At the Scene, Spring Issue #167
Hello Everyone!
Look who we found hiding out with the crockery at a Connecticut estate sale! Because the sale included items from many sources, there’s no easy way to establish ownership. But, of course, there are only a few people that it could have belonged to. Was it Jack Webb’s Edgar for the radio drama
Dragnet? It would be fitting if it once belonged to John Collier.
For this issue, Art Taylor assigned himself the task of reading all the Edgar short story winners from the founding of Mystery Writers of America to the present. In 1952, Collier’s “outlandish and gymnastic prose” resulted in an Edgar Award for the collection
“SWF” was “a real game changer for him,” said award-winning book critic Oline Cogdill, who reviews mysteries for the South Florida Sun-Sentinel and other publications. “Before that, he had written a lot of things in the 1970s and 1980s that were well-received, solid books. ‘SWF’ put him on the next level. But he still never got the attention that he deserved.”
During winters in Sarasota, Lutz was a regular at the Liars Club, a group of writers who gather weekly to play poker and swap stories. The group was founded in 1953 by authors John D. MacDonald and MacKinlay Kantor.
“For many years, he joined us each Friday. He was a very kind, gentle and quiet man with a wry sense of humor,” said Richard “Doc” Glidewell, the club s historian.