LIVING IN THE PAST

by Rob Lopresti

In October 1979 I was dwelling in a place called, so help me, Lake Hiawatha, New Jersey.

One evening I brought in the mail and found a letter with no return address. I opened it and a check fluttered to the floor.

There was nothing else in the envelope.

The check was made out to me from Renown Publications, creators of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine. In the memo line it said “The Long Treason.” I had just become a published author.

While my wife made dinner I called my parents and explained the situation to them. I had been trying to get fiction published for three years. Not a nibble. One story of the last bunch I sent out had never been returned, but I had been too depressed to bother writing a letter asking for it.

Now I knew why the story had not been sent back. What I never found out was why the editor never sent me a contract or even a report that he was buying the story.

My wife and I sat down to dinner but before we finished my parents had phoned back. Rather than waste time eating they had gone out to a newsstand and found the October 1979 issue of Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, with “The Long Treason,” in it. After dinner we went out and did the same.

I remember that what excited me the most was the fact that the story was illustrated. The way I figured it, the editor could have bought the story without reading it, but the illustrator had had to read enough to do the accompanying drawing. Someone had read my story. Wow.

The next day I brought a copy to work and showed it to my assistant. “What’s this?” asked Sue.

I pointed to the story with my name on it. “I wrote that.”

She pushed it back across the desk. “No, you didn’t.”

Fame and fortune followed, of course.

On being semi-classical

I bring all this up because I was recently chatting via email with Linda Landrigan, the editor of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine. She explained that in order to be eligible for the Mystery Classics department a story had to be at least thirty years old.

And I realized, with a shock, that my first published story was almost old enough to qualify. And now it is. (I’m not saying it is good enough for that department. Time does not turn vinegar into champagne.)

But the shock that I had been a pebble in the mystery pyramid for that long got me thinking about the events of the year 1979. No, I don’t mean the hostage crisis. I’m talking about the important stuff. What was the mystery world like back then?

It was thirty years ago today

Glad you asked. In October 1979 there were several books on the Best Seller List by authors with connections to our field (Ken Follett, Stephen King, Mary Stewart) but only one book that was inarguably a mystery: The Green Ripper, by John D. MacDonald.

Publisher’s Weekly reviewed perhaps a dozen mysteries that month and I recognized a few of the authors: Smiley’s People by John LeCarre, The Homicidal Horse by Hugh Pentecost, Sleep Before Evening by Donald Olson, and Smart Money Doesn’t Sing Or Dance by Joseph Mark Glazer.

There were a lot more publishers then than now, but no publishers dedicated to just new mysteries yet. Mysterious Press was still specializing in reprints of rarities.

And if you wanted to buy one of these books, where would you go? There were lots on independent bookstores then, unlike today, but mystery bookstores were still few and far between. Murder Ink, arguably the first, had been founded a few years before.

What if you wanted to meet your fellow mystery fans? Go to Bouchercon, which was in Los Angeles that year. It was the only conference for mystery aficionados, Left Coast Crime, Malice Domestic, etc. being a ways down the pike.

If you were an American writer, or aspired to be one, there was Mystery Writers of America, and that was all. No Private Eye Writers of America, no Sisters in Crime.

And speaking of MWA, they gave out the Edgar Awards, which were the only prizes for mysteries in the U.S. Here are the top five short stories of the year according to the Edgars Committee:

“Armed and Dangerous” by Geoffrey Norman (ESQUIRE 3/79) (The winner)
“Used in Evidence” by Frederick Forsyth (PLAYBOY l2/79)
“Scrimshaw” by Brian Garfield (EQMM 12/79)
“The Boiler” by Julian Symons (EQMM 11/79)
“The Imperial Ice House” by Paul Theroux (ATLANTIC 4/79)

There were three mystery magazines on the newsstand: The October issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine featured new stories by the aforementioned Brian Garfield, Ruth Rendell, Celia Fremlin, Pat McGerr, and (of course) Edward D. Hoch, along with some folks who ring no bells for me.

I can’t track down the October 1979 issue of Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, but I do own (naturally) that month’s Mike Shayne. Guess who is in it besides me, with a novelette, no less? Dick Stodghill. Dick, I am almost exactly as old now as you were then.

Oh, and what about fanzines? There was Allen J. Hubin’s long lamented The Armchair Detective. And that was about it.

Back to the future

So as tempting as it may be to talk about the good old days, we find that in many ways there are a lot more options for mystery fans today then there were back then.

And that is without even mentioning the elephant in the room (which in this case is also the 600 pound gorilla, which just demonstrates its versatility). I am referring, of course, to the World Wide Web, which is store, magazine, organization and conference, as well as many other things.

No Web back in 1979. My gosh, no personal computer either. In those days every time I found a word out of place in a short story I had to retype (at least) a page.

And that’s something I don’t miss a bit.

One final buzz

Oh, here is an odd fact I found in Publisher’s Weekly. Do you remember this incident? I certainly don’t.

One day in October 1979 the United Nations building was evacuated because an airplane was continually circling it and the authorities were afraid that terrorists — who could imagine such a thing? — might be planning to smash the plane into the building.

Why was that reported by Publisher’s Weekly? Turned out the pilot was a 61-year old counterfeiter-turned-author by the name of Robert Baudin. His goal was actually to buzz the nearby headquarters of his publisher, Harcourt Brace. He claimed he was angry about the lack of sales.

So one thing that hasn’t changed, I guess, is the need for authors to get out there and publicize their own books. Another constant is the criminal badness of some publicity ideas.