Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-226878-20150710200046/@comment-70.27.67.203-20151119162312

To Cyrania de Bergerac: Dupin might be out of the running because of the anonymous sidekick, tho calling him Nemo Somecolor and giving him an invisibility semblance might work.

Now, I haven't read 'The Woman in White', the Wilkie Collins book in ages, but it has popped up again in the public's sight. There's a bumbling detective as well as the brilliant one, and Collins' last name in Welsh is hazel, the hazel tree. So there's a color tie for the character.

If we want to get away from the early classics for a little time, there's Ellery Queen in 'The Roman Hat Mystery' which the writers abominated, though it won a contest, because it was built on Philo Vance, quite rightly thinking him the snob of all snobs. Ellery means island of elder trees; EQ showed up in the late twenties. People can ID him because he's always in print and the magazine named after him keeps a going and a going. His sidekick is his father, who is a New York Poice detective. His stories are classic mysteries, revealing the clues so the reader can follow him. In you dig far enough, vocalist Sigrid Hausen for the band Qntal, saw 'Queen' spelled in fire. Works for me re: Richard Queen.

There's also Dashiel Hammit, best known for the Nick and Nora Charles comedy mysteries, but the original 'The Thin Man' is a legitimate, serious mystery with no carousing in it. 1934. He also wrote 'The Maltese Falcon' (1930) and 'The Red Harvest' (1929), well thought of in its time. It trips into the hard-boiled field, but the 'Thin Man' is a definite mystery. And it has Asta, the fox terrier, as his partner, not Nora! (Zwie being the prototype.)

Poirot first appears in the 20s. I don't know if you have a cut-off date for these, up or down. Personally, I like the Asey Mayo books, the first lot of books Phoebe Atwood Taylor wrote in the 30s-40s, but I don't think anyone but me ever heard of them. Dear, dear.