The thing that got me hooked on Ellery Queen – and mysteries – was the Ellery Queen TV show that ran in 1975.  It starred Jim Hutton (father of Tim Hutton) and David Wayne as Inspector Queen.  It was produced and largely written by Levinson and Link – the pair who brought us great mysteries such as Columbo, Mannix, and Murder She Wrote.

It was a brilliant show, with a great cast, and wonderful period style.  The character of Ellery Queen evolved quite a bit in the book series – going from a foppish and silly young genius to a more bookish and absentminded fellow to a more brooding modern style toward the end.  This series picked the bookish forties as it’s model, which I understand was partly modeled on Frederick Dannay – one of the writers behind the pseudonym of “Ellery Queen”.

Jim Hutton was always the perfect absentminded professor, but he was at least as famous for a number of action films he did with John Wayne, and a few conman sorts of roles.  He always brought a bit of bookishness to the action roles, and in turn, he brought a certain sly wisdom that made his Ellery formidable even when he was forgetting things.

To me, though, it was David Wayne who stole the show.  As Inspector Richard Queen, Ellery’s cranky father, he brought the perfect balance to Ellery. Just like in the books, these two were a perfect team.  Fussing and arguing at times, but also always in sync, and a formidable pair for any murderer who dared cross their paths.

Unfortunately, this show only lasted for one season, perhaps because they had such complex stories.  William Link has said that he and Levinson killed themselves to hide the clues in plain sight, and always play fair – but the stories were often too complicated for your average audience.  Years later when they started Murder She Wrote, they made it easier to find the clues and kept the stories simpler.  This was both easier on the writers and the audience.

I truly miss that show.  It is NOT available on DVD yet.  I have dear hopes that it will be.

One thing you can do for out of print works like this is to go to Amazon.com and search for the item.  Sometimes you can sign up for the “alert me” or “first to know” mailing list.  These lists don’t get you junk mail, but they do record how much interest there is in an out-of-print item, and each sign up is considered a “vote” for that item to eventually be offered for sale.  Here is the Ellery Queen TV Show link.

The other thing you could potentially do is lobby famous people.  I once met William Link at a mystery festival.  He was premiering his own new Columbo play, “Columbo Takes the Rap”(and if that ever plays in your town, go see it.  It’s a lot of fun).  I asked him: “So when is Mannix going to come out on DVD?”  He answered “Good question!”  The next year, it was out.

I now kick myself that I had forgotten that he was responsible for the Ellery Queen TV show too.  Next time I meet Mr. Link, I plan to ask him about it.

I just saw on the sff.net homepage that Stuart Kaminsky died.  He was one of my writing heroes.  (And before that, he was one of my academic heroes too.)

I’m now extra glad I got to meet him down in Owensboro two years ago at the Discovering New Mysteries drama festival.  I didn’t get a chance to talk to him much, but was ever so pleased that he was on the committee that selected my play to be performed there.

Kaminsky wrote four mystery series, all different, and yet all with the longtime storyteller’s depth of character and setting.

The first, and my favorite was the Hollywood series featuring down on his luck P.I. Toby Peters (or Tobias Pevsner, as he was named at birth).  Kaminsky was a film historian who concentrated on genre, and was one of the first to look at it in terms of academic criticism.  So the Toby Peters books were kind of a segue into writing genre fiction himself.

The series took place in Hollywood, and started just before the war.  Each book “starred” a Hollywood star or two as the client, and at the end of each book, Toby received a call from the star of the next book, propelling him on to the next adventure.  Kaminsky was a meticulous researcher, and these back to back stories moved through real historical time, with Toby hearing radio broadcasts and reading real headlines.

The first one, A Bullet For A Star (featuring Errol Flynn), was moody, tough and sexy, as a hard-boiled novel should be, although a lot of Kaminsky’s natural humor and great sense for the absurd shined through. He dashed through the lovely lunacy of Murder On The Yellow Brick Road (with Judy Garland). By the time of the third book, You Bet Your Life (featuring the Marx Brothers) the humor had fully taken over – although the series never really lost the philosophical weight.

He was a major influence on everything I’ve ever written. There’s an awful lot of Toby in Mick McKee.

The other series were just as meticulously researched, just as grounded in reality.  They were more serious and gave him more outlet for the deeper philosophical existentialism that he did so well – always touched with humor and an understanding of the absurdities of the universe.

While I think he got more acclaim for his Rostnikov books, police procedurals about about detectives in Russia, my other favorite series of his was his Lieberman series – about an elderly Jewish detective in present day Chicago who must deal with the conundrums of family, crooks, fellow cops, victims and congregational politics (although he himself is an agnostic).

I was just getting warmed up to his last series, about Lew Fonesca, a deeply depressed dropout of society who, in his flight from the tragedy of his wife’s death, drove until he ran out of gas in Sarasota. There he would live as a hermit, if he didn’t take occasional jobs as a process server, and as an unlicensed detective.

He wrote a wonderfully dippy (and twisty) play about a bumbling bank robber who takes the denizens of a small bookstore hostage for the Discovering New Mysteries festival. And he wrote other plays, and teleplays, and also media tie-in books for The Rockford Files and Columbo.

I have nearly all of his books, and maybe I will go back to what I used to do, re-reading them slowly, dripping them out one or two a year to make them last while I wait for a new one.  Or maybe I’ll sit down and just read them all again in a row. That will last me quite a while.

I suppose I started reading mysteries with Trixie Belden, and Sherlock Holmes, but my real passion for mysteries came with Ellery Queen.

The Ellery Queen TV show got me interested, and though the character in the TV show and the book were not quite the same, I soon devoured the whole series – haunting libraries all over the area to find lesser known titles.

