ALTHOUGH NOT A PROLIFIC AUTHOR, the stories and novels of James Yaffe (1927–) have acquired a following deeply devoted to his exceptional narratives of fair-play detective fiction. Born in Chicago, he moved to New York City at an early age and wrote his first story while still in high school. That effort, “Department of Impossible Crimes,” was published in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, launching a series of stories about Paul Dawn and the fictional division of the NYPD that he heads. Yaffe then created his most popular detective character, Mom, a Jewish widow who lives in the Bronx. A true armchair detective, Mom solves cases for her son, a detective, merely by listening to his accounts of the evidence during their traditional Friday-night dinners. These stories were frequent winners in the annual EQMM contests and spawned five novels, beginning with A Nice Murder for Mom (1988).
After Yaffe graduated from Yale, he served in the navy and spent a full year in Paris before launching his writing career. A book of non-mystery stories, Poor Cousin Evelyn (1951), received good reviews, followed by Nothing but the Night (1957), a fictionalized version of the famous Leopold-Loeb murder trial. He has written several plays, the best known being The Deadly Game (1960), an adaptation of Friedrich Dürrenmatt’s Traps; it was the basis for a 1982 television movie with George Segal, Trevor Howard, and Robert Morley. With Jerome Weidman, Yaffe wrote the drama Ivory Tower (1969), in which an American poet in 1943 calls for soldiers to lay down their arms in the face of the Nazi onslaught and is accused of treason. Yaffe wrote for numerous TV series, including Studio One, The U.S. Steel Hour, Suspicion, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
“Department of Impossible Crimes” was first published in the July 1943 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.