Since this is the last day of the Gold Medal theme, I though
that, for those of you who, like me, are into the crime
genre's "statistical lore" I'd write a bit
about Gold Medal books that have won the Edgar award.
The very first Edgar-winning Gold Medal was THE GIRL WITH THE
SCARLET BRAND by Charles Boswell and Lewis Thompson which won
the 1954 Edgar for Best Fact-Crime.
I know nothing about this book other than that it was
part of a series of true-crime books Gold Medal did, each
title starting with the words THE GIRL . . . .
One of these books, THE GIRL ON THE RED VELVET SWING,
was made into a movie. SCARLET BRAND never made it onto the
screen, but it did achieve some distinction by being the very
first PBO to win an Edgar in any category.
In 1969, MWA first instituted the "Best Paperback
Original Novel" category and for the first few years,
Gold Medal dominated.
The first winner was THE DRAGON'S EYE by Scott C.S. Stone, a
dynamite spy novel set in Southeast Asia and China. A new
edition is available from Iuniverse. Stone currently lives in
the Big Island of Hawai'i where he's and
"author-in-residence" at the University of
Hawai'i's Hilo campus.
A year later, Dan J. Marlowe's FLASHPOINT (also published as
OPERATION FLASHPOINT) was named Best PBO of 1970. This was
one of Marlowe's Drake novels, and while it did win the
award, many Marlowe fans consider this book the beginning of
the series' decline since it continued the main character's
metamorphosis from professional crook to secret agent, a
change-over virtually complete by the next book.
The best PBO of 1972 was Richard Wormser's THE INVADER.
Wormser wrote both westerns and gangster novels, and he
combined the two genres in this rural police procedural about
a small-town sheriff in the contemporary southwest who must
deal with the infestation of his community by Mafia
types.
The last Edgar-winning Gold Medal was Roy Winsor's THE CORPSE
THAT WALKED. Not hard-boiled by any stretch of the
imagination, this classic whodunit about a mystery-solving
college professor is, nevertheless, quite enjoyable.
Other Gold Medals were nominated in subsequent years
(Donald Hamilton was nominated twice for THE TERRORIZERS and
THE RETALIATORS, but, inexplicably, never won), but,
ironically, the last Edgar-winner for Gold Medal, a publisher
closely identified with the hard-boiled crime novel, was a
cozy.
JIM DOHERTY
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