of James Yaffe (1927–2017) have featured 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 Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine contests and spawned five novels, beginning with A Nice Murder for Mom (1988).
Born in Chicago, Yaffe 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. The clever plotting garnered Yaffe a following deeply devoted to his exceptional narratives of fair-play detective fiction.
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 wrote 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 television series, including Studio One, The U.S. Steel Hour, Suspicion, and The Alfred Hitchcock Hour.
“Mom Sings an Aria” was originally published in the October 1966 issue of Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine; it was first collected in My Mother, the Detective (Norfolk, Virginia, Crippen & Landru, 1997).