activity a month ago. Its members still stay in touch. It would take nothing less than global meltdown to stop that.

We are the Trilateral Commission of the mystery world, referred to in some circles as “The Secret Masters of Mystery Fandom.” James Lincoln Warren has the Freemasons. I have DAPA-EM.

You probably know some of DAPA-EM’s members. Bill Crider, the blog-columnist for EQMM and an excellent blogger, short story writer, and novelists, has been one of our most active members. Other members include a who’s-who of mystery fandom. A majority of Bouchercon Fan Guests of Honor have come from our roster. Editors of various other mystery publications – CADS, Old Time Detection, Mystery News, Mystery*File, Mystery and Detective Monthly, and Mystery Readers Journal – have also been DAPA-EM members.

As we have for thirty years, we’ll continue to get together at various mystery conventions. It’s not unusual to find a group of us, all gathered in someone’s suite, late at night during Bouchercon, listening to Bill Crider, Richard Moore, and Joe R. Lansdale spin tales. Some day, perhaps, DAPA-EM will rise like a mythical phoenix. But until then, fans of the Mystery will continue to attend conventions, read EQMM and AHMM, and of course, visit Criminal Brief.