In the fall of 2015, as part of the round of promotion for the two-volume Library of America set Women Crime Writers: Eight Suspense Novels of the 1940s and 1950s, I published an essay on the editors responsible for publishing the great crime writers included in that collection (as well as my earlier anthology of suspense stories from the mid-20th century, Troubled Daughters, Twisted Wives) such as Patricia Highsmith, Margaret Millar, Charlotte Armstrong, and Dorothy B. Hughes.
What I discovered then, to my delight but not my surprise, is that these writers owed their careers to a quartet of female editors who, for all intents and purposes, invented the mystery publishing field in America. Their imprints linger on with dim recognition today, names like “an Inner Sanctum Mystery” or “Doubleday Crime Club” or “A Harper Novel of Suspense.” These editors’ names struck equal parts admiration and trepidation —especially by the authors they worked with. Like editors before and since they didn’t actively seek out the limelight but would appear at conferences, publish articles or books, and of course, had excellent reputations for publishing the best of the best in mystery.
The essay first appeared on a long-defunct website (The Life Sentence). The recent death of longtime St. Martin’s Press executive editor Hope Dellon, who herself shepherded the careers of a great many women crime writers (most notably, Louise Penny and M.C. Beaton) made me think of that essay anew. Dellon began her publishing career as an assistant to one of the editors I wrote about. And so it seemed time to re-introduce readers to these editing women—Isabelle Taylor, Lee Wright, Marie Rodell, and Joan Kahn—to a new audience almost certainly unaware of them. They deserve our respect and admiration. And they likely have a thing or two to teach current-day editors in the mystery world.
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Isabelle Taylor
A profile from 1950 described Isabelle Taylor as “involved in some 1,800-2,000 murders” and, as editor of the storied Doubleday Crime Club, Taylor (1904-1986) would be intimately acquainted with at least a couple thousand more before her retirement in the late 1960s. Much of what we know about Taylor is drawn from Ellen Nehr’s 1992 coffee table book about the Crime Club, which began in 1928 (with poet Ogden Nash as founding editor) and closed up shop 63 years later.
Taylor started her publishing career as a clerk at the Doubleday Book Store, then housed in the old Penn Station. She joined what was then known as Doubleday, Doran, as associate editor of the Crime Club in 1939, and started running the imprint just three years later. “She had a brilliant touch with people (enhanced by her faultless Southern charm), was a firm, no-nonsense editor, had very definite opinions, was personally very brave, and was revered by her colleagues, authors, and friends until the day she died,” recalled onetime Doubleday editor-in-chief Ken McCormick in Nehr’s book. “She seemed to me to be light years ahead of any of her predecessors in making this line of books as distinguished as it became.”
And what a list it was. Over the more than two decades she ran Doubleday Crime Club, Taylor’s taste in mystery methods and style was catholic yet scrupulous, heavily indebted to the British Golden Agers but also deeply American. Crime Club, under Taylor’s watch, published Margery Allingham, Leslie Charteris, Dolores Hitchens (as well as her earlier alter ego, D.B. Olsen), Sax Rohmer, Arthur Upfield, M.V. Heberden, Patricia Highsmith (in the mid-1960s) and many, many more. Taylor even cajoled Isaac Asimov, a longtime author on Doubleday’s science fiction list, to try his hand at a straight crime novel—only to reject the result because she didn’t like it.
In that 1950 profile, by David Dempsey of the New York Times, Taylor said she received 400 manuscript submissions a year and published 48, “a majority of which, she thinks, are read by women.” Nine years earlier, in an article for Publishers Weekly, Taylor extolled the virtues of the mystery story, as well as its often-modest sales. I barely resisted the temptation to quote the piece in its entirety, but this flavor should be enough to indicate Taylor’s astute, still-relevant thinking on the subject:
“Mystery sales may not attain the sweeping sales that novels on the bestseller lists reach, but it is certainly a truism that a first mystery novel has more than a ten to one chance of outselling a first novel. The reason for this situation is not difficult to understand: for years we publishers of mystery stories have provided a salable commodity to booksellers, and the standard established has been constant enough so that a first book brought out as a mystery will have adequate bookstore and lending library distribution. Then satisfactory reviews and a good popular reception make further advertising reasonable, and your book and its author get off to a very good start.
