Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine. Vol. 14, No. 71, October 1949

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W. Somerset Maugham begins his introductory remarks to “A Writer’s Notebook” by making this curious and provocative statement: “I forget who it was who said that every author should keep a notebook, but should take care never to refer to it.” We know many authors who religiously maintain commonplace books of ideas, impressions, scraps of dialogue, news clippings, and all the other germs and sperms of literary creation; and so far as we can tell, these authors refer to their notes nearly every time they find themselves in need of “inspiration.” True, we know even more authors who do not keep journals of any kind, but without exception these authors are constantly berating themselves for their laziness, and constantly promising to go out and buy a shiny, leather-bound, hand-tooled, gilt-edged notebook and turn over a new leaf.

Speaking for ourselves, we are of the lazy genus. We have no notebooks, and if we had, they would be more apt to contain Daliesque doodling than detectival data. Nevertheless, we are all for notebook discipline — it must be of enormous help in a criminological crisis, compared with the haphazard slovenliness to which we are addicted and on which consequently we must depend. The occasional memoranda we commit to paper are usually indecipherable scrawls on the backs of envelopes, scribblings on the margins of newspapers, notations on menus, timetables, and paper napkins. We once put an important jotting on the back of a ticket-stub, and then placed the stub in the band of our hat — to make sure it wouldn’t get lost; but we never found the stub again — perhaps we put it in someone else’s hat!

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