Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 98, No. 4 & 5. Whole No. 588 & 589, October 1991

Issue #588 — Dedicated To Clark Howard

Clark Howard has been a constant favorite with our readers since be began publishing in these pages 11 years ago. Since then he’s been a frequent nominee and recipient of our annual Readers Award and MWA’s Edgar Awards in the best short story and best fact-crime book categories. His concerns are for the outcast, the minority, the prisoner — and he has woven these concerns into some of the most exciting short fiction being written today. Stories like “Horn Man,” “Puerto Rican Blues,” “Animals,” “Scalplock,” “The Color of Death,” “The Dakar Run,” and “Challenge the Widow-Maker,” are examples of his modern classics.

In an interview we published in 1981, the author had this to say about his beginnings: “I was born in Tennessee in 1934. My father was ‘Tennessee Slim’ Howard, a bootlegger in business with George Barnes, who later became ‘Machine Gun’ Kelly. My father was sent to federal prison and my mother took me to Chicago. She overdosed on drugs and died, and I became a ward of Cook County. I lived in foster homes until I was twelve... and was a chronic runaway. I was finally put in reform school as an incorrigible. My maternal grandmother got me out two years later and had me sent back to Tennessee. I was still a bad kid, so my grandmother agreed to sign falsified papers so I could join the Marine Corps. I enlisted just before my seventeenth birthday and I literally grew up in the Corps. Many of my personal values, my neatness, my ability to organize, my self-confidence, were all learned in the Corps. It was my family and my teacher during some very important years.

“Back in Chicago, when I was 20 and out of the Marines, I got a night job switching freight cars for the railroad, and enrolled at Northwestern University on the G.I. Bill, taking journalism and creative writing. I became disenchanted with formal education though and began writing based on my own experience.”

His fiction novels include The Killings, Dirt Rich, Quicksilver and most recently Hard City (Dutton). His non-fiction books include Six Against the Rock, Zebra, Brothers in Blood and he is currently researching a new work of fact-crime, tentatively titled Love’s Blood...