Murder in the Library: The Mystery Writers of America Anthologies

Everybody into the Boat!

Okay, nobody’s ever going to mistake The Mystery Writers of America (MWA) for The Private Eye Writers of America (PWA), but private eye writers have played a major role in the MWA right from the beginning

Brett Halliday and Baynard Kendrick were both involved in the founding of the organization back in 1945, and other members of the shamus game have continued to play an often significant role, through the years, both as part of the rank and files, and as part of the executive.

They’ve also contributed ro the MWA’s long-running anthology series, which was started to raise funds for the fledgling organization’s treasury. The first anthology, Murder Cavalcade, was published in 1946, and since then, the MWA has averaged about one short-story anthology a year, often devoted to a theme, edited by best-selling writers and providing a showcase for members.

In fact, an awful lot of the earlier stories were contemporaneous P.I. stories–or what we now call “vintage.” For example, the anthology I’m slowly working my way through at the time of this writing, Crime for Two (1955), had a Mike Shayne story in it that was mostly written by Helen McCloy (she and Brett Halliday, Shayne’s creator, were married at the time).

Speaking of Mike Shayne, a beat-up old copy of Four and Twenty Bloodhounds, edited by Anthony Boucher, remains one of my most treasured early finds, picked up for a quarter (!) at a book sale in the basement of a church in St. Lambert, Quebec, about a million years ago. it included all sort of good P.I. stuff from the likes of Frank Kane, Vern Chute and James M. Fox, as well as “Michael Shayne as I Know Him”, the only non-fiction piece in the book, written by Halliday himself, who gives us the skinny on how he came to create his beloved eye.

MURDER IN THE LIBRARY

• The Best Anthologies of Original P.I. Stories
• The Best Anthologies of Hard-Boiled, Noir & Pulp Reprints 
• Other Mystery Anthologies Worth Hunting For 
• The Best American Mystery Stories
• The Akashic Noir Series

List compiled by Abbey in Boston, and updated by Kevin Burton Smith.