This week Happiness Is a Book is observing the 30^th year of Crippen & Landru, a well-known small press that specializes in single author collections of short crime fiction. Founded in 1994 by Edgar nominee Doug Greene, C&L continues today with Jeff Marks in the role as Publisher and Doug serving as Senior Editor.

Among their many books, C&L assembled and issued two compendiums of short stories about one of the first contemporary female private investigators, Sharon McCone. The creation of Marcia Muller, MWA Grand Master, Sharon emerged in 1977 as an investigator for All Souls Legal Cooperative in San Francisco. A poverty law firm catering to the economically disadvantaged, All Souls paid its staff next to nothing and had minimal office space. Sharon’s first office was a cubbyhole underneath a staircase and many of the staff members slept on premises as part of their salaries. This around-the-clock proximity created enduring friendships which, with Sharon’s colorful nuclear family, evolved into a permanent cast of support characters for the series that will issue its 35^th book in April 2024.

The McCone Files (Crippen & Landru, 1995) bookends the beginning and the end of Sharon’s association with All Souls. The Broken Promise Land (Mysterious Press, 1996) launches Sharon in her own investigative firm next to the law offices of her friend Hank Altman after the legal cooperative imploded, thus starting a new professional story arc. Two of the stories in The McCone Files were written expressly for this collection; the other 13 stories were originally published in anthologies and mystery magazines between 1981 and 1994. They show Sharon’s growth personally and professionally in the first 18 years of the series as well as speak to the social and technological changes in the last quarter of the 20^th century.

McCone and Friends (Crippen & Landru, 2000) collects seven stories and one novella originally published between 1993 and 1999 mostly in mystery magazines. Her nephew, her office manager, her long-term significant other, and her assistant write about working a case with Sharon, thus the “and Friends” of the title. The stories show Sharon from their perspectives and give the reader a different slant on the character. They cover the time from Sharon’s first office on a pier in the newly renovated Embrocadero district of San Francisco up to the point of major changes within Sharon’s nuclear family, which begins to occupy a significant amount of her attention. These changes are noted in Listen to the Silence (Mysterious Press, 2000), the book following the publication of this anthology.

As Kevin Burton Smith points out in this blog post, this is about the time the cast of characters becomes so sprawling that the stories lose their edge and the focus drifts away from Sharon. https://thrillingdetective.com/2021/09/18/sharon-mccone/ The early books, though, are crisp, taut works of verbal art, just as these stories are.