Greg Clark Noir Art

  GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY #20 THE HARDY BOYS By the 1920s the literacy rate in America had climbed to over 90% and publishers began thinking about getting mystery readers at a younger age.  Edward Stratemeyer, owner of the Stratemeyer Syndicate which was a book-packaging firm, introduced the Hardy Boys to a juvenile audience hungry for adventure.  Frank and Joe Hardy were teenage brothers that comprised a trouble-shooting detective team.  Frank was 16 and Joe was 15, and they lived in the fictional Northeastern town of Bayport on Barmet Bay with their father Detective Fenton Hardy, mother Laura, and aunt Gertrude.  In the original stories the Boy's mysteries were often linked to their father's confidential cases.  They were constantly involved in action and adventure but they "never lose their nerve...They are hardy boys, luckier and more clever than anyone around them." The quaint little town of Bayport becomes the location of murder, drug...

  GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY #19 PHILO VANCE "Philo Vance / Needs a kick in the pance" wrote poet-humorist Ogden Nash about the arrogant, Regie-smoking, g-dropping Vance who spoke with an affected British accent and speech pattern.  The mysteries of Philo Vance were bestsellers and he became the most popular private detective of the late 1920s through the 1930s.  He was historically and culturally significant, even if Raymond Chandler pointed out that he was "the most asinine character in detective fiction."  Like his creator, S. S. Van Dine (1888-1939), Vance was a dilettante and aesthete who constantly injected his knowledge of the most esoteric subjects into the middle of a murder investigation - particularly those subjects relating to art, music, religion and philosophy.  Just under 6 feet tall, slender and graceful, Vance had aloof gray eyes, a straight slender nose, and a thin-lipped mouth that almost suggested cruelty as well as irony. ...

  GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY #18 ALFRED HITCHCOCK Hitchcock.  The single name is enough to tell you what type of film to expect.  Hitchcock, the Master of Suspense.  The only director whose name alone could sell a film.  Few directors ever achieve the status of a superstar with their name above the title.  Born in London on August 13, 1899, he was educated by the Jesuits at Saint Ignatius College.  From the age of 16 he was fascinated by cinema and impressed by the works of Griffith, Murnau, and Fritz Lang.  Paramount - Famous Players - Lasky opened a studio in England and in 1920 young Alfred went to work for them as a title artist (this was the days of silent film when title cards revealed dialogue and plotlines).  From this rose to become an art director, scenarist, editor, and assistant director, learning all phases of the movie production business, and then began directing his own films.  In the moral universe of Alfre...

  GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY #17 CHARLIE CHAN Charlie Chan was created by Earl Derr Biggers (1884-1933) who was born in Warren, Ohio and attended Harvard, graduating in 1907.  His first job was on the Boston Traveler  for which he wrote a humorous column and occasional drama criticism.  He wrote a play in 1912 that was unsuccessful.  Then in 1913 his first mystery novel "Seven Keys to Baldpate" was published and was an immediate success.  In the mid-1920s he was searching for an idea for another book and thought, "Sinister and wicked Chinese are old stuff, but an amiable Chinese on the side of law and order had never been used."  The result was Charlie Chan and a series of six novels beginning with "The House without a Key" (1925).  The books and character were extremely popular.  Before they were published in book form all six novels were serialized in The Saturday Evening Post .  The Chan series was clean, humorous, unpre...

  GREAT DETECTIVES & PEOPLE OF MYSTERY #16 THE CONTINENTAL OP There were other detectives before Dashiell Hammett's nameless operative of the Continental Detective Agency, but there were none better.  Hammett (1894-1961), well known and regarded as the true innovator of the hardboiled style of literature, gave us a private eye that would influence detective fiction for decades to come.  The success of Hammett and his creation is closely tied to the pulp magazine Black Mask .  It was founded in 1920 by H. L. Mencken and George Jean Nathan and printed traditional thrillers and stories of adventure, but its remembered primarily today for its detective stories.  The hardboiled school of tough private eyes filled the pages of the magazine with stories by Hammett, Erle Stanley Gardner, Raymond Chandler, George Harmon Coxe, Frank Gruber, and so many others.  These pulp tales were fast-paced, violent, cynical, and sometimes even romantic.  The magazine ach...