The New Reality, 1945–1985
After the end of World War II, the public had few remaining illusions. They had seen, or at least heard of, the horrors of the camps, the bombings, the deprivations, and lives with little hope. Detective fiction after the war was more likely to find the victim in a public lavatory than a private library. The heroine was more likely to be a sex worker than an au pair. The detective was just as likely to be an anti-hero as a hero. Brute force, cynicism, and broken rules were common. No topics were off limits.
Sgt. Julius Fast. Watchful at Night. New York and Toronto: A Murray Hill Mystery by Farrar & Rinehart, Inc., 1945.
While likely written at nearly the same time as the previous novel by William L. Stuart, Watchful at Night wasn’t recognized by the Mystery Writers of America with the first Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel until 1946, with the war in the past. Fast, the younger brother of novelist Howard Fast, wrote the book while serving as a staff sergeant in the Army, which is the setting for the story. Fast had a long writing career—mainly in nonfiction—and published his last book in 2003.
William Faulkner. Intruder in the Dust. New York: Random House, 1948.
One of America’s most celebrated writers, William Faulkner won the Nobel Prize for Literature the year following the publication of this novel of murder and racism in the Deep South. Two teenage boys, one white and one Black, work to prove the innocence of a Black farmer accused of murdering a white man. The novel was the basis for the 1949 film of the same title, directed by Clarence Brown and selected as one of the year’s ten best films by the New York Times. A Haycraft-Queen selection.
William Krasner. Walk the Dark Streets. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1949.
Krasner’s first novel was praised by no less a figure than Raymond Chandler and was nominated for an Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel in 1950. It introduced the recurring character of police captain Sam Birge.
Thomas Walsh. Nightmare in Manhattan. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1950.
Walsh’s first novel was the winner of the 1951 Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel. It was the basis for the 1950 film Union Station starring William Holden. This copy is inscribed by the author.
Thurston Scott [George Leite and Jody Scott]. Cure it with Honey. New York: Harper & Brothers Publishers, 1951.
Cure it with Honey was written by George Leite, owner of a bookstore and gallery in Berkeley, California, and Jody Scott, who would become a cult science-fiction writer. It won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel in 1952 and is a tough rendition of Mexican American street gangs, with themes of violence, incarceration, and sex of all varieties. Leite and Scott were both friends with many early “Beat” writers and artists, and helped publish their work and display their art.
Erle Stanley Gardner. The Case of the Grinning Gorilla. New York: William Morrow & Company, 1952.
Another in Gardner’s Perry Mason series begun in 1932. This particular copy is especially interesting, inscribed both by Gardner and by the book’s dedicatee, Dr. R. B. H. Gradwohl, who suggested the idea for the plot. Gardner inscribed the book in December 1952 to a friend of Gradwohl’s. Gardner had practiced law in California for several years but quit when he published his first Perry Mason. He wrote at least 120 books and supposedly had 135 million copies in print upon his death in 1970.
Ira Levin. A Kiss Before Dying. New York: Simon and Schuster, An Inner Sanctum Mystery, 1953.
The first novel of the prolific Ira Levin, A Kiss Before Dying also won the 1954 Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel. It was made into a film noir of the same title starring a very young Robert Wagner. A serial killer woos three sisters. Levin is probably best known as the author of Rosemary’s Baby.
Patricia Highsmith. The Talented Mr. Ripley. New York: Coward-McCann, Inc., 1955.
This third novel by Patricia Highsmith is the first to introduce one of the best-known anti-heroes in detective fiction: Tom Ripley. The detecting in the novel is inept, and Ripley gets away with murder. The 1999 film version by Anthony Minghella was a critical and commercial success but lacked much of the book’s subtlety.
Henry Slesar. The Gray Flannel Shroud. New York: Random House, 1958.
