Jane Speed

Born and raised in Akron, Ohio, Jane Speed was a New York-based short story writer and radio dramatist, active between 1946 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 eduction regarding scriptwriting, 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, of course the myriad reprints and translations, her work appeared 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 a 1977 story appearing in EQMM's sister publication, Alfred Hitchcock's Mystery Magazine). The subsequent death of her 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 Speed 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 and finally succumbed on March 5th at the age of 71. Jane Helen Speed, née Krisher, was survived by her husband James, her daughters Jill and Barbara, and son David. Moreover, aside from her memory living on within the hearts and minds of family, friends, neighbors and colleagues, Jane Speed's work would not only survive, but thrive, in a very tangible way. Much as it had during the decade following her final published story, her work continued to be reprinted, anthologized and translated throughout the remainder of the 20th century.