Sci-fi/mystery writer Peter Heck made Mark Twain a detective in a half-dozen crime novels a decade and more ago.

Here they are, all put out by Berkeley Prime Crime, a top publisher of mysteries in this country: Death On the Mississippi, A Connecticut Yankee in Criminal Court, The Prince and the Prosecutor, The Guilty Abroad, The Mysterious Strangler, and Tom’s Lawyer.

The first four titles are plays on the titles of four of Twain’s more popular books.

Heck is a curious guy.

At one time, he was an editor at Ace Books, a top publisher of sci-fi novels and anthologies, and he created a sci-fi newsletter and a mystery newsletter for the Waldenbooks chain. He also reviewed books for Asimov’s Science Fiction and Kirkus Reviews.

Heck chucked it all in 2007 to move to Chestertown, Maryland – he and his wife he lived in Brooklyn – where he works for the Kent County News. He’s a reporter covering local government, health, environment, and the arts.

And how’s this? Heck also is a musician, playing guitar and banjo in a local band, Colonel Leonard’s Irregulars.

Tomorrow: Beatrix Potter, detective

It seems only natural that the inventor of the detective story – Graham Magazine published Poe’s short story, Murders in the Rue Morgue, in 1841 – should become a detective in a mystery series written by a modern American writer.

Harold Schecter, a self-avowed expert on all things crime – he wrote True Crime: An American Anthology for the Library of America series – churned out a crime series in which he paired Edgar Allan Poe with P.T. Barnum and Louisa May Alcott to solve several sets of serial killings.

Four books in all: Nevermore: A Novel (2002), The Hum Bug (2002), The Mask of Red Death (2004), and The Tell-Tale Corpse (2006).

Schecter’s day job?

He teaches American literature and culture at the City University of New York’s Queens College.

Tomorrow: Mark Twain, detective

Jane Austen and her novels are popular again, and again, and again as a result of movies and television shows based on her books . . . so, if you are a writer of mysteries, why not capitalize on that?

Why not write a crime novel in which Jane Austen is your sleuth? You’ll have her going around solving murders in her home community.

Jane Austen, detective!

We’ll sell a ton of books!

I don’t know whether Francine Mathews sold a ton of her Jane Austen Mysteries – she’s written 11 books to date – but readers who’ve posted comments on Goodreads sure like them. Mathews, a former CIA agent, writes this series under the pen name Stephanie Barron.

Two weeks ago, we celebrated the 200th anniversary of Charles Dickens’ birthday. Are there any Charles Dickens Mysteries out there?

Sure enough.

Purdue University professor emeritus William Palmer employed young Charlie as a sleuth in four books.

Well-received books . . . all featured by The Literary Guild, The Book of the Month Club, The Mystery Guild, and The Doubleday Book Club when they came out in the late 1980s and ’90s.

Palmer is a Dickens scholar, so he knows Dickens’ works and Victorian England well. That accounts for the ring of authenticity in his mysteries.

Four books here: The Detective and Mr. Dickens (1990), The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens (1992), The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens (1997), and The Dons and Mr. Dickens (2001).

Palmer, ever the academic, gave each book a second title:

The Detective and Mr. Dickens: Being an Account of the Macbeth Murders and the Strange Events Surrounding Them
The Highwayman and Mr. Dickens: An Account of the Strange Events of the Medusa Murderers
The Hoydens and Mr. Dickens: The Strange Affair of the Feminist Phantom
The Dons and Mr Dickens: The Strange Case of the Oxford Christmas Plot

Palmer employed another device from academia. He puts himself forward as the editor of a secret journal he’s found, a journal in which a fictional writer, Wilkie Collins, recorded his adventures with Charles Dickens when both men were young and performing in amateur theater, more importantly, when they were working with London Inspector William Field, solving murders.

Field, like Collins, is a fictional character.

The hoydens in the title of the third book, you don’t know who or what they are?

Confession time. I didn’t either, so I looked them up.

Hoydens are boisterous, outspoken women, the word coming from Middle Dutch heiden, meaning heathen.

Palmer drew on the feminist movement in England during the 1850s for his third mystery. Dickens is not the only real person in that book. Florence Nightingale is there, as is Marian Evans who, later in her life, wrote under the pen name George Eliot.

Tomorrow: Edgar Allan Poe, detective

Writer Ruby Walton died this past weekend.

You didn’t know her, unless you lived in my hometown at some time.

And I didn’t even know Ruby. I only knew of her, but she was a good friend of both my mother and my wife.

Back in the 1970s, Ruby was a reporter and editor for our city newspaper’s community living section. After she retired, she both freelanced and wrote on assignment for a variety of Wisconsin newspapers and magazines.

One year, while she and her husband, Ted, were wintering in Arizona, she hit on the idea of teaching other seniors how they could write about their lives, their memories. She called it reminiscence writing. Memoir was too fancy a term . . . but the concept is the same.

Ruby taught those classes for six winters.

