Cartoon of the Day: Little Free Library

 

LUDWIG: A new detective series

I'm really enjoying the new BBC detective dramedy series Ludwig, playing on Britbox in the U.S. The series stars David Mitchell and Anna Maxwell Martin. You'll recognize several of the minor characters, too, including Welsh actor Gerran Howell who stars as a medical student from Nebraska in the U.S. show The Pitt. What a surprise. I'm so used to seeing British actors in many shows, but not usually in U.S. ones.

In Ludwig, John Taylor (David Mitchell) is a reclusive puzzle maker who publishes puzzle books under the pen name "Ludwig". His identical twin brother, James Taylor, is a successful detective chief inspector in the Cambridge police force. James has gone missing, and his wife Lucy (Anna Maxwell Martin) enlists John's help to solve the mystery. Pretending to be his brother, John infiltrates the local police station to investigate, and becomes inadvertently embroiled in solving other cases.

While seeking to unravel the mystery of his twin brother's disappearance, reclusive puzzle-designer John 'Ludwig' Taylor takes on his twin brother James's identity as DCI on Cambridge's major crimes squad. 

Read the NYT review here

And the good news is that the BBC has commissioned a second season of Ludwig with Mitchell and Martin remaining in the starring roles. 

AUTHORS AND THEIR CATS: Edward Gorey

Happy Caturday! I'm reviving my "Authors/Artists and their Cats" Caturday feature. 

Today: Edward Gorey.

ELEGY FOR A STORY-TELLING COP: Guest post by Jim Doherty

 

It must be said from the start that Joe Wambaugh, who passed away on 28 February at the age of 88, was not the first cop to turn his professional experiences into fiction.
            

Way back in the 1930’s, Basil Thomson, a former Assistant Commissioner at Scotland Yard, wrote eight books about a London Met policeman named Richardson (no first name is ever mentioned) who in eight books, enjoys a meteoric rise from rookie police constable to chief constable of the CID.
            

Thomson was followed by cops from other parts of Britain like Maurice Procter, of the Halifax Borough Police; John Wainwright, of the West Riding County Constabulary; Peter Walker, of the North Riding County Constabulary; Hamilton Jobson of the Southend-on-Sea Borough Constabulary; among others.
           

 In the Netherlands, Albert Cornelis Baantjer’s novels about Detective Inspector DeCock (“DeKok” in English-language editions), which began in 1964, became international best-sellers.
            

In the US, Wambaugh was preceded by LA County DA’s Investigator Leslie T. White, FBI Agent Gordon Gordon (who collaborated with his wife Mildred), collaborating NYPD officers John P. Connors and Paul Glaser, LA County Deputy Sheriff William Camp, and NYC Transit Authority Police Detective Dorothy Uhnak.
            

And yet, despite all those antecedents, when Joseph Wambaugh’s The New Centurions (Little, Brown, 1970) appeared in bookstores, it somehow seemed to be unprecedented.
            

To a degree, this was less because of the book, excellent though it was, than because of how it was marketed.  Previous cop-written novels were consigned to the literary ghetto of “category mysteries,” published by imprints like Doubleday’s Crime Club, or Simon and Schuster’s Inner Sanctum Mysteries.  

Centurions, a comparative “door-stopper” at 376 pages, was marketed as straight fiction.  Charting the career paths of three young cops, from their academy training, through their field training, following them through their first few years on the Job, and culminating in the 1965 Watts riots, it got featured reviews in publications like the New York Times and made all the major best-seller lists.  A high-budget movie followed in 1972, starring George C. Scott as a veteran beat cop, and Stacy Keach as the rookie he’s training.
            

Wambaugh followed with The Blue Knight (Little, Brown, 1972), another door-stopping novel, but a more intimate character study, it follows veteran foot patrolman William “Bumper” Morgan, a cop on the verge of retirement as he approaches his 20^th anniversary on the job, who hopes to make one more major league bust before he pulls the pin. This became an award-winning TV-movie starring William Holden, shown on NBC in 1973 in four parts on four consecutive evenings, leading to the coining of the term “mini-series.”  A regular weekly series, starring George Kennedy as Bumper, followed a few years later on CBS.
            

Between the Blue Knight mini-series and the follow-up regular weekly series, Wambaugh created an award-winning anthology TV show, Police Story (NBC, 1973-80).  Wambaugh described the show as, being, like his books, “less about how cops work on the Job, then how the Job works on cops.”  Using a different cast every week, the show was able to depict a wide variety of law enforcement activities.  
It also made it possible to use specific episodes as, essentially, pilots for additional series, and Police Woman (NBC, 1974-78), Joe Forrester (NBC, 1975-76), and Man Undercover (NBC, 1978-79) were all spun off from Police Story episodes.  
            

The same year that Police Story and The Blue Knight mini-series debuted, Wambaugh released his third, and most ambitious book, The Onion Field (Delacorte, 1973). This was his first piece of non-fiction, describing the kidnapping of two LAPD officers, leading to brutal murder of one, and the hairbreadth escape of the other.  More importantly, it described the emotional toll that Officer Karl Hettinger paid for being the “one who got away.”  This book got Wambaugh his best notices to that point, and, many books later, it was still the one in which he took the most pride.  It was the most praised and admired true-crime book since Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (Random, 1965).
            

Oddly, it did not win the Edgar for Best Fact Crime.  Instead, the Mystery Writers of America gave it a Special Edgar, the Herbert Brean Award, probably thinking that it sucked so much air out of the room, no other true-crimer had a chance.  This would be the first of five Edgars the MWA would award Wambaugh, including a Grand Master.
            

