Carolyn Wells's "A Reader's Lament" (1899).

Carolyn Wells,
ca. 1923

Carolyn Wells's The Clue (1909) appears on the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone list of essential mysteries, and she's also known for her Sherlock Holmes pastiches. In addition, she wrote poetry, such as the following "Reader's Lament" (The Bookman, Mar. 1899, p. 22):

I cannot read the old books
I read long years ago;
Eliot, Dickens, Thackeray,
Bulwer and Scott and Poe.
Marryat's yarns of sailor life,
And Hugo's tales of crime; —
I cannot read the old books,
Because I haven't time.

I love the dear old stories,
My thoughts to them will stray;
But still one must keep posted on
The writers of to-day.
My desk is piled with latest books
I'm striving to despatch;
But ere I've finished all of them,
There'll be another batch.

Hope's new one isn't opened yet,
I've not read James's last;
And Howells is so prolific now,
And Crawford writes so fast.
Evelyn Innes I must skim,
O'er Helbeck I must pore;
The Day's Work I'll enjoy, although
I've read the tales before.

And then there is The King's Jackal,
The Gadfly, Caleb West,
Silence, The Forest Lovers, and—
I can't name all the rest.
I'll try to keep up with the times,
But, oh, I hope that I
May read my David Copperfield
Once more before I die.

E. W. Hornung's unpublished diary.

Libraries are always so interesting: a man's bookcase is something more interesting than the man himself, sometimes the one existing portrait of his mind.
—E. W. Hornung, The Crime Doctor

E. W. Hornung. NYPL

In English Literature in Transition, Edmund G. C. King (Open Univ) discusses the reading experience of British and Scottish soldiers in WWI, with particular attention to the wartime activities of E.W. Hornung (creator of Raffles, gentleman thief).

Sadly, Oscar—the only child of Hornung and Constance, Arthur Conan Doyle's sister—was killed in action at Ypres in July 1915. Seeking solace, Hornung served as a YMCA volunteer during the war—working in a canteen; maintaining a wartime library for soldiers in Arras, France, and a postwar one in the vicinity of Cologne, Germany; looking for friends of Oscar; and hoping to encounter Conan Doyle's serviceman son, Kingsley (who died of flu in 1918). His Notes of a Camp Follower on the Western Front (1919) tells about his war experiences and provides insight into what servicemen were reading (popular authors included Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Marie Corelli, Anthony Hope, and E. Phillips Oppenheim). Interestingly, he reports only one reader for Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White. Pertaining to the works of his brother-in-law, he wrote, "Messrs. Holmes and Watson were the most flourishing of old firms, and Gerard the only Brigadier taken seriously at my counter" (Notes 141). His own output was not ignored:

"When I was up the line," said one of my friends, bubbling over with a compliment, "a chap said to me, 'You know that old—that—that elderly man who runs the Rest Hut? He's the author of Raffles.'"

Adds Hornung in mock outrage, "Elderly! One would as lief be labelled Virtuous or Discreet" (Notes 144–45). Hornung died of pneumonia in 1921 at 54, hardly an advanced age.

King relates that Hornung kept a diary between December 1917 and March 1918 that took the format of letters to his wife. He drew on this diary to write Notes, but King indicates that the diary reveals more about Hornung's reasons for war service than Notes does. Hornung's friend Shane Chichester preserved a typescript of the diary, which is now in the University of Birmingham's Cadbury Research Library along with other papers. King also provides a heart-warming glimpse of Hornung at work via the World War I memoir of Carlos Paton Blacker, Oscar's Eton classmate who became a noted psychiatrist.

King's article follows "The A. J. Raffles Stories Reconsidered: Fall of the Gentleman Ideal" by Jeremy Larance from the first 2014 issue of English Literature in Transition.

More on "Best of" lists.

On the Times Literary Supplement blog, Michael Caines discusses the

Amelia B. Edwards, from
Harper's Magazine. NYPL

100 Best Novels list from 1898 that was created by editor-critic Clement K. Shorter, placing it alongside David Bowie's more recent list (Bowie's selections include Truman Capote's In Cold Blood and Edward Bulwer Lytton's Zanoni). The privileging of dead authors over living ones on such lists also is discussed.
There are quite a few books on Shorter's list that may provoke head scratching among today's readers, but Shorter does include the following:

• Gothic milestones The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho (by Horace Walpole and Ann Radcliffe respectively)

• Catherine Crowe's Susan Hopley (maidservant solves crime; see also Dante Gabriel Rossetti's drawings of characters from this work)

• Wilkie Collins's The Woman in White

• Sheridan Le Fanu's Uncle Silas

• Amelia B. Edwards's Barbara's History (Edwards was a successful novelist before she became a cofounder of the Egypt Exploration Fund and an inspiration for Elizabeth Peters's Amelia Peabody Emerson)

Digital projects from Old Bailey records.

Author and baronet Edward
Bulwer Lytton, who was the
victim of theft, according to
this Old Bailey record. NYPL.

In a podcast on "Big Data and Dead Criminals" from the UK's National Archives, Tim Hitchcock (University of Hertfordshire) discusses some digital projects on crime that draw from 200,000 trial records of the Old Bailey (now online) and the London Lives project. (There's also a BBC 2 series, Tales from the Old Bailey, based on the records.)

Through the lens with George Bernard Shaw.

George Bernard Shaw.
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div.

An interesting online exhibition by the London School of Economics archives looks at playwright George Bernard Shaw as a skilled photographer. Photo