Mysterious Days: 19 June

1863
The first team of crooks in literature is created by Sir Max Pemberton, who is born on this date in Birmingham, England. His A Gentleman's Gentleman: Being Certain Pages From The Life And Strange Adventures Of Sir Nicolas Steele, Bart. , As Related By His Valet, Hildeb features a valet (who is a rogue) employed by a gentleman (who is a rogue), anticipatiungf Raffles and Bunny by three years.

Mysterious Days: 18 June

The author of the first instruction manual for crime writers, Carolyn Wells, is born in Rahway, New Jersey on this day. The Technique of the Mystery Story, published in 1913, includes her famous opinion: The detective story must seem real in the same sense that fairy tales seem real to children." Wells also writes 82 mystery novels, usually featuring the scholarly detective Fleming Stone. One book was The Clue, 1909.

1939
The Ellery Queen radio program premieres on CBS. Near the end of each drama a panel of guest celebrities try to guess the solution before Ellery gives the answer. (This is an experiment which is dropped after a few episodes.)

Mysterious Days: 17 June

1904
Ralph Bellamy is born in Chicago. He will play Ellery Queen in four films released in 1940 and 1941, beginning with Ellery Queen, Master Detective.

1917
Dean Martin is born in Steubenville, Ohio. He will go on to become an actor, singer and member of the Rat Pack. He will star as Donald Hamilton's Matt Helm in 4 campy film thrillers, including The Wrecking Crew (1969).

1953
Samuel Fuller's Cold War thriller Pickup on South Street, starring Richard Widmark, is released. Widmark plays a two-bit New York pickpocket who finds himself in possession of microfilm wanted by both the FBI and the Communists.

Mysterious Days: 16 June

1911
Victor Canning is born in Plymouth, England. His book A Handful of Silver (1954) is made into the movie Masquerade (1964) and Alfred Hitchcock's final film, Family Plot (1976) is based on his The Rainbird Pattern (1972.)

1975
Edward S. Aarons, author of the "Assignment" series featuring indestructible CIA agent Sam Durrell, dies.

Mysterious Days: 15 June

1905
Wendell Hertig Taylor is born. A professor of chemistry at Princeton University, he collaborates with Jacques Barzun on the classic inventory of mystery fiction, A Catalog of Crime (1971).

Mysterious Days: 14 June

1930
Charles McCarry is born in Pittsfield, Massachusetts. McCarry examines the lives of two families, the Hubbards and the Christophers-both in the business of espionage and counter espionage. McCarry spends ten years working for the CIA, and his experiences are reflected in the attitude of his unusual hero, poet-spy Paul Christopher. The Last Supper (1983) moves from the 1920s to the present, using the Christopher family as a historical barometer.


John Dickson Carr modeled his Gideon Fell on Chesterton.
1936
GK Chesterton dies. His 1908 thriller The Man Who Was Thursday, combines detection, espionage, secret codes, anarchists, disguises, policemen, slapstick and theology. He is also the author of the Father Brown mysteries.

Mysterious Days: 13 June

1935
Rex Burns, whose police procedurals featuring Denver cop Gabe Wager integrate theme and character with detailed knowledge of police methods, is born in San Diego.

His 1975 novel The Alvarez Journal won the Edgar for best first novel.

Denver police detective Gabriel Wager, assigned to the Organized Crime Unit, investigates a narcotics smuggling ring that operates out of a shop which imports Latin American handicrafts. The case leads Wager back into his own Hispanic past to confront acquaintances from his school days, whose path had led them outside the law.

https://www.rexburns.com/Gabe_Wager_Series.html

Mysterious Days: 12 June

1927
Henry Slesar, the writer of more than 500 short stories that usually combine suspense with a finely honed black humor, is born in Brooklyn. Slesar receives the Best First Novel Edgar for The Grey Flannel Shroud (1959).

Mysterious Days: 11 June

1923
Former show-business insider (and agent to such stars as Ramon Navarro) turned novelist George Baxt is born in Brooklyn. Baxt writes mordantly witty mystery novels in a variety of genres. In A Queer Kind of Death (1966) he introduces Pharoah Love, a gay black cop who operates within New York's homosexual community. Other books of his have real actors in roles, for example The Dorothy Parker Murder Case, the Marlene Dietrich Murder Case, and the William Powell and Myrna Loy Murder Case

Mysterious Days: 10 June

1936
Brian Freemantle is born in Southampton, Hampshire, England. He is the creator of Charlie Muffin, beginning with Charlie M (1977) and ending with The Run Around (1989).


1945
Father Brown, based on the GK Chesterton character, premiers on the Mutual radio network as a summer series. Karl Swenson plays the title role.