I’ll spare you a book-by-book description of the rest of his corpus.  Suffice it to say that Wambaugh rarely hit anything less than a home run.
            

Aside from triumphing across several different mediums, books, screenplays, and television, fiction and non-fiction, Wambaugh’s success opened the doors for other cops-turned-writers, like NYPD’s William Caunitz, New Orleans PD’s O’Neil de Noux, the US Secret Service’s Gerald Petievich, LAPD’s Dallas Barnes, LAPD’s Connie Dial, the FBI’s Paul Lindsay, Wright County, MN, Sheriff’s Office’s Christine Husom, Portland PD’s Frank Zafiro, and, quite literally, hundreds of others, including your obedient servant.  There is now an organization of crime writers, the Public Safety Writers Association (formerly the Police Writers Association) made up primarily of law enforcement professionals who’ve been inspired to get their stories written and published.  Wambaugh, by his success, was the root of this explosion of cops-turned-writers.  What had been a trickle before Wambaugh became a tidal wave after him.

            

That may be his greatest legacy.
            

And, I think because he knew this, he was always encouraging to new writers.  When my first book, Just the Facts (Deadly Serious, 2004) a collection of true-crime articles (most of which had first appeared in Janet’s Mystery Readers Journal) was being prepared for publication, I contacted Sergeant Wambaugh and shyly asked if he’d be willing to provide a blurb.  He invited me to send some of the chapters, and, after reading them, sent the following comment.
           

“This is a well researched, addictive collection of true case studies, some sensational, others little known, all intensely interesting. And one, ‘The Mad Doctor and The Untouchable,’ will no doubt become a terrific movie.” 

            

The year after the book came out, one of the chapters won a WWA Spur for Best Short Non-Fiction.  That was a wonderful moment.  

But getting that blurb from Wambaugh was, all by itself, almost as terrific.

 

Cartoon of the Day: To be Read Pile

Basement to Bestseller: A Casebook of Crime---Thrilling Adventures of Suspense from the Golden Age of Mystery: Guest Post by Andrew McAleer

You never know what you might find in Edgar winner John McAleer’s mystery correspondence. As my brother Paul and I comb through his voluminous records we’ve become numb to discoveries such as letters from Golden Age of Detection icons – Dame Agatha, Georges Simenon, or Leslie Chateris. Not to mention big-screen legends like John Wayne and Marlene Dietrich. To paraphrase Humphrey Bogart from The Big Sleep, “We don’t even pass out cigars anymore over such finds.” 

A few years ago, however, one lost gem did hook our attention—big time! Paul found a small hardcover chapbook containing a handwritten mystery. The first page—yellowed and pulpy—announced, “Stories of Private Detective Henry von Stray, by John J. McAleer.” The book contained a full mystery story entitled, “The Case of the Illustrious Banker.” Later published in Edgar & Shamus Go Golden. (Down & Books)
In order to establish when von Stray was created Paul did a little sleuthing of his own in attempt to unearth a few clues about the elusive London-based detective and his able collaborator in the detection of crime—affable beetle expert Professor John Dilpate. Paul solved the case.

In our father’s 1937 diary, an August 4^th entry reveals how the senior McAleer wrote at least three von Stray mysteries. (A search for the remaining two stories from the original series remains afoot.) Proving von Stray was created in the 1930s, has important historical significance for the crime fiction genre since it makes von Stray, in all likelihood, the last of the great master sleuths to emerge from the Golden Age of Detective Fiction (a literary period existing predominately during the 1920s and 1930s.) In somewhat of an ironical twist, some 40 years later, McAleer’s Rex Stout: A Biography, won the Edgar Award over Golden Age “founder”—the Queen of Mystery herself—Christie’s autobiography.
 

As a novelist and having taught classic crime fiction at Boston College for many years, I jumped at the chance to continue the von Stray series. The characters and setting were too fun to limit the amazing find to one von Stray adventure. I sensed this inimitable detective had many more crimes to solve and it would be my pleasure to help him do so. My first von Stray mystery “The Singular Case of the Bandaged Bobby” appeared in the September 2024 Sherlock Holmes issue of Mystery Magazine and was later selected for the Best Private Eye Stories of 2025.

The first full-book collection of von Stray stories A Casebook of Crime (Level Best Books) was released this February. The volume also features my father’s only known surviving von Stray mystery. A publisher’s note says of the collection, “[Andrew] seamlessly picks up where the elder McAleer left off, brilliantly and authentically capturing—and not without a touch of light humor—von Stray’s thrilling adventures and unique methods of crime detection through 1920s England. So authentic in fact, mystery lovers will virtually travel back in time to a bygone era where they will genuinely feel as if they’re enjoying timeless, never-before-seen century-old classic puzzle whodunits.” 

Shortly after its release, A Casebook of Crime became an Amazon bestseller surpassing a collection of short stories written by none other than—Dame Agatha Christie!
 

* * *

Andrew McAleer served in Afghanistan as a U.S. Army Historian and is the author of the Henry von Stray historical mysteries. Von Stray’s latest exciting exploits appear in the newly released: A Casebook of Crime: Thrilling Adventures of Suspense from the Golden Age of Mystery. (Level Best Books, 2025)
 
John McAleer is the Edgar Allan Poe Award-winning author of Rex Stout: A Biography and creator of Golden Age Private Detective Henry von Stray. He also edited the Throndyke File and was a Pulitzer finalist.