Joan Kahn (April 13, 1914 – October 12, 1994) was a New York City-based American author, anthologist, and editor, widely regarded as the preeminent mystery/suspense editor of her time.Barkham, John. "Of Books and Authors: Joan Kahn of Dutton Co. is Leading 'Mystery Editor'". The Youngstown Vindicator. September 19, 1982.Haller, Tod. "Imprint Publishing: A Capsule History". New York Magazine. December 4, 1978.Boucher, Anthony. "Criminals at Large". The New York Times Book Review. November 13, 1967. Described variously as the "doyenne of suspense,"Blades, John. "Doyenne of Suspense and the New Mother Crime". The Chicago Tribune. January 25, 1990. Retrieved February 20, 2025. "the doyenne of mystery editors," and "publishing's grande dame of detective stories,"Dudar, Helen. "Caretaker of Whodunits". The Los Angeles Times. January 2, 1981 Kahn first came to prominence during her extended reign (1946-1980) at Harper & Brothers (later Harper & Row), much of it spent creating and overseeing the longstanding "Harper Novel of Suspense" series. The Joan Kahn imprint, instituted during her Harper tenure, soon became a sought-after imprimatur for mystery connoisseurs.Rule, Sheila. "Joan Kahn, Respected Editor of Mysteries, Dies". The New York Times. October 13, 1994. Some of Kahn's more celebrated signings include John Creasey, Patricia Highsmith, Julian Symons, Dick Francis, and Tony Hillerman.
Early life Born and raised in New York City, Kahn was the eldest child of architect Eli Jacques Kahn and Elsie [Plaut] Kahn, and the sister of writer E.J. Kahn. An alumna of the Horace Mann School, the Yale School of Art, Barnard College, and the Art Students League of New York, Kahn wrote one children's book (which she also illustrated),"Latest Books Received". The New York Times Book Review. October 9, 1938. See also: "LADIES AND GENTLEMEN SAID THE RINGMASTER" (Newspaper ad featuring Kahn's illustration). The New York Times. November 9, 1938. 'Ladies and Gentlemen' said the Ringmaster (1938), and two novels, To Meet Miss Long (1943) and Open House (1946), before embarking on her editorial career.
Career Neither immediate nor by design, Kahn's career change was, in fact, incremental, circuitous, and, on Kahn's part, entirely unwitting. Her initial employment at Harper was as a manuscript reader, only later being recruited by Frederick Lewis Allen as an editor at Harper's Magazine, before finally being brought back by Harper & Brothers to help overhaul the publisher's antiquated mystery department. Even after these respective promotions, Kahn had no inkling that her current livelihood was soon to become her life's work.Nichols, Lewis. "American Notebook: Mystery Lady". The New York Times. April 28, 1968. Both her training and her aspirations at that time were primarily in the visual arts; aside from being a published author, Kahn was both a painter and a sculptor, as well as a stage and costume designer."Joan Kahn, author of 'To Meet Miss Long'..." (captioned photo promoting Kahn's first novel). The Hartford Courant. February 28, 1943.
As she would tell The New York Times in 1968, Kahn initially viewed the Harper job as merely a "temporary thing," and never more so than when poring through roughly 200 previously rejected manuscripts, the reevaluation of which was one of the first tasks assigned the fledgling "Harper Novels of Suspense" team. However, when one of the handful she ended up accepting, The Horizontal Man by Helen Eustis, went on to win the Mystery Writers of America's annual Edgar Award for best first novel of 1947, Kahn quickly reconsidered. Her initial misgivings forgotten, Kahn aggressively pursued her newfound calling. Speaking with The Chicago Tribune in 1990, shortly after her retirement, she recalled: I was so bloody lucky. Here I was, absolutely untrained and a dame. In those days, women didn't get many jobs in publishing. I was a snotty little girl... I was scared. I didn't know what I was doing. But I happened to be working for very bright people, who gave me my head. They allowed me to play.
This freedom allowed Kahn to wield extraordinary power, purging Harper of the majority of its largely hidebound roster of mystery writers, sparing only John Dickson Carr and Nicholas Blake (aka C. Day Lewis).Blades, John. "Editors at the Scene of Crime's Path from Potboiler to a Gentler Genre; Editors (Continued from page 1)". The Chicago Tribune. January 25, 1990. Retrieved February 20, 2025.
As an editor, Kahn was both devoted to her authors and extremely demanding – by her own account, "a nasty editor." She would not buy a book until it was fully fit to print; to that end, she worked long hours collaborating with her prospective authors. Moreover, no amount of previously successful collaborations between Kahn and a given author guaranteed publication of that author's next novel.
Appearing in The New York Times in November 1967, Anthony Boucher's enthusiastic review of the first of 11 suspense anthologies Kahn would produce over the following twenty years provides a concise summary of the previous twenty: One of the best editors I know has never had her name on a book until this season. You know the reliable quality of the "Harper Novels of Suspense," and the disproportionate frequency with which they turn up on my Best-of-the-Year lists. Well, it is Joan Kahn who has, over the past two decades, made the Harper imprint meaningful in suspense, who made us acquainted with the giants of the modern English school (Julian Symons, Andrew Garve, Michael Gilbert, etc.), who taught John Creasey and the American public how to discover each other, who introduced probably the most important new suspense writers of the 1960s (Nicolas Freeling and Dick Francis) - and if her track record with American authors is less impressive, still John Ball, Ed Lacy and Elizabeth Linington are not precisely negligible.