Mysterious Days: 9 June

1870
Charles Dickens dies, having completed only six of the twelve chapters of The Mystery of Edwin Drood.

The Mystery of Edwin Drood is the final novel by Charles Dickens. The novel was left unfinished at the time of Dickens' death, and thus how it might have ended remains unknown. The novel is named after Edwin Drood, but it mostly tells the story of his uncle, a choirmaster named John Jasper, who is in love with his pupil, Rosa Bud. Miss Bud is Drood's fiancée and has also caught the eye of the high-spirited and hot-tempered Neville Landless, who comes from Ceylon with his twin sister, Helena. Neville Landless and Drood take a dislike to one another the moment they meet. Drood later disappears under mysterious circumstances. Dickens died before he could finish the mystery.

The story is set in Cloisterham, a lightly fictionalised Rochester, and feelingly evokes the atmosphere of the town as much as its streets and buildings.

Monthly:
April 1870 -September 1870

Mysterious Days: 8 June

1921
John Buxton Hilton is born on this day in Buxton, Derbyshire. Rural settings alive with rustic ignorance and intolerance are his trademarks. He writes under the pseudonym John Greenwood, and creates the elderly Inspector Mosley. Murder, Mr. Mosley (1983).

Mysterious Days: 7 June

1866
E.W. Hornung, is born in Middlesborough, Yorkshire. He is the brother in law of Arthur Conan Doyle, and creates A.J. Raffles - gentleman thief - to tweak his brother in law. He is also the author of Ther Crime Doctor (1914), a collection of stories about Dr. John Dollar (no relation to Max Marcin's Crime Doctor, Robert Ordway.)

1883
The New York Detective Library, a popular series of dime novels featuring Irish sleuth James Brady and his nemesis Jesse James, releases the first publication in its fifteen year run.

Mysterious Days: 6 June

1904
Helen McCloy is born in New York City. She will be the first female president of the Mystery Writers of America.

Her psychological thrillers often focus on an innocent relative of the suspected criminal. Her series character, Dr. Basil Willing, is the first American psychiatrist-detective, and the first to use psychiatry in discovering clues.

McCloy was once married to hard-boiled writer Brett Holliday.

Mysterious Days: 5 June

1908
Georgiana Ann Randolph is born in Chicago. Under the pseudonym Craig Rice, she writes screwball comedy mysteries featuring John J. Malone. She also ghost-wrote The G-String Murders (1941) for Gypsy Rose Lee, and Crime on my Hands (1944) for George Sanders.

Mysterious Days: 4 June

1940
The imaginative and bizarre writer George C. Chesbro is born in Washington, DC. He writes detective novels featuring Dr. Robert Feredrickson, an ex-circus performer, criminologist and dwarf, better known as Mongo.

His Beasts of Valhalla (1985) blends fantasy, computer technology, and Wagnerian and Tolien mythology with the traditional private eye style.



1949
On this day, in the comic strips, Dick Tracy finally marries Tess Truheart, after an 18-year engagement.

Mysterious Days: 3 June

1910
Paulette Goddard is born in Long Island, New York. She will co-star with Bob Hope in two classic mystery films in 1939 and 1940, the sound remake of The Cat and the Canary, and The Ghost Breakers.

1925
Tony Curtis is born on this day in The Bronx, New York. With a long movie career, he will also co-star, with Roger Moore, in the TV series, The Persuaders.

1992
Actor Robert Morley dies in England. While not typecast as an actor in mysteries, he was in quite a few mystery and crime movies - Who Is Killing the Great Chefs of Europe (1977), Hot Millions (1968), The Alphabet Murders (As Hastings to Tony Randall's Hercule Poirot), and Law and Disorder (1958).

Mysterious Days: 2 June

1916
John Michael Evelyn is born in Worthing, Sussex. He writes under the pseudonym Michael Underwood.

His books include:
The Case Against Philip Quest (1962)
The Injudicious Judge (1987)

They feature a background of legal goings-on, courtroom drama and detective investigation. His experiences as an attorney are reflected in the legalistic back-room ambiance of his work.

Mysterious Days: 1 June

1829
Sir Robert Peel's Police Bill is passed, leading to the creation of an organized British police force, housed in Whitehall Palace adjoining Great Scotland Yard road. In the 1880s the headquarters is moved to a new building at the Parliament end of Whitehall, and is called New Scotland Yard. (It's moved again since then.)



1887
Clive Brook is born in London. In 1927 Brook had the lead in Josef von Sternberg's Underworld, the first gangster movie. In 1929, he will star in the first talking movie featuring Sherlock Holmes.

1959
Sax Rohmer, creator of Fu Manchu dies.



1978
The last episode of the popular LA crime sseries Baretta airs on ABC. Robert Blake stars as the streetwises, unconventional cop Tony Beretta.