The Dean of Whodunits

The early days for Larry Treat weren't all shrimp, you know, but he got by. He wanted to be a don't we all—but there wasn't mubh in it for a kid out of Dartmouth who liked writing poems. He went into, law for his living. When the firm split up in '2B, though, Treat was the odd man out. He took his $350 worth of thanks and bolted, gambling he'd find something useful in Europe. He was down and out in Paris when he discovered the pulps: cheap paperback thrillers with titles like Top Notch and Dime Detective. Ik: sold a piece about a rich guy being blackmailed, and bang sold it just like that. It wasn't poetry, he'd tell you that, but at least it was words. "That was my Rubicon," he'd say later. He started writing crime puzzles during the Depression for a quarter-cent a word, and they got around. Doubleday came knocking. Wanted to put a bunch of those puzzles together in a book, call it "Bringing Sherlock Home." Treat would still have to write for the pulps for a few years after that (the publisher would send him a title. Please Pass thePython or The Blonde in the Ambassador's Bed, and Treat would crank out a Story to go with it). But he was on his way.

Knock around the underworld of mystery writers today and you'll see Lawrence Treat in every dark corner you come to. In half a century of mystery writing, Treat has worked all the angles: more than 20 books (including an acclaimed series B as in Banshee, D as in Dead...), more than 100 short stories, pieces in 27 mystery anthologies. Be has won the Edgar Allan Poe award (the "Edgar," to those on the inside, a big deal), won it three times in fact. He helped start up the Mystery Writers of America-and served as its president. They. say he was the first to write the police procedural genre (realistic stories of police at work), the first to do crime puzzles.

He's doing them still, now 90 and living year-round on Martha's Vineyard, Massachusetts. His "Grime and Puzzlement" series sells copies in the six figures, and the puzzles are used in the schools as teaching tools across the United States and Canada. He's a long way from a quarter-cent a word and The Blonde in theAmbassadom Bed, but he's still cranking them out. He told me, last time I saw him, '"When I cease to write, I die,' a friend of mine once said. I think there's something to that." Jim Collins 'M