Jane Speed

Born and raised in Akron, Ohio, Jane Speed was a New York-based short story writer and radio dramatist, active between 1941 and 1980. She was born Jane Helen Krisher, the only child of William C. Krisher and Helen E. Roush. After graduating from Buchtel High School, she attended first Ohio Wesleyan and then Northwestern University's School of Speech, where she majored in drama; it was during this latter stint that she gained the bulk of her education regarding script-writing, both for radio and for film. Subsequently she worked as a commercial copy writer at WFMJ in Youngstown, Ohio, all the while working on radio scripts, both originals and adaptations, some of which would later go on to be produced and broadcast nationally. After her marriage in 1943, Speed continued writing and selling radio scripts until 1955, at which point the prospect of a third child on the way, coupled with TV's dramatic erosion of the market for radio dramas, conspired to dictate a career change. Within eight years, Mrs. Speed had gained sufficient mastery, both of the essentials of short-story writing and of the conventions of the mystery genre, to become a regularly published writer in that genre. Not counting the myriad reprints and translations, her work debuted almost exclusively within the pages of Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, all of it published between the years of 1963 and 1980 (the sole exception being the 1977 story, "Poor Eva," which made its first appearance in EQMM's sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine). "End of the Day," arguably her most widely read and translated story, also brought about an unexpected return to Speed's radio roots, in the form of numerous European broadcasts, both straight readings and full-blown dramatizations; perhaps the most notable being one that aired on July 3, 1976, starring Elisabeth Wiedemann, who, despite an extensive stage and screen career, had the dubious distinction of being known almost exclusively for her TV portrayal of "Else Tetzlaff", the German equivalent of All in the Family (1971)'s Edith Bunker. The subsequent death of Speed's longstanding editor at EQMM, Frederic Dannay (aka Ellery Queen), compounded by the failing health of her elderly father back in Akron, all but insured that the writer's block afflicting her at the beginning of the eighties would become firmly entrenched in relatively short order. Towards the end of that decade, the final nails in this coffin (figurative at first, but before long, literal) would be hammered home, first by her husband's, and later her own, health concerns. The latter would explode in late February 1991, when Mrs. Speed suffered a massive coronary from which she would not recover. She never did regain consciousness, finally succumbing on March 5th at the age of 71, survived by her husband and three children, her son-in-law, poet John Curl, and her grand-daughter, film and video producer Rachel Curl.