Henry Slesar was an advertising executive when he penned his first novel, set in a Madison Avenue agency. He had been earning his living with his typewriter from the age of seventeen, writing copy, pulp magazine stories, and television scripts. The Gray Flannel Shroud won the Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel in 1960. His title was a play on The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit, a 1955 novel by Sloan Wilson and the subsequent 1956 film, both of which explored upward mobility and corporate life.
Harry Kemelman. Friday the Rabbi Slept Late. New York: Crown Publishers, Inc., 1964.
Friday the Rabbi Slept Late is Kemelman’s first novel, the first in the Rabbi David Small series, and the winner of the 1965 Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel. Kemelman went on to write eleven more Rabbi Small mysteries that sold well even though they tended to be philosophical, often considering Talmudic logic.
John [Dudley] Ball. In the Heat of the Night. New York, Evanston, and London: 1965.
Winner of the 1966 Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel, In the Heat of the Night introduced Black Californian detective Virgil Tibbs. Tibbs, from Pasadena, travels to the Deep South and is promptly arrested by the racist local police, who eventually involve Tibbs in a local murder investigation. The novel was the basis for the 1967 film of the same name, which won the Academy Award for Best Picture. The dust jacket design is by Luiz Woods.
Ross Thomas. The Cold War Swap: A Novel of Espionage. New York: William Morrow & Company, Inc., 1966.
While not strictly a detective novel, this novel features a murder (or assassination) at our hero’s bar in Germany, and he and his part-time spy partner endeavor to sort it out. The novel, Thomas’s first, won the 1967 Edgar Award for Best First Mystery Novel. The dust jacket design is by S. A. Summit.
George Baxt. A Queer Kind of Death. New York: Simon and Schuster, An Inner Sanctum Mystery, 1966.
Baxt’s first novel is one of attitudes in transition. While Baxt was acclaimed for creating the first gay detective (who was also Black), the supporting characters are stereotypical, and Native, Jewish, Black, and gay people, and nontraditional body types can all find cause to take offense.
Lawrence Block. Deadly Honeymoon. New York: The MacMillan Company, A Cock Robin Mystery, 1967.
The first hardcover novel by Lawrence Block, who was named a Grand Master by the Mystery Writers of America in 1994 and won the Gumshoe Lifetime Achievement Award in 2005. A long-time New Yorker, he has published over fifty novels and has created popular recurring characters such as Matthew Scudder, Bernie Rhodenbarr, and Evan Tanner. The dust jacket design is by Stan Zagorski.
Joseph Hansen. Fadeout. New York and Evanston: Harper & Row, Publishers, 1970.
The first novel published under the author’s own name, Fadeout introduced the groundbreaking character of openly gay insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter. As tough as any “hardboiled” private investigator, Brandstetter appeared in eleven more of Hansen’s novels. For the most part, the novel avoids stereotypes, and the fact that Brandstetter is gay is incidental to the plot. Brandstetter is still reeling from the death from cancer of his lover, Rod, and according to the dust jacket, has “to fight a grieving sense of emptiness.” In other words, he is human.
Sue Grafton. “A” is for Alibi: A Kinsey Millhone Mystery. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1982.
The author of the popular “alphabet” series, Grafton was the winner of the Mystery Writers of American Grand Master Award in 2009. Grafton died before she could complete the series, with the final book published in 2017, “Y” Is for Yesterday. The photographic cover art is by Kathie A. McGinty. This copy is signed by the author.
Paul Auster. City of Glass: The New York Trilogy, Volume 1. Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1985.
Considered by many to be the first “post-modern” detective novel, City of Glass is a meta-novel that explores layers of identity and madness as an investigation proceeds. Subsequent titles in the three-book series are Ghosts and The Locked Room. According to critic Michael Dirda in the Washington Post (December 21, 2003), “Ever since City of Glass, . . . Auster has perfected a limpid, confessional style, then used it to set disoriented heroes in a seemingly familiar world gradually suffused with mounting uneasiness, vague menace and possible hallucination.” The dust jacket design is by Katie Messborn.