Harry Kemelman Source: Wikipedia

Harry Kemelman (1908-1996) was an American mystery writer and a professor of English. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1908. He was the creator of perhaps one of the most famous of religious sleuths: Rabbi David Small.

After having received a BA in English Literature and a MA at Harvard in English philology, he taught in a number of schools before the Second World War. Afterwards, Kemelman worked as wage administrator for the Army Transportation Corps in Boston and subsequently for the War Assets Administration, and as a free-lance writer and a private businessman. In 1963 he was appointed assistant professor of English at the Franklin Technical Institute in Boston. He was also an assistant professor at Boston State College in the 1960s.

His writing career began with short stories for Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine featuring New England college professor Nicky Welt, the first of which, The Nine Mile Walk (1967) is a late Golden Age classic.

The start of the Rabbi Small series begun in 1964. Friday the Rabbi Slept Late became a huge bestseller, a difficult achievement for a religious mystery, and won Kemelman an Edgar Allan Poe Award for best first novel in 1965.

Kemelman died in 1996, at the age of 88, in Marblehead, Massachusetts.