Books › Blue Book v074 n02 [1941-12], 1941 › scan 1
Scan 1
Blue Book v074 n02 [1941-12], 1941
26 lines. Read by computer on 18 September 2026. No printed page number was found. See the scan on archive.org.
1Who's Who In This Issue
3PETER B. KYNE
5THE old master who wrote "Cappy Ricks" and "The Valley of the Giants" needs little introduction to you. Like the other writers on this page, he was born in California—San Francisco. Prominent episodes in his vivid career, aside from his great success as a writer, have been his army service in the Philippines and as an artillery officer in the World War. We like to recall some of Peter Kyne's many Blue Book titles: "Big Tim Meagher" (1916), "The New Partner," "The Widow's Mite," "The Sheriff of Panamint," "General McNeil Plays a Hunch," and "Misery Bails out" (1940). Don't miss "The Sheriff of Los Brancos," (beginning on page 20)
7RALPH CONDON
9BORN and raised on a California ranch: Following that, and in somewhere near the order mentioned, although the dates and durations of those pursuits are somewhat foggy in my mind, I was: a garage-hand, truck-driver, oil-worker, rancher, flunky in a lumber-camp, tractor-driver, rancher again, mine mucker, newspaper reporter, salesman, newspaper reporter again, associate editor of a New York magazine which "folded," and lastly, back to the writing business, at which I had labored since the oil-worker era.
11On looking over the foregoing, I see only hash—made more of potatoes than meat and of doubtful seasoning—but such as it is, it is my hash, and I made it myself.
13Future hash, however, I trust will not only be better balanced but better cooked, because I have a wife who not only is vastly smarter than I am, but she can ski better than I can. This last is a shameful admission, but at least I have the satisfaction of knowing that compared with me, she is still just a raw hand with a fly-rod.
15GEOFFREY HOMES
17GEOFFREY HOMES, author of "Forty Whacks," started writing mysteries because of a semicolon. Some years back he was a rewrite man for a Los Angeles newspaper. Got into an argument with the managing editor over the proper use of semicolons, which ended in both agreeing that Homes should go to the cashier and get his time. So he went home, and wrote "The Man Who Murdered Himself." That was in 1934. "Forty Whacks" is his eighth "whodunit." Homes insists he was right in the semicolon argument.
19"But editors are strange fellows," he says. "You can't convince them of anything."
21Homes is a native Californian. Born in the Sierra foothills in 1902 near a town called Squaw Valley; went to school in Fresno, graduated from Fresno State College and got a job teaching agriculture in Los Angeles. Lasted a year. "The members of the board of education were unanimous in thinking I knew nothing about agriculture," he says. So he became a reporter. He thinks the most exciting thing that happened to him in the newspaper business was the time he covered a poultry show for the Examiner.
23"Mr. Hearst spotted me," he explains. "Told me to get a moving-van and take all the chickens to San Simeon. It seems he had bought out the show. I didn't argue. The trip took two days, and the hardest part of it was trying to keep the van driver from stopping alongside the road and cooking one of the five-hundred-dollar roosters."
25For the past year, Homes has been living in a cabin near Northfork, Madera County. His wife, Sally, is an ex-dancer. "She used to work for the Shuberts," he says. "Sometimes I think she feels that the Shuberts weren't so bad after all."
The computer misreads some letters and numbers. Where a name matters to you, read the scan.