Article continues after advertisement“In the case of most first novels, bookstores and lending library managers are more loath to put it in stock than if it were a first mystery. Consequently, good reviews send people to a store where the book is not in stock, and advertising is useless if the book is not easily obtained. But your first mystery, with the publisher’s imprint and reputation for providing good first mysteries behind it, is assured that wide distribution to begin with….[Even] Dashiell Hammett and Dorothy Sayers and all the rest first had their start and their chance in a well established, steadily selling, commercially lucrative field of publishing—the mystery.
“I don’t believe we can start a crusade for selling all mysteries to the wider novel-reading market. The majority of them won’t stand such pressure, and we might as well be honest about it. I don’t think we put a curse on a book by calling it a mystery; I think we give it a much better chance.”
Taylor retired from Crime Club around 1968 and died in the 1980s.
Lee Wright
“She’s the top of the pyramid in the mystery field and has been ever since she started Inner Sanctum at Simon & Schuster back in the thirties.” – Donald Westlake
As much as Taylor pioneered category mystery publishing with the Doubleday Crime Club, the field would simply not exist as we know it in the United States if not for Lee Wright. Born in 1904, Wright started her career in books running the Wright Lending Library with her restauranteur father, and then got a job as secretary to Dick Simon, who with Max Lincoln Schuster formed the publishing house that, in 1924, was a long way off from its current Big 5 conglomerate version.
Wright’s secretarial duties lasted just a year before Dick and Lincoln asked her to create a new mystery imprint, which Wright called Inner Sanctum. Over the next sixteen years, Wright discovered Anthony Boucher’s first novel The Case of the Seven of Cavalry (1937) in the slush pile (she told her husband it was the first slush manuscript she’d ever wanted to publish), matched up Craig Rice and Gypsy Rose Lee on the rollicking theater mystery The G-String Murders (1942), and published Mildred B. Davis’ Edgar Award-winning debut The Room Upstairs (1948) and Stanley Ellin’s early novels.
In a 1951 profile piece, Wright said she read “all of the published output” in a given year as well as 250 manuscripts on submission, which, as the interviewer rightly pointed out, is a “considerable” undertaking. Wright’s tastes ran to anything except what we think of as women-in-peril stories, or what she called “girl-in-the-attic” mysteries—still, “that doesn’t mean she won’t pull her okay on a good one if it rolls along.”
Wright left S&S in 1952 for a five-year-stint in magazines before being hired on at Random House to run their crime fiction department—no separate imprint necessary—and it was there she cemented her reputation as “the top of the pyramid in the mystery field,” in the words of Donald Westlake. The prolific Westlake published his early titles under his own name with Wright, beginning with The Mercenaries, and as the Richard Stark pseudonym gained popularity and acclaim by publishing Parker novels as paperback originals with Pocket Books, Wright also kept Stark around in hardcover for most of the Alan Grofield novels, creating an amusing conundrum. But she had one particular quirk about titles that Westlake learned firsthand, when he presented a comic crime novel he titled The Dead Nephew: Wright didn’t like titles with the word “dead” in them. The book’s new title was The Fugitive Pigeon (1965), and ended up outselling his earlier, darker, more serious crime stories by a 2-1 margin.
She brought Davis over to Random House from Inner Sanctum after the author took many years off to raise her family, as well as Ellin (beginning with the magnificent The Eight Circle, in 1958). Wright’s list also included Margaret Millar, beginning with The Listening Walls (1959); Ira Levin, starting with Rosemary’s Baby (1967); Joe Gores; John Lutz; Lawrence Block’s early Bernie Rhodenbarr novels (after earlier near-misses in the 1960s); and Dorothy B. Hughes’ final masterpiece The Expendable Man (1963).
Wright worked at Random House at a pivotal period for the company, when co-founders Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer went public, partnered with Knopf, and sold to RCA. She was, for many years, the sole female editor at Random House, staying within her chosen niche of crime fiction and (only rarely branching out beyond the genre). As she said at the 1972 Mystery Writers of America symposium, “The mystery is the modern fairy tale. It satisfies the reader’s desire for a happy ending and, above all other kinds of fiction, it has form.” She retired in 1977 but she didn’t give up on her authors so quickly, working in a freelance capacity until her death, at the age of 82, in December 1986.
