How I Discovered Joyce Porter

How I Discovered Joyce Porter

 

We discover our favorite authors in many different ways.  Sometimes we’re given books as gifts– that’s how I discovered Agatha Christie and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.  Sometimes we do research for authors we hope we’ll like.  That’s how I discovered G.K. Chesterton.  And sometimes we stumble upon authors by accident.  That’s how I met Joyce Porter.

 

I’m a big fan of radio drama.  It’s been decades since it was popular in the United States, but the UK is still adapting lots of great stories for the radio (as well as creating original works).  When visiting a BBC radio website, I discovered that one featured audio drama was a mystery featuring “Scotland Yard’s laziest sleuth.”  It was advertised as being hilarious, and I felt I could use a laugh, so I listened to it and found the slovenly Dover highly entertaining.  I discovered that this was part of a series based on Joyce Porter’s novels, and I eventually found and listened to the other four adaptations, plus the original story not based on Porter’s works but featuring her characters.  All of them were great fun.

 

I did a little research, and found out Porter wrote twenty books.  At the time, her Dover novels were just going out of print in the U.S., but I was able to find eight of her Dover books brand new for just a few dollars each, and inexpensive editions of her other three Dover books used.  It was a lot harder to find affordable copies of the Eddie Brown and Hon Con books, as the Brown books hadn’t been released in paperback in the U.S. or published since their original release, and the Hon Con books were similarly out of print.  I managed to find inexpensive copies of some of the books, and spent the next few years checking book websites regularly, as most used copies of the other books were quite pricey.  Every so often, I’d find another book for less than ten dollars, and buy it.  Finally, I had everything she ever published.

 

I had such fun with all of Porter’s books that I felt she deserved a wider audience.  So with the Dover books finally being released as e-books in the U.S., I wrote a book about Porter to publicize her.

 

 

–Chris Chan

 

 

Chris Chan’s first book, Sherlock & Irene: The Secret Truth Behind “A Scandal in Bohemia” was released on August 27^th from MX Publishing, and is available for sale at Amazon.com and the MX Publishing website, as well as at Book Depository (with free worldwide shipping there).  It is also available in a Kindle edition.