If you want to blame someone, try Edgar Allan Poe. He’s the guy who started it. Or did he? Maybe this would be a good place to mention Mauritz Christopher Hansen. A Norwegian writer, born 1794, died 1842. In 1827 he published “Novellen” (“The Short Story”), an armchair detective mystery concerning a case of murder and revenge. So he got there first, well ahead of Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” but he wrote in Norwegian, with the result that nobody ever heard of him. Well, nobody outside of Norway. Matter of fact, you wouldn’t have heard of him either, if your Norwegian friend Nils Nordberg hadn’t told you about him. Memo: E-mail Nils, suggest he translate Hansen for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Either “Novellen” or his short novel, Mordet paa Maskinbygger Roolfsen (“The Murder of Engineer Roolfsen”).
Still, what did Hansen start? If a tree falls in a forest, and only Norwegians can hear it, it’s not exactly the shot heard round the world, is it? Poe started it, but who cares? I mean, how many lame introductions have already trotted out poor old Poe? Think of something else, will you?
It’s a rare pleasure to introduce Blood on Their Hands, the latest collection of stories by members of Mystery Writers of America. MWA, as its name implies, is an organization of American mystery writers who...
Duh. Who write American mysteries, and they hammer them out one inspired word at a time, even as you are attempting to pound out this introduction. Do you really want to bore everybody with the history of the organization, explaining how a handful of hacks and drunks banded together, adopted the motto “Crime Does Not Pay. Enough!” And, when they weren’t busy hacking and drinking, got on with the serious business of giving one another awards. You can fill space this way, but do you want to?
It’s a fine organization, MWA, and virtually every crime writer of distinction is proud to be a member of it. But everybody knows that, so why waste their time telling them?
Start over.
The stories you are about to read...
...Are guaranteed to cure cancer, ensure world peace, and solve once and for all the problem of global warming. They’re excellent stories, as it happens, but what can you say about them that will make them more of a treat than they already are?
It’s my great pleasure...
Yeah, I can tell. You know something? You’ve done too many introductions, my friend, and you’re getting worse at it, and you were never that good in the first place. You always used to start out by decrying the whole idea of an introduction, urging readers to get on with it and read the stories themselves, and now you seem determined to prove how dopey an introduction can be by mumbling and stammering and generally behaving like an idiot. You promised them an intro. Write it, will you? Just spit it out!
It all started with Poe.
Great, just brilliant. “It all started with Poe.” And here’s where it stops.
—Lawrence Block