In fact, few better examples could be found of Kahn's tough-love approach to editing than her 1965 collaboration with the then largely unknown John Ball; in coaxing from him the Edgar Award-winning In the Heat of the Night (itself the basis of the multi-award-winning film of the same name, starring Sidney Poitier and Rod Steiger), Kahn's accomplishment, at least as perceived by critic and fellow editor Otto Penzler, was Svengali-like: Ball, in spite of creating the iconic Virgil Tibbs, was an excruciatingly bad writer, his prose more wooden than Sherwood Forest. He had a terrific idea for a novel, assigning a black policeman down South to work with a redneck sheriff, and sent it off to the greatest mystery editor who ever lived, Joan Kahn. She painstakingly worked with Ball to rewrite again and again, finally pulling a book out of him that was good enough to win the Edgar Allan Poe Award.Penzler, Otto. "The Dark Secrets Of Black Noir". The New York Sun. August 16, 2006.
Two of Kahn's key seventies signings, Tony Hillerman and Joseph Hansen, not only unleashed two hitherto frustrated novelists, but also introduced two groundbreaking American protagonists, Hillerman's Navajo Tribal Police Lieutenant Joe Leaphorn and Joseph Hansen's unapologetically gay insurance investigator Dave Brandstetter.Shenitz, Bruce. "Father Crime". Out. September 2003. Looking back in 1985, fifteen years after the fact, and again almost two decades later, Hansen recalls both the initial agonizing delay in publication and the ensuing mutual incredulity when Kahn finally came to the rescue: But before there were reviews, there had to be a published book. And that took some doing. It also took three years. Publishers were leery of my matter-of-fact, non-apologetic approach to a subject that the rule book said had to be treated sensationally or not at all. At last a brave lady named Joan Kahn took a chance on me.Baird, Newton. "Hansen, Joseph" in Twentieth Century Crime and Mystery Writers, edited by James Vinson and D.L. Kirkpatrick. St. James Press, 1985. . pp. 498. Cited in: When Kahn, magisterial mystery editor at Harper & Row, accepted this novel for publication, she wrote my agent, "Where's this writer been hiding?" I had to laugh to keep from crying. Hiding was the last thing I wanted to do... I'd been writing for 46 years.
Hillerman had an analogous tale to tell (a three-year travail, complete with Kahn cast as the deus ex machina), recounted shortly after his death by Jack Adrian in The Independent: His first book, The Blessing Way (1970), took him three years to write and then three months to rewrite after Joan Kahn, the mystery editor at Harper's, sent him a detailed critique, telling him to "beef up" one of his secondary characters. "Ironically," Hillerman said, "that character was Joe Leaphorn. I'd originally had a white anthropologist as the protagonist. I owe my career to Joan Kahn."Adrian, Jack. "Tony Hillerman: Writer who won critical acclaim for his tales of Navajo crime fighters". The Independent. October 30, 2008.
The exact circumstances of Kahn's departure from Harper & Row in early 1980 remain unclear; contemporary press accounts offer no specifics. For her part, speaking with the Los Angeles Times in December of that year, Kahn suggests the move was her choice, a reluctant response to Harper's increasingly bottom-line orientation: I left Harper with my heart breaking, but it was getting bigger and bigger. Since the only thing I really give a damn about is the authors, and they weren't being taken care of, I thought I'd better go and find a place that would love them more. I think little places can afford to do that. However, in a 2011 obituary for editor Ruth Cavin, a recollection by Thomas McCormack (formerly Kahn's colleague at Harper, and later the CEO at St. Martin's Press, where Kahn would finish her career), is cited to the effect that, in 1980, Kahn, then 65, had simply been "retired" by her longtime employers.Shatzkin, Mike. "Ruth Cavin, great editor and world's nicest person, gone at 92". The Shatzkin Files. January 10, 2011. "McCormack (another Doubleday alumnus originally recruited by my father) told me that he had a previous good experience with Joan Kahn, a mystery editor who had been retired by Harper at age 65 and then gave St. Martin's ten great years.." In any event, after leaving Harper, Kahn worked briefly at Ticknor & Fields, and then E.P. Dutton, before landing, in early 1983, at St Martin's,Taylor, Robert (February 13, 1983). "Bookmaking". The Boston Globe. p. A13. Reprieved March 3, 2023. where she would remain until her retirement six years later. Accompanying Kahn through her many relocations were a number of her more recent discoveries from Harper, including Jack S. Scott, Richard Bulliet, E. Richard Johnson, Herbert Resnicow, Jonathan Gash, and Jane Langton, See also: as well two Ticknor signatories, H. Paul Jeffers and Patrick McGinley. See also:
Towards the end of her life, Kahn received two special awards from the Mystery Writers of America – first, in 1985, the Ellery Queen Award for "outstanding people in the mystery-publishing industry," and, on the occasion of her retirement in 1989, a special Edgar Award in recognition of Kahn's distinguished career. That same year, Kahn received a special Anthony Award from Bouchercon for Distinguished Contribution.Gallagher, Maria (October 6, 1989). "Hit of the Week: Murderous Writers Plot Mystery Weekend in Philly". Philadelphia Daily News. p. 61. Retrieved March 3, 2023."Information on Bouchercons 1 - 32". ALAMO, Inc. (Alamo Literary Arts Maintenance Organization).
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