DATE: Sunday, July 13, 1997                 TAG: 9707080405

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J3   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BILL RUEHLMANN

                                            LENGTH:   74 lines

SMALL PUBLISHER MAKES A KILLING - SO TO SPEAK

The little company with the gallows logo celebrates its third anniversary this summer.

Crippen & Landru of Norfolk, the mystery publishing house named after two notorious murderers, has turned out nine titles since 1994 and plans 13 more by this time in 1999.

``Most major commercial presses won't publish single-author short-story collections,'' says Crippen & Landru director (and Old Dominion University humanities professor) Douglas G. Greene. ``But I think the detective short story is the best form for the mystery. We're preserving in books material that would otherwise disappear in yellowing back issues of magazines.''

And he is just the person to do it. A longtime mystery fiction scholar and critic, Greene, 52, is himself author of a Mystery Writers of America Edgar-nominated biography of John Dickson Carr, king of the impossible crime. He selects the titles, makes arrangements with the authors (or, should they be deceased, their heirs and agents), hires the cover designers and gets the books printed - on acid-free paper with notch binding - by Thomson-Shore of Dexter, Mich.

His wife, Sandy, keeps track of invoices, bills and shipping labels.

Together they box and send off copies to 50 U.S. bookstores and others in England and Canada.

The press run varies from 1,000 to 1,500 copies of the trade softcovers and 200 to 300 of the clothbound, signed limited editions.

Already out are such titles as The McCone Files by Marcia Muller (featuring female gumshoe Sharon McCone); Diagnosis: Impossible, The Problems of Dr. Sam Hawthorne by Edward D. Hoch (about the country medico who specializes in ``miracle'' crimes``), and Spadework: A Collection of ``Nameless Detective'' Stories by Bill Pronzini (concerning the anonymous non-Continental op).

Advertised in trade journals and reviewed widely in national publications, these books sell.

``We have a much larger volume than expected,'' says Greene, who operates the business out of his home, evenings and weekends, on a Compaq 486 computer. ``We're not making money - but we're not losing any, either. Breaking even has been a big surprise.''

They're hanging in there at Crippen and Landru.

Says Sandy, ``I have certainly met a lot of nice people and read a lot of things I otherwise wouldn't have, because of the proofreading. And I really enjoy helping Doug with something that he loves. But I really wish our home didn't have so many books in boxes!''

Their son, Eric, designed the gallows logo.

All the noose that's fit to print.

The latest Crippen & Landru volume, just out, is Shoveling Smoke (244 pp., $16) by Edgar Award-winning North Carolina novelist Margaret Maron, creator of Judge Deborah Knott and Lt. Sigrid Harald of the NYPD.

Reports Maron from her Willow Springs home near Raleigh, ``I'm quite pleased with it.''

The wife of an artist, she has been writing for almost three decades. Mother of a grown son and grandmother of a brand-new granddaughter, Maron provides 22 sharply observed tales of dark domestic endeavor. With, one hastens to add, a certain gimlet humor.

Make that icepick.

``It's certainly interesting,'' she concedes, ``to be a collector's item.''

For 1999 Greene has already garnered the outline and notes for Ellery Queen's unpublished last novel, The Tragedy of Errors, complete with two murders and a dying message. That volume will also include six previously uncollected Queen short stories. Fans will know the incomparable Queen was, in fact, a creative team of cousins Frederic Dannay (1905-1982) and Manfred B. Lee (1905-1971).

Dannay did the plotting, Lee the writing; death ended their criminous collaboration.

To acquire Shoveling Smoke and other titles in the Crippen & Landru line, write P.O. Box 9315, Norfolk 23505-9315 or call (757) 623-3453.

Who says crime doesn't pay? MEMO: Bill Ruehlmann is a mass communication professor at Virginia

Wesleyan College.

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