But after that first passionate year or two of reading, I haven’t actually looked at any of the Ellery Queen books since.  I had a vague memory of a very old-fashioned clue-based series, and maybe I was afraid that they wouldn’t stand up to my memory.  But recently I decided to go back and read them again, so I picked up one of the first Ellery Queen’s I had ever read – The Chinese Orange Mystery.

I was not disappointed.

Sure, the style was a little old-fashioned, an it was a little slow to get moving, but it was fun, and I was drawn once again to the great relationshop between the effete, bookish Ellery and his no nonsense father, Inspector Queen.  That relationship is the heart of this series and I have to say that Inspector Queen has a habit of stealing the show (especially when Ellery gets a little annoyingly coy about his conclusions.)

In The Chinese Orange Mystery, an strange little man no one can identify is murdered while waiting to see a wealthy publisher.  Everything in the room, from the man’s clothing to the furniture, has been carefully turned backwards.  Why?  This story drags a little as Queen grasps at straws, trying to find connectins between backwards elements of any sort.  Red Herrings pop up and go away, but soon Ellery and his father start to dig up all sorts of tangles in the relationships among the publisher’s friends and family.

If you are interested in classic mystery, this is the stellar example of the early Ellery Queen stories.

First Light by Craig and Tapply

When it comes to mystery books for real summer reading, you can’t beat Philip R. Craig and his mystery pi series about J.W. Jackson – a professional beach bum on Martha’s Vineyard (once a cop who was shot in the line of duty and had to retire young).  As J. W. goes around digging quahogs and surf casting for bluefish, he is called upon to investigate disappearances and crimes.

Second Sight by Craig and Tapply

Reading these books are like sitting on the beach.  You can taste the salt water and hear the surf and the gulls.  Even so, there is a slightly hard-boiled edge to these mystery books.

A few years ago Craig teamed up with fellow writer William Tapply, and they wrote a mystery novel that involved both of their characters – J. W. Jackson, and Tapply’s lawyer detective, Brady Coyne.  First Light was a perfect blend.  Brady comes to the Vineyard to get in some fishing and help a dying client sort out her will.  J. W. is his host and guide in the fishing tournament, and has his own case trying to locate a missing woman.  When the nurse of Brady’s client disappears under very similar circumstances, their cases tie up together as tightly as a fishing line.

Third Strike by Craig and Tapply

I’ve never read another Tapply mystery novel, but I think I’ll have to try soon. First Light and the next book, Second Sight, are written by both authors, trading off an on with each of their characters narrating a chapter.  The stories they tell overlap and go back in time and play artfully with your expectations.

I’m only a short way in to Second Sight, but already enjoying it as much as the first.  The setting this time is a big festival and concert being held on the island.  J.W. has been hired to drive a famous pop star around the island, and help her look for the leader of a famous ashram, while Brady has been asked to fine a runaway teen who may be on the island for an event too.

And they’ve just discovered the first body.  Gotta get back to it….

(Oh! And I just discovered the third mystery book in this series is out. It’s called  Third Strike, and I’m licking my chops.)

Mick and Casey Mystery Stories has a long way to go.  (I got big plans, I tell ya.)  Right now, the focus is on Free Stories.  Well, a few free stories anyway.  At the moment I have a few reprints of my published mystery fiction. There will be more trickling in this fall, and some original fiction written just for this site.

Ten years ago, I despaired of the publishing world.  The midlist – that part of publishing where all those great series mysteries reside – was dying a horrible death.  Many writers of my favorite blossoming series were giving up, because the pay was so low, and distribution was drying up because Barnes and Noble, and other large chains, wanted only best sellers or very cheap brand new writers they could treat like canon fodder.

As for the short mystery fiction market, it had long dried up.  Newspapers and general interest magazines, which were once prime territory for suspense and puzzler stories, had stopped publishing fiction at all.  Our two major magazines – Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock – are not really major magazines in the industry overall, and they are dependant on advertising by publishers, and thus put a lot of emphasis on publishing stories by the novelists being advertised.  Yes, they do what they can to foster new voices, but the market is too limited, and publishing is in no economic shape for them to be too generous.

But even as I was leaving fiction writing behind (I went off to do screenwriting and playwrighting and blogging) I could see the start of the next wave of great publishing – free stories on the web!  Small presses were popping up everywhere, and thanks to the Short Mystery Fiction Society, they could find each other and their audience.  It was even then possible to find ripping mystery stories on the web – many rough around the edges, but also some polished work.  New voices and old.  Free stories online for the reader, an advertising venue for publishers.  It was far from well established, and most of the small presses were still somewhat dependant on paper editions – which was expensive and labor intensive, and many of those little magazines just couldn’t make it.

But there was hope.  And now I see established authors beginning to treat the web as a kind of small press house.  A place to publish free short stories to please their readers, or to sell that novel that isn’t quite right for their regular publisher.  eBooks are going mainstream, and some writers are even producing serialized fiction again.  Just like the Golden Age of magazine publishing!

Most of this is happening in the Science Fiction world, but I see it slipping into the mainstream.  And I have to say this is just what I have been hoping for in mystery fiction.  Because mystery readers are the most loyal of readers.  We love characters and we love authors, and all we ask are two things – a chance to try new series now and then, and once we love a series, we don’t want it taken away from us by the business model chosen by modern booksellers and publishers.

When we use the model of providing free stories online, we support both sides of the equation.  Readers can find and try out new characters, and once they love those characters they can keep in touch with the series.  And on the other end, the author has a venue to keep the series flowing, even as the publishing industry ebbs and flows.

Right now, the free stories I offer here will be my own.  This blog will be about all mysteries, and westerns and adventures.  I’ll have reviews and provide links to other mystery fiction sites.  I hope that you will like the free stories offered here, and I especially hope to provide you with more – some free, some for purchase.