|
Book Home  Famous Authors George Bagby
George Bagby
George Bagby was the nom de plume of the American novelist Aaron Marc Stein specialized in mystery fiction. Bagby's focus was on police investigators, especially the fictional Inspector Schmidt, Chief of Homicide for the New York Police Department. In the Schmidt novels, mystery-writer Bagby himself appears as "the Watson to Schmidt's Holmes, following him on cases, and acting as biographer". A number of his novels have been translated into other languages, including German, French and Spanish.
Stein was born in 1906 in New York City. He attended Princeton University, graduating with a degree in archaeology and also summa cum laude. His early avante-garde novels came to the attention of Theodore Dreiser and were published, but he did not gain much fame till he moved into writing mysteries. In addition to Bagby, he also published mystery novels under his own name, and under the pseudonym "Hampton Stone."
He held a position as a radio critic for a New York newspaper in the 1930s, and then went to work for Time magazine.During World War II he worked as with the US Army. His army work may have involved cryptography or language translation.
Over 100 novels by Stein eventually saw publication, and for his lifetime achievements the Mystery Writers of America awarded him as a Grand Master in the 1979 Edgar awards. His final book was published in 1984, entitled "The Garbage Collector". Stein died at the age of 79, of cancer, on August 29, 1985.
In addition to the hero of most of the Bagby novels, Inspector Schmidt, Stein also created a New York City Assistant District Attorney named Jeremiah Gibson for the books published under the Stone pseudonym, and archaeologist detectives Tim Mulligan and Elsie Mae Hunt, as well as engineer Matt Herridge, for the mysteries published under his own name.
1930 was the year of the publication of Stein's first novel. His first mystery was published in 1935, "Murder at the Piano." The first novel written as Stone was entitled "The Corpse in the Corner Saloon." It was reviewed in the New York Times in 1948, though, when the series was republished in 1968-1971, "The Corpse in the Corner Saloon" was labeled as book 10 in the series .
Selected listed of novels by Bagby
- The Most Wanted (1983)
- My Dead Body (1976)
- Two in the Bush (1976)
- Killer Boy Was Here
- Cop Killer
- Bead Storage
- A Dirty Way to Die
- Dead Drunk
- Scared to Death (1952)
- Drop Dead
- In Cold Blood
- Red Is for Killing
- Murder on the Nose
- Murder at the Piano
- Bachelors' Wife
- Give the Little Corpse a Great Big Hand
|
|
