6/9/1870 The Mystery of Charles Dickens

June 9, 1870.  Charles Dickens died on this date.  I usually only mention the births of mystery writers, but I will make an exception for this one, because it had effect on our field. 

Dickens had written a few books with crime elements.  Inspector Bucket in Bleak House is one of the first fictional police detectives.  But Dickens died while he was working on a genuine mystery novel, The Mystery of Edwin Drood.  If he had finished it we would probably think of it as a minor work, notable only for its author.  But since we can never know exactly what solution DIckens had in mind the story keeps capturing people's imagination.  It was even turned into a musical in which the audience got to vote on the killer - with songs written for each possibility. 

5/29/1874 Father Brown's father is born

May 29, 1874.  G.K. Chesterton was born on this date in London.  He was  a playwright, poet, journalist, theologian, blah blah blah... He's on this page because he created one of the immortal sleuths of mystery fiction: Father Brown (no first name, although once we are told his first initial was J and in another he is casually referred to (by the narrator) as Paul).  The character was inspired by a Catholic priest named John O'Connor who astonished the author with his knowledge of the seedy side of human nature.  Father Brown never appeared in a novel but he did wonderful work in 53 short stories, beginning with "The Blue Cross," which is still rated a classic.

Chesterton also wrote The Man Who Was Thursday, a sort of spy novel cum religious allegory which is a bizarre and fascinating read.

“I am a journalist and have no earthly motives except curiosity and personal vanity.”

5/11/1875 Leroy Scott arrives in Indiana

May 11, 1875.  So when do you think the first novel appeared starring a female criminal attorney?  Did you guess 1912?  I didn't think so.

Leroy Scott was born on this date in Indiana.  He was a newspaper reporter, an activist and a social worker.  His fourth novel, Counsel For The Defense (1912), was decades ahead of its time.  One reviewer notes that the protagonist "secures the release of two innocent prisoners, overthrows a political ring, exposes a water-works conspiracy, elects a mayor and marries him."  Wow.

You can read the book here for free.

Source: James Alvin Huston.  A Hoosier Sampler: An Anthology of Indiana Writers.

8/12/1876 Had she but known

August 12 1876.  Mary Roberts Rinehart was born this day in Pennsylvania.  In 1907 she wrote The Circular Staircase, a mystery novel that sold more than a million copies.  She was a prolific and highly successful writer but is perhaps best known today as a creator of  the "Had I But Known" school of suspense.  She is also credited/blamed for the cliche "the butler did it," although that phrase does not appear in her novel in which the butler, in fact, did.

1/25/1874 W. Somerset Maugham arrives

January 25, 1874.  W. Somerset Maugham was born today and began leading a very interesting life.  He studied to be a doctor but when his first novel was a hit he dropped medicine immediately.  During World War I he was one of the "literary ambulance drivers," along with Ernest Hemingway and E.E. Cummings, among others.  Between ambulance runs he proofread his novel Of Human Bondage.

Later he was recruited as a British spy, working in Switzerland and in Russia, just before the Bolshevik conquest.  He also lived for a while in the Pacific, writing about the British and their conflicts with the residents of their empire.

But the main reason he appears on this page is a novel-in-stories called Ashenden, or the British Agent (1928), which is considered a classic of spy fiction.  Some of the stories served as the basis for Alfred Hitchcock's movie Secret Agent.