Attention Vintage Mystery Fans: The October 8 Challenge

Noah, Golden Age Detection (GAD) aficionado and participant in my Vintage Mystery Challenge, has been bitten by the challenge-sponsor bug. In honor of his and a friend's birthday, he has put together the October 8 Challenge. A fiendish Bingo-style reading challenge designed to encourage us to read, think about, and write about GAD fiction in new and exciting ways--as well as to compete for glory and prizes.  I'm in! I'm going to commit to one Bingo by next October and at least one essay by the end of the year to claim it for my 2014 challenges. Please join us. Click on the link for Noah's full post and to let him know you'd like to play along.

Here are the basic rules:

The challenge will run from October 8, 2014 to October 8, 2015. He will keep track of any essay submitted as an entry in this challenge and will collect them at his blog.

On October 8, 2015, He’ll be asking all interested parties (contributors and my readers) to select essays that they feel were best. The three participants who receive the most applause will each receive a small token of his esteem; a collectible paperback from his large collection.

You can create a line of four squares horizontally, vertically, or diagonally. The idea of a “Bingo” was selected to stimulate you to get some work done, not to make you write something in which you’re relatively uninterested; He’d rather see one great essay than four ordinary ones. The other criteria:

• Each group of books must represent the work of at least two different authors.
• Each group of books must contain at least three volumes.
• Volumes of collected shorter stories are welcome as long as all the stories fit the selected criterion.
• Ambiguous words like “theme” or “location” are meant to be interpreted generously.
• The books you select should, generally speaking, have been published before 1950. Please don’t misuse the privilege, but if a book written after 1950 directly relates to your chosen theme, feel free to include it as part of the group. The primary focus should still be upon GAD books and authors. (I expect that A-1, about a single series character with multiple authors, will almost always include books written after 1950.)

And the Bingo card:

Square 4C: Written in the 1940s (11/18/14)
Square 3B: Just a Girl Detective [linked by a theme] (2/18/15)
Square 4B: Written in the 1930s (5/25/15) 
Square 2B: Trains & Murder in the Golden Age [location] (5/26/15)
Square 1B: The Detection Club [inter-related personal lives] (9/8/15)