RARA-AVIS: Re: half-time job for mystery novelist

From: JIM DOHERTY (jimdohertyjr@yahoo.com)
Date: 16 Nov 2008

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    Rob,

    Re your comment below:

    "That's a hoot. Their requirement for Ph.D would, I think, be generically disqualifying; my college experience (crammed 4-year degree into 9 years) taught me that no self respecting English Ph.D would soil him/herself writing mystery/suspense. Except, possibly, under a pen name -- but then how could it be proved? What a stitch."

    Thomas Flanagan was a Ph.D. English prof at UC Berkeley (my alma mater), and, in addition to his award-winning straight fiction like THE YEAR OF THE FRENCH, was also the author, under his own name, of a very good, award-winning series of semi-hard-boiled short stories featuring Captain Tennente, a humane policeman forced to operate an inhumane police state, that appeared in EQMM during the '50's.

    Our own Bill Crider was an English professor and his mystery credentials, under his own name, are pretty impressive

    Those examples don't necessarily disprove the TREND you describe, but they do render it at best a trend, and not an absolute.

    JIM DOHERTY

          



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