As a Sealed Book: It’s here, it’s (a)live!

Just what the title says, my collection of Beulah Poynter stories, As a Sealed Book: Five Mysteries From the Pulp Era is finally available for purchase!  Get it in ebook or paperback here!  Share, tell your friends, leave a review, etc.!  Most of all, though, please enjoy it!  Due to varying public domain laws, it unfortunately isn’t available worldwide, but it is available in the United States (obviously), Canada, the UK, and Australia.  (I’ll have to research the laws of other countries to see if I can make it available elsewhere, but for now, I figure the major English markets are a good place to start.)

I restrained myself from posting about it here as often as I truly wanted to (you’re welcome 😅), but man, what a ride.  I basically had everything done a mere couple days after my last update, but then I had to wait for paperback proofs (ended up having to order two, because the first had a printing issue related to how I’d saved the file), then I had to wait for the approval process, and then I realized the ebook had a formatting problem (weird spacing in first paragraphs, which I just fixed today).  I learned a lot and will definitely be applying it to future endeavors, because—oh, yeah—I’ll for sure be compiling more of these.  Next up will be another Beulah Poynter collection; unlike the standalone stories of As a Sealed Book, it’ll be five loosely-connected pieces that, together, function as proto-police procedurals (recurring characters, but the individual focus shifts with each installment).  After that, I have a couple other ideas, and I’d frankly love to get a romance anthology together, but I…uh…need to hunt down more love pulps that are officially in the public domain.  I have a couple at this point (and some have been digitized), but they’re a bit scarcer than later issues, and their prices tend to be unreasaonably inflated.  :/  Still, I’m very excited by the prospect of making some of these stories, particularly the romance ones, more widely available!

As a Sealed Book updates: Tfw you know/remember just enough graphic design skills to be dangerous to yourself.

(First off, apologies to those who follow me for reviews—they will return, I promise!)

In Beulah Poynter news, however, we are so close to launch!  The full cover is complete (see below), the paperback version is all laid out, and all I need to do is figure out how to make an epub—something I am led to believe will be a lot easier than everything that has come before it.  I am hopeful things will be available for sale, at least in some fashion, as early as next week.  (I’ll want to do a proof of the paperback before I release that format to the wild, so a lot depends on how long it takes for that to physically get to me.)

On the one hand, I’m disappointed this project has taken twice as long as I initially intended (real ones will remember I was originally aiming for the beginning of May—oh, the naive optimism!).  On the other hand, approximately two months from literal conception to finished product is still pretty damn good, yeah?  Especially considering I’m literally doing ALL the work myself, and there was a steep learning curve, as it’s my first attempt at self-publishing.  (On that note, part of the delay is not only because I decided—insanely—to make two fonts for the cover, but because I also took a week out to teach myself Scribus, AKA the open-source equivalent of InDesign, just so I could make the paperback look more professional.  Once upon a time I was formally studying graphic design, and it turns out that shit will ruin you for life.)

Anyway, enjoy the formal front and back covers (sans barcode)!

Announcement: As a Sealed Book (or, join me as I hop on the self-pub bandwagon).

The blog has been pretty quiet as of late, and that’s mostly because I’ve (shock!—gasp!) been busy putting a short story collection together!  (Actually multiple collections—at least two—but we’ll get to that.)  Long story short, I fell deep into a Beulah Poynter hole, hunted down some neat mysteries she wrote in the late-1910s and early-’20s, found myself thinking what a shame it was that they were never formally collected, and then decided to…collect them myself?  After all, I have no industry clout, but I do have graphic design skills, and self-publishing is a viable option these days, so…why not, yeah?

So click through to see the (working) cover reveal!  (I may yet tweak the font sizes a little.)

“Mystery In Room 913”: I wish you would step back from that ledge, my friend.

They thought it was the Depression the first time it happened.  They guy had checked in one night in the black March of ’33, in the middle of the memorable bank holiday.  He was well-dressed and respectable looking.  He had baggage with him, plenty of it, so he wasn’t asked to pay in advance.  Everyone was short of ready cash that week.  Besides, he’d asked for the weekly rate.

