Books, books, and still more successful books, as listed in the Washington Post.

Murder Goes Operatic

James M. Cain never saw himself as a writer of hard-boiled detective fiction.  As a matter of fact, he eschewed that description of his work.  Sure, he wrote tough, dark mysteries that shared many similarities with the works of such writers as Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler.  But most of Cain's writing was set apart by his love for, of all things, the opera.

Cain, who died in 1977 at the age of 84, came by his musical knowledge honestly.   He tried singing after college, although both his mother and a close friend who was a music teacher feared he lacked any real talent and tried to discourage him.   Eventually he realized that their lack of enthusiasm grew out of two simple facts: He hated rehearsing and he couldn't sing.  As his mother put it, "You have no voice, no looks, no stage personality."  She herself had been a promising opera singer, but she had abandoned her career for marriage and motherhood, a choice her son regretted.  Cain admitted on more than one occasion that the stories he wrote about singers were meant as memorials to his mother.

Several of Cain's works revolve in part or in whole around operas and opera singers. One of his most famous books, Mildred Pierce, features a character's operatic abilities, and the story "Career in C Major" and the novel The Moth also pay special attention to singers.  In an inscription to his novel, Serenade, about a tough, failed opera singer who became involved with a Mexican prostitute, he explicitly mentioned the autobiographical elements of the story.  "This story goes back to my try-to-be-a-singer days (1914), when the idea occurred to me."

Cain never lost his enthusiasm for music.  His fourth wife was opera singer Florence Macbeth, and the couple held musical parties in their home.  But Cain's own involvement with opera was always limited to his artistic descriptions of the dark side of the musical world.

Walk Like an Egyptian

The best writers around know that a rose by any other name smells as sweet.  Take Dashiell Hammett, for example.  His detective stories are works of art to this day because he gave his characters the unmistakable ring of authority, and for good reason.  Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930) and The Thin Man (1932) spark with believability because Hammett lived the moral code about which he wrote.   Having been a detective, himself, he knew that real-life detectives are rarely the handsome sleuths of the classic English detective mystery and that good guys don't always win.  Hammett's detectives are dark, complicated characters who care deeply about right and wrong, despite appearing cynical and detached--much the way Hammett was, himself.

Of course, Hammett was a far cry from being labeled a Boy Scout.   He had his own moral code, but he was also known throughout his entire adult life for drinking, brawling, and womanizing.  Still, he was a man of considerable conscience, like his detective characters, and he did what he thought was right throughout his life.

In 1942, Hammett volunteered for the US Army.  He was a 48-year-old WWI veteran with tuberculosis and didn't need to serve.  His bad teeth caused him to fail the physical, but he had them pulled, and he passed the second time around.  He volunteered for overseas service and ended up in the frigid Aleutian Islands for three years as an enlistee.

Hammett showed still more mettle after the war.  During the Red Scare hysteria, the wily detective was a bail bond trustee for the Civil Rights Congress, then considered a subversive group.  When he was called before the US Senate and told to name those who had contributed to the group's bail fund, Hammett could have said truthfully that he didn't know any of them; he had never been in the group's offices.   But he refused to cooperate on moral grounds and ended up serving six months in federal prison for contempt of Congress. 

Feminism in the Mystery Genre

With the publication of her first novel, In the Last Analysis (1964), Amanda Cross did more than launch a popular mystery series; she single-handedly created the American academic mystery.  Cross, whose real name is Carolyn G. Heilbrun, is, like her amateur detective Kate Fansler, a feminist English Professor.   (Heilbrun teaches literature at Columbia University.)  The development of Heilbrun's and Fansler's feminism parallels the evolution of women's issues in America since the 1960s and can be traced throughout Cross's mysteries.

From the very start of the series, Kate Fansler made it clear that she likes to challenge convention.  She is single and prefers affairs to marriage and motherhood, a philosophy that would have been unthinkable in a character a decade or two ago.  In Cross's second book, The James Joyce Murder (1967), Kate's impatience with traditional gender roles grows, and in most of her mysteries published between 1970 and 1995, male characters who are arrogant and authoritarian are either killed off or brought to justice, which is the ultimate in feminism literature.

Fansler's frustrations with academia mirror Heilbrun's.  Heilbrun knew that she would have trouble receiving tenure at the male-dominated Columbia University in the 1960s--especially if it became known that she was writing detective novels.  So, she kept her success as a mystery writer a closely guarded secret until she was granted tenure in 1972.

But for a female academic, tenure does not necessarily provide protection against male chauvinism or guarantee acceptance.  In Death in a Tenured Position (1981, a Nero Wolfe award winner), Kate becomes aware of her role as "token woman" in the academic world and challenges Harvard as an "all-male bastion of power and privilege" while investigating the death of Harvard's first tenured female English professor.

The later books in the series reflect changes in the feminist movement.  Kate marries a law professor and seems calmer, more comfortable with herself.  The books' female characters are more interested in exploring themselves and bonding with each other than raging against the male establishment.  Beginning with An Imperfect Spy (1995), Kate collaborates with an elderly private investigator, Harriet Furst.  But don't worry--she's still a feminist, and a scholarly one, at that.

The Making of a Best Seller
New-Millennium Style

"The big bestsellers aren't being created by Barnes & Noble, says Michael Korda, editor-in-chief at Simon & Schuster.  "If you're a retailer and know that once a year you're going to get Mary Higgins Clark's book on a given date, you're going to have an awful lot of copies out there in time for that.  You'd have to be simple-minded not to do that—although bookselling prior to 1950 never made that connection."

Korda is himself author of Making the List: A Cultural History of the American Bestseller 1900-1999, in PW Daily

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