When she and Ted sold their Arizona place, so they could live year-round here, closer to their children and grandchildren, Ruby pitched the idea of teaching reminiscence writing at the Janesville Senior Center.

The management said wonderful.

I have no idea how many people went through Ruby’s classes over the years, but she encouraged every one of them to put their written memories – memories they read aloud to their fellow students – into book form. The book could be as simple as typed pages clipped into a three-ring binder or as complex as a printed, hardbound book.

Make enough copies, she told her students, so you can give one to every child and grandchild you have, to a select number of friends, and even to the city library.

Somewhere along the line, the thought occurred to Ruby that some of the best stories – the best memories – her students wrote ought to be collected and published in an anthology.

Hopscotch, Hobos & Fox Holes was the result, a kaleidoscope of memories from 39 of Ruby’s students, plus several memories she and Ted contributed . . . a 374-page book published in 2004.

I own a copy.

It’s darn fine reading.

Humor is a car. It can date to specific period.

What was hilarious 50 years ago might be only mildly funny today or, more likely have contemporary audiences wondering where the joke is.

In Robert Traver’s 1958 courtroom drama, Anatomy of a Murder, Traver has his lead character, a defense lawyer named Paul Biegler, quipping about Duncan Hines, saying it was an ignominy that Hines hadn’t blessed the hamburger stands and tourist hotels of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula.

Pardon?

Duncan Hines?

Isn’t he the guy who made his name making and selling cake mixes?

Yes, but in the 1940s and ’50s he also traveled the country, rating hotels and restaurants.

If, as a traveler, you saw a Duncan Hines sign in the window of the place where you were stopping, you knew this was a quality business with great food, great lodging, and great service.

Biegler describes Hines as “a ubiquitous little man – his bib full of gravy stains, his pockets full of pills, his soul full of hope – gnawing his way across the continent, leaving diplomas of approval in his wake like a sort of gastronomic Kilroy.”

A man or woman as old as I am gets the joke – we even know who the fictional Kilroy was – but someone in their thirties or forties reading this passage would wonder what’s this doing here . . . and skip on, hoping Traver will get back to something they know.

I wonder, when I sit down to write a laugh scene, will the humor hold up twenty years from now, thirty years from now?

So as tempting as it is to have two of my characters in a bar, hanging jokes on President Obama as they down another beer, as it was for Traver to hang a joke on Duncan Hines, I won’t do it.

It won’t be funny in a decade.

It may not even be funny next year.

The secretary Robert Traver created for his defense lawyer in Anatomy of a Murder, Traver’s bestselling 1958 crime novel, follows the stereotype of the secretaries in private eye fiction of the previous decade.

Maida Rutledge is a chipper, ditzy soul, much like Effie Perrine, Sam Spade’s secretary as played by Lurene Tuttle in the late 1940s radio series, “The Adventures of Sam Spade.”

Maida, when business is slow in the office, reads Mickey Spillane paperbacks – hardly sterling literature – and business is always slow.

Her reading Spillane is one of two running gags in the book. The other is her boss, defense lawyer Paul Biegler, threatening to fire Maida over various slights and affronts. She won’t go because Biegler is so broke he can’t pay her back wages.

We could laugh with her – and at times at her – but today the Effies and Maidas of fiction grate on the soul. No secretary can really be like that.

The secretaries you and I know – now called administrative assistants – are smart and efficient, often the diplomats of the office.

And this is the way you and I would write a secretary in fiction, as if she were real and not a cartoon.

Traver could have. Instead, he chose to use a stereotype for the laughs that character would get.

Tomorrow: Jokes we don’t get

I was rolling along through Robert Traver blockbuster of a book, Anatomy of a Murder – it’s really well written – until I got to the opening of chapter 25.

I choked.

Defense lawyer Paul “Polly” Biegler is dictating to his secretary, a letter of transmittal that’s to accompany his notice for an insanity plea for his defendant, one copy to the prosecuting attorney and a second copy to the county clerk who, among his several duties, will pull together a jury pool.

“Add a postscript to the county clerk’s letter,” Biegler tells Maida, his secretary. “‘I trust that by chance, as usual, you will contrive to get at least one good-looking babe on the jury to ease our pain.’”

Eye candy.

Today, Maida would read her boss out over that one . . . and rightly so.

The babe is one Doris Flanders, and she arrives on cue. Clovis Pidgeon, the court clerk, just by chance manages to pull her name from the box containing the names of all the prospective jurors.

She rises.

Doris, Biegler observes, is “an undulant, lissome young creature with long earrings and much make-up.” She glides up to the jury box, “ostentatiously virginal, flushing self-consciously and carrying her girdled and fragile little treasure of femaleness as though she were guarding a sacred flame. I glanced at Clovis and he found time to give me a knowing small smile of triumph. ‘Mission accomplished,’ his glance seemed to say – ‘see, Polly, we’ve already drawn our siren for the session.’”

I grant you the sexual revolution didn’t arrive for the better part of another decade, but even in 1958 I wouldn’t write that. Had I done so, my mother would have pounded nobs on my head.

Tomorrow: Maida, the cartoon secretary

Anatomy of a Murder is one smokin’ book.

I mean everybody lights up . . . a cigar, a cigarette, a pipe.

Of course, Robert Traver wrote his bestselling courtroom drama in 1956 and ’57, when you could smoke in a car, a restaurant, or a courthouse and think nothing of it.

Secondhand smoke, who had heard of such a thing?

Firsthand smoke, well, over half of the population was puffing away.

Smoking does provide a lot of Traver’s characters with some stage business, with something to do . . . to break up the long sets of dialogue in his book.

He does have fun with it, though.

Traver’s main character, defense lawyer Paul “Polly” Biegler, smokes cigars. Not just any cigars, but Italian cigars. Says he in the opening of chapter 25, “I leaned back and lit one of my Neopolitan stink weeds.”

The judge calls Biegler’s cigars Roman candles.

And the judge smokes, too, a pipe. In chapter 1 of the second part of the book, we have Biegler in conference with the judge, watching the judge: He sat at his desk carefully filling a large beat-up hod of a briar pipe with a tobacco called Peerless, a pungent, working-man’s delight which I suspected was salvaged from the ticking of old mattresses – in turn salvaged from orphanages.

If Traver were alive and writing his book today, all that would be gone.

How times have changed.

Tomorrow: Sexism in Anatomy of a Murder

Novelist Robert Traver is largely forgotten now, except by mystery and movie buffs.

Back in 1957 – my gosh, that’s almost a half-century ago – Traver wrote the blockbuster crime novel Anatomy of a Murder.

Twenty-nine weeks at the top of the New York Times bestseller list.

The next year, Otto Preminger turned the book into a movie and cast Jimmy Stewart in the lead role of defense attorney Paul “Polly” Biegler.

The movie was nominated for seven Oscars, including an Oscar for best picture. Critiques have called it as the best courtroom drama of all time.

It certainly was at that time, no question of it.

Those courtroom scenes, particularly as they are in the book, ring true and for good reason. The murder case Traver fictionalized was one in which he was the defense attorney.

The book and film made Traver a millionaire, allowing him to quit his day job – he was a justice of the Michigan Supreme Court – so he could write and do what he enjoyed most, fish.

Traver, incidentally, is not the man’s real name. It’s a pen name. Traver is/was James Voelker.

Voelker grew up on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, observing the characters who frequented his father’s Ishpeming tavern and fishing the trout streams of the area.

Yup, he became a lawyer in 1928, after he graduated from the University of Michigan Law School. He moved to Chicago where he practiced his trade for three years, then bailed out. Voelker went home, back to Ishpeming, to practice law. For him, Chicago was just too crowded, and there weren’t any trout streams there.

To avoid starvation, Voelker ran for and won the office of Marquette County prosecutor, a job he held for 18 years.

It was while he was the county prosecutor that he began to write fiction, memoir, and essays. That brings us to why he wrote under a pen name.

Said Voelker in several interviews, “I wrote as Robert Traver so that the Marquette County voters wouldn’t think I was writing novels on company time.”

He brought out his first book, Troubleshooter, a memoir, at age 40, his first novel, Anatomy of a Murder, at age 53.

In all, Voelker wrote four collections of short stories, four novels, that memoir, and three books about trout fishing.

He died in 1991 at the age of 87.

A heart attack felled him.

Searchers found Voelker slouched over the steering wheel of his fishing car.

If he had had his druthers, he would have died while whipping a line out over Frenchman’s Pond, his favorite place to fish.

Here’s a footnote for you. Otto Preminger cast real-life lawyer Joseph Welch as the judge in the movie. Welch had gained fame, four years earlier, for berating communist-hunter Senator Joseph McCarthy during the Army-McCarthy hearings.

Welch was a tough bargainer. He demanded that Preminger give his wife a part in the movie. Preminger agree and cast Mrs. Welch as a member of the jury.

Tomorrow: Why Traver’s book is dated

Three hundred fifty mystery writers and fans are invading the Intercontinental Hotel outside O’Hare Airport in Chicago today.

It’s the 13th year the gang has congregated . . . to talk about the craft of writing and the business of being published, hoist a brew with friends, and pass out some well-earned honors.

I’ll be there, a part of the big show twice today . . . at 1 p.m. in an author chat and at 2 p.m. on a panel talking with writers who are polishing their craft about how best they can nail the ending of their novels.

I’m in fine company . . . William Kent Krueger, Raymond Benson, Kathleen Ernst, and Libby Fischer Hellmann, our panel moderator.

David Morrell is the big gun at this convention. He’s one of our top thriller writers in the business. Morrell broke in with his book, First Blood, in 1972.

The lead character in First Blood?

Rambo.

Here’s the link so you can see what else is going on: http://www.loveismurder.net/home.html

If you’re in the Chicago metro area today, tomorrow, or Sunday, come on by.