Marie Rodell
Rodell (1912-1975) wielded her influence primarily as a literary agent, working with Martin Luther King on his first book (Stride Towards Freedom, 1957) as well as Rachel Carson, the environmentalist who stunned America with her indictment of DDT in Silent Spring (1962). But for nine years before she went out on her own as an agent in 1948, Rodell worked at Duell, Sloan and Pearce as the company’s crime fiction editor. Duell wouldn’t last all that long—it partnered with Little, Brown in 1951, then got sold to Meredith, which folded the line in 1967—but Rodell’s taste in mystery meant the company brought out almost all of Dorothy B. Hughes’ novels (most notably Ride the Pink Horse and In A Lonely Place), the early work of Lenore Glen Offord (including Skeleton Key and The Nine Dark Hours) and the “Regional Murder” series, in which crime writers of a certain city (New York, Boston, Los Angeles, Cleveland, to name a few) banded together to write about true crimes famous and less-so.
Rodell also published work of her own, including three mystery novels as “Marion Randolph” (Breathe No More; This’ll Kill You; and Grim Grow the Lilacs) and the 1943 how-to Mystery Fiction: Theory and Technique, which also illuminated the buying and reading habits of mystery readers at the time. According to Rodell, “the vast majority of mystery fans—about 99% of them” chose to borrow books from the library instead of purchasing them outright. The “top of the heap” of crime writers, such as Agatha Christie, might sell 15,000 to 20,000 copies of each new title. Most authors were lucky to get 3,000 copies sold in a year.
Rodell was also astute about the fundamentals of a good crime novel, as in this section about MacGuffins: “The fear and punishment of condemnation is a strong ear, and if the motive is to be believable, it must be stronger than these. The consequences of failing to murder must seem as legitimately dreadful to the murderer as capital punishment and/or eternal damnation, if his choice of murder is to appear plausible to the reader. The MacGuffin should seem real to the reader, or at least be able to evoke the reader’s willing suspension of disbelief. And it should be powerful enough to plausibly account for what happens in its pursuit.”
Joan Kahn
“When I got into publishing, the top three mystery editors were ladies: Marie Rodell at Duell, Sloan & Pearce, Isabelle Taylor with the crime club at Doubleday and Lee Wright at Simon and Schuster, who did the Inner Sanctum books. Those three wise ladies were my mentors. In those days mystery books were regarded sort of like poetry and cookbooks, not exactly a publishing ghetto, maybe, but at least a mini-ghetto.” – Joan Kahn, 1982
By virtue of living so close to the end of the 20th century Joan Kahn (1914-1994) became the bridge point between the makings of modern mystery publishing and what constitutes today’s field. Her career, of the quarter, lasted the longest and arguably had as great an impact on crime fiction as Wright’s.
She joined Harper & Brothers in 1946 and, more by accident than design, began carving out a specialty in crime fiction, with a specific eye to character-driven stories. Kahn’s first mystery acquisition, The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis was a prototype for her later taste: it emphasized psychological depth, literary-minded writing, entertaining characters, and surprise twists. Eustis’ debut won the second-ever Edgar Award in 1947, and effectively launched the “Harper Novel of Suspense” imprint that Kahn spearheaded for nearly three and a half decades. She counted Julian Symons, John Creasey, Tony Hillerman, Nicolas Freeling, James McClure, and John Ball among her authors
Kahn specialized in finding new writers and furthering careers but she was equally adroit at resuscitating reputations. It’s hard to believe now, when Dorothy L. Sayers is so firmly entrenched in crime fiction’s canon, but in 1975 much of the author’s work was out of print. Kahn cajoled Harcourt Brace, Sayers’ publisher of record, to sell her the rights to all of Sayers’ Lord Peter Wimsey novels (save one: The Nine Tailors), as well as the plates, for a mere $1,000, according to Hope Dellon, executive editor at St. Martin’s and Kahn’s summer assistant that year. “Around that time I think Joan was also getting ready to publish Janet Hitchman’s biography of Sayers, Such a Strange Lady, which was the book that taught everyone that it was disrespectful not to call her Dorothy L. Sayers,” Dellon recalled by email.
The most famous writer Kahn worked with is Patricia Highsmith, who published Strangers on a Train, The Blunderer, The Talented Mr. Ripley, and Deep Water without incident and to great acclaim. But Highsmith and Kahn relationship was, unsurprisingly for those familiar with Highsmith’s temperament, complicated. Kahn rejected the manuscript for The Price of Salt. She put Highsmith through several drafts of A Game For The Living (1958), pointing out the original murderer was too “out of the blue” and needed to be changed. She received a brutal rebuff from Dorothy B. Hughes, who more or less called the book a racist caricature of Mexicans, when requesting a jacket quote. And despite being published, “nobody much liked the book,” according to Highsmith’s biographer Joan Schenkar. (It’s the one Highsmith novel I could never finish.) Kahn and Highsmith battled it out over multiple drafts of The Cry of the Owl before it was published by Doubleday, and eventually the two women parted ways.
Kahn, by sticking with novels of suspense, also generated suspense of her own. There was the mystery of Jacqueline Mallet, pseudonym for a yet-to-be-unmasked writer who first published They Can’t Hang Me! (1947) in Britain. When mystery critic James Sandoe found a copy in a used bookshop and read it, he passed it on to Kahn, who was so taken she wished to reissue. But all of her sleuthing acumen came to little: no one knew who “Jacqueline Mallet” was, her original publisher had folded, and the only lead—that it might be a man named Jacques Mallet—came to naught.
A more sobering story emerged when one of Kahn’s discoveries, E. Richard Johnson, won the Edgar Award for best debut in 1968. Johnson was a career criminal who spent the bulk of his adult life—and his entire writing career—in prison in Minnesota, serving a life sentence for robbery and murder. Johnson wrote the manuscript for Silver Street, a hard-bitten tale of urban criminals, “because I had a lot of time on my hands.” He sent that manuscript directly to Kahn’s slush pile because he’d heard she was the best mystery editor in the business. She took it on, as well as the majority of his later work. When Kahn traveled to Minnesota State Prison in Stillwater to meet Johnson in person for the first time, it was after two years of lengthy correspondence, and for a specific purpose: in the Warden’s Conference Room, Kahn gave Johnson the ceramic bust of Edgar Allan Poe that she’d accepted on his behalf the year prior.
She kept on publishing mysteries, editing anthologies, and speaking at crime fiction conferences through the 1970s, the “Harper Novel of Suspense” changing to “A Joan Kahn Book.” But in 1980, she left what was now Harper & Row, though the circumstances aren’t clear: some say she was pushed out, or “retired”, but Kahn told the LA Times she quit of her own volition. Whatever the case, Kahn worked briefly for Ticknor & Fields and E.P. Dutton, then landed at St. Martin’s Press in 1983, where she worked with a number of her Harper discoveries (including Johnson, Jonathan Gash, and Jane Langton) until her proper retirement in 1989. (She also, according to a number of St. Martin’s staffers around at the time, was one of the last proponents of the three-martini lunch.)
Kahn explained why she was more moved by novels of suspense than straight mysteries in a 1964 interview: “For me, the suspense novel is a novel in the truest sense of the word. Everything that happens is it is the product of the characters reacting to each other, just as in a straight novel. All that differentiates it from a straight novel, in fact, is the element of suspense, which I think heightens its appeal for the average reader.”
And in 1990, four years before her death, Kahn looked back on her career as a mystery editor with more than a little fondness: “I was so bloody lucky. Here I was, absolutely untrained and a dame. In those days, women didn’t get many jobs in publishing. I was a snotty little girl… I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing. But I happened to be working for very bright people, who gave me my head. They allowed me to play.
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Here’s a cliché in dire need of decimation: editors don’t edit. Saying so not only fundamentally misunderstands the role of editors in our current, more corporate, bottom-line-approach trade publishing industry, but infantilizes the great editors of the past. It was less about what they did on the page but that they understood the need for the page to exist to begin with. It wasn’t merely about making a manuscript the best, but finding those manuscripts, nurturing careers, and most of all: having taste.
It wasn’t merely about making a manuscript the best, but finding those manuscripts, nurturing careers, and most of all: having taste.
Crime & mystery specialists are more difficult to come by now at the bigger houses. Publishers look at the category and see the low-four-figures Isabelle Taylor expected a typical first mystery to sell, or the small profits from selling titles primarily to libraries, and clamor for bigger, bolder, more breakout titles. Every now and then that comes to pass but how often does it not? What made Taylor, Wright, Rodell & Kahn such formidable editors is that they took chances, recognized what worked, didn’t get too worked up about failure—most of the time, anyway—and above all, you could not argue about their taste.
How many authors would not exist if not for their scouting, editorial, and publishing efforts? And in turn, how could today’s crime fiction, most notably psychological suspense, exist without their prior work?
The answers: too many, and it couldn’t. Which is why, despite the pressures and struggles, the justifiable laments and complaints, our current crop of mystery-minded editors, marketers, and publishers, regardless of gender, should look to the past for a tip or two. Many things have changed. The art of having great taste and making books even better never does.