He signed the register James Hopper, Schenectady, and Dennison, eyeing the red vacancy-tags in the pigeon-holes, pulled out the one in 913 at random and gave him that.  Not the vacancy tag, the room.  The guest went up, okayed the room, and George the bell hop was sent up with his bags.  George came down and reported a dime without resentment; it was ’33, after all.

“Mystery In Room 913” is a novella by Cornell Woolrich, first published in the June 4, 1938 issue of Detective Fiction Weekly.  Since then it has seen a number of reprintings, including in 1987’s Death Locked In (where it was published under the title “The Room With Something Wrong”).  It’s actually available digitally these days, but if Kindle/Amazon isn’t your bag, and you can’t find it elsewhere, let it be known that it was also reprinted in the December 1949 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, which you can find through the Luminist Archives.  In short, it revolves around hotel detective Striker, as he, well, tries to solve the mystery of room 913 of the St. Anselm Hotel, a classic Room That Kills—within the span of about two years, three people (all single men) have jumped to their deaths from the French window.  Despite the suicide notes (all short, all unsigned), Striker suspects murder, which leads to an investigation full of colorful characters:  There’s the Chinese-American couple, the Youngs, whose Pekingese dog always seems to whine before each death; there’s Miss Flobelle Heilbron, prototypical Crazy Cat Lady who’s also practicing mesmerism on the sly; there’s “trusting and childlike” Peter the Hermit, who was conned into buying useless goldmines in Canada; and then there’s city cop Eddie Courlander, who’s somehow always the one assigned to the case, and also all-too eager to chalk each incident up as self-inflicted…

“One Last Night”/“I’ll Take You Home, Kathleen”: Gender politics and race relations and explorations on masculinity, oh my!

They didn’t say it, but you could almost hear it beating on the air around her from all sides:  “Kathleen, don’t.  Look out.  Be careful.”

Another girl said, “Kathleen, can I talk to you alone a minute?” and drew her a step away, while he stood there alone in the crowd.  He didn’t hear what the girl was whispering to her, but he didn’t have to; he could have told what it was word for word.  “Kathleen, take my advice, don’t go alone with him.  He’s been in jail, so I heard; he’s probably not the same as he was.  And these men that feel they’ve been thrown over are dangerous; sometimes they turn on you when you least expect it.”

“One Last Night” is a short story/novelette by Cornell Woolrich, first published in the May 1940 issue of Detective Story Magazine and then later collected (under the new title, “I’ll Take You Home, Kathleen”) in the 1956 anthology Nightmare.  The original pulp issue can be found through the Luminist Archives, or (at least if you’re in the U.S.?) a digitized copy of Nightmare can be found through Hathitrust.  (Heads up that if you’re interested in giving it a read, I’d recommend the Nightmare version if at all possible.  As was seemingly often the case, Woolrich revised the story before its 1956 republication, so the two versions are slightly different.  I get into the details later.)

“The Case of the Maladroit Manicurist”: An adorable little crackerjack of a mystery, with bonus commentary about how you shouldn’t harass women at their workplaces.

Suddenly a door opened and a nattily-dressed man emerged, on his way out of the offices.  He stopped for a minute by the receptionist and Scanlon did his homework all over him.  Palmer didn’t look ten years older than the photo his wife had shown Scanlon, he looked ten years younger.  The private dick thought with an inner chuckle:  “If this mitt-repairer has been able to do that to him, she’d put a guy her own age right back in short pants.”

“The Case of the Maladroit Manicurist” is a short story/novelette by Cornell Woolrich, first published in the May 1941 issue of Dime Detective Magazine.  It’s one of his rarer tales (I think, to date, it might have only been collected in the 1985 anthology, Blind Date With Death?), but luckily you can find a PDF version of the pulp issue through the Luminist Archives.

The plot follows Scanlon, a private investigator who gets hired by one Mrs. Hedda Palmer.  She suspects her husband is having an affair with his manicurist, and she wants Scanlon to identify the girl so that Hedda can pay her off (and thus get rid of her).  So Scanlon follows Mr. Palmer to the barbershop one day, meets Joan Blaine (the manicurist in question), and everything is going fine—until Mr. Palmer falls over dead in the middle of his manicure, that is.  Superficial evidence points to Joan, but the whole thing seems fishy to Scanlon, so he makes it his mission to unravel the mystery while also protecting Joan from the police.