There was a lot of jostling around and coming and going at the bar. I knew less than a third of the people there, and was feeling lonely when Fred Dannay came up end shook hands and asked me when I was going to submit another short story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’s annual contest.

I grinned and reminded him that he and Manny Lee turned down my last effort, and asked if the other half of Ellery Queen was there.

He said three of Manny’s seven children were sick and he hadn’t been able to make it. Neither had George Harmon Coxe who was in Panama for a few days. “And I don’t know what happened to John Dickson Carr,” he added.

“That’s easy,” a voice snickered behind me. “He couldn’t decide whether to come as Harper’s guest as John Dickson Carr; or as Morrow’s guest in the person of Carter Dickson.”

I turned and saw it was Avery Birk speaking. He’s one of my less favorite competitors, bald and pudgy, with a porcine face and small eyes set too close together. He’s the sort who’s always patting the girls on their fannies and making snickeringly suggestive remarks, and his writing is atrocious. You probably know his character, Johnny Danger, the private eye who beds every blonde he meets within five minutes of being introduced. A compensation, I’ve always believed, for the author’s manifest inability to bed any dame, blonde, brunette or bald-headed.

Avery insisted on pumping my hand and buying me a drink, and Fred Dannay eased away and I was lonely again.