Mum - Re EQMM Harvard Contest

September 20, 1950

Dear Doc:

My cousin and partner-in-crime, Fred Dannay, has come up with an idea which attracts both of us very much. It involves Harvard, and initially will mean a talk with the proper person or persons at the University. I thought you might be able to tell us whom to approach.

The plan is this: Broadly, to encourage under-graduate students of Creative Writing to write for publication in our field, which is the field of the mystery and detective and crime short story. Specifically, we would like to institute a prize contest for Harvard undergraduate students of Creative Writing, the contest to be run under the auspices of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, with the material intended for publication in EQMM.

To do this, obviously, and especially to do it right, would require the active cooperation of the Harvard English faculty, or at least that part of it which is concerned with creative writing. The idea would be to integrate the mystery-detective-crime story - its character, creative problems, technique, etc. - into the Creative Writing curriculum. The stories of the genre done in this course or these courses would aim toward entry into the EQMM contest, and the best of them - perhaps screened by the teacher or teachers involved - would be entered formally in the contest.

The plan is geared, I think, to a growing (and healthy) tendency in writing courses to implement purely creative teaching with practical considerations of publication. From our (editorial) standpoint it is a tendency highly worth supporting and encouraging. The writers of tomorrow are the students of today.

In casting about for a university to approach, we hit naturally upon Harvard for its pedagogical pre-eminence in creative writing. We believe the plan has great value for all concerned and that Harvard is the place to launch it. If it produces satisfactory results at Harvard, we would be encouraged to extend the plan to include other great universities, so that eventually the contest and

2.

the plan on which it is based would embrace a nation-
wide coverage of universities. But we feel that it
ought to be tried at Harvard, as the outstanding
proving ground.

The contest would be self-renewing, either,
semi-annually or annually, depending on how it worked
out in practise.

If you are familiar with Ellery Queen's Mystery
Magazine, you know the quality of publication it is.
Fred has done a really bang-up job with it. For years
now it has been considered unique in the field. It
has not only brought to the attention of readers un-
known stories of mystery, detection, and crime by
authors of literary stature who were never even sus-
pected of having written in our field - and written
superbly - but it has also offered the work of new
writers and it keeps offering such work. Some of our
younger writers, unknown before EQMM discovered them,
have already gone on to other fields and are well
set in a literary career. Publication in EQMM has
come to be regarded, by writers of international
repute as well as by tyros, as a sort of accolade.
Only a magazine of EQMM's quality and reputation
could qualify as sponsor of such a project, which
I am sure is an important consideration. The work
of bibliographic scholarship alone which Fred has
done in and for the field of the detective short
story justifies our claim of pre-eminence.

Doc, who at Harvard is in the proper person to
approach on this plan? For obvious reasons, we
should not like to make a faux pas in protocol.
If you can advise me in this particular, what we
should like to do is come up to Cambridge for a
talk with the proper person or persons at which we
would present the plan and be prepared to discuss
it in all its ramifications. Time is a considera-
tion, as - if a satisfactory and agreeable arrange-
ment can be made - we should like to see the contest
plan started as quickly as possible. In fact, we
are hoping that an appointment can be arranged
for either the end of next week (say the 26th or
29th of September) or the beginning of the week fol-
lowing (the 2nd or 3rd of October). Perhaps you
would like to arrange the appointment yourself and
even plan to sit in on it, which we should enjoy
very much. I want to see you anyway, for personal
reasons, and I plan to do so - with your consent -
whether you join the discussion or not. And I would
like to present Fred to you; he is most anxious to
meet you. It's even possible that Fred's wife, Bill,
and mine - Kaye - may come to Boston with us.