From Ed Gorman's Desk: "Doubleday Crime Club"

from ED GORMAN’S Desk

Doubleday Crime Club from Nov. 13, 2005   I’m glad Ellen Nehr lived long enough to see her enormous volume about the Doubleday Crime Club appear1. It detailed the contents of every single Club volume ever published. I doubt that people under the age of 35 have ever seen a Crime Club book. In the beginning, back in the late Twenties and well into the Thirties, the line was known for its covers as well as the fiction inside. Over the years they published writers as diverse as Dorothy B. Hughes, Sax Rohmer, Stuart Palmer, Leslie Charteris, Wm. DeAndrea, and Charlotte McLeod along with innumerable one-shot writers and writers whose books have vanished utterly. They published hundreds of good, readable mysteries by pulp pros who wanted the pleasure of seeing their material between boards. Fredrick C. Davis comes to mind. He had his flaws but of the forty or so of his books I’ve read over my lifetime, I can’t recall a dull one. And several of his novels were exceptional in every respect. Certainly I’d say the same about Dolores Hitchens, an even better writer who could turn cozies pretty damned dark. She had the ability to swing from her atmospheric cozies to outright brutal private eye stories. She even wrote a first-rate western. It was essentially a library line and that’s what made me think of it. The other day I looked through boxes that were the remnants of a recent library book sale and found several Club titles to take home. Of all the hardcover mystery lines of the past, the Club is the one I get most nostalgic about. By the end of its run, its packaging was a disappointment to anybody who remembered its glory days—cheap paper, abysmal binding, horrible covers. One thing never changed and that was the wonderful inky smell of the books that seemed to last for months after you’d first read them. For book junkies, that is the smell of heaven. Having lived in various small towns after the big war, I got used to book mobiles serving places that didn’t have libraries close by. And in those days book mobiles were packed with Doubleday westerns, science fiction, and Club titles. Libraries subscribed to the list and received the books once a month, like magazines. I suppose Five Star2 is not unlike a version of the old Club, a library line that fulfills the needs of virtually every kind of mystery reader. I hope we’re fulfilling the needs of mystery readers as well as the Club once did. There is more than a little remorse in this particular post. Two years before she died, Ellen and I got into an argument over something she was alleged to have said. Only a year later did I learn that Ellen was telling the truth and that this other person, a prominent editor, was lying because that was her wont—not just about Ellen but about everybody who crossed her threshold. She loves mischief. I apologized then and I apologize now. I sure miss you, Ellen. ____________ 1.      Ellen Nehr’s Doubleday Crime Club Compendium 1928-1991 was published by Offspring Press in 1992. As far as I can tell, it has been out of print for some time. 2.      Ed Gorman partnered with Tekno Books, which was owned by the prominent anthologist Martin H. Greenberg, to produce the now defunct Five Star mystery line.

This article originally appeared on Ed Gorman’s blog, Gormania, on Nov. 13, 2005. It is reprinted here by permission. Ed wrote dozens of novels in a variety of genres, but his most popular work (and my favorite of his work) was in the crime and western genres. His ten Sam McCain mysteries—set in the fictional Iowa town of Black River Falls during the 1950s, ’60, and ’70s—are suspenseful, mysterious, and often funny excursions into small town America. The New York Times called Sam McCain, “The kind of hero any small town could take to its heart” and The Seattle Times called McCain “an intriguing mix of knight errant and realist…”      But Ed was also a tireless reader and promoter of other writers’ work. His blogs—there were three, none of them operating at the same time—are treasure troves for readers of crime, horror, and western fiction both old and new. Ed died Oct. 14, 2016.   Click here to check out Ed Gorman’s Sam McCain novels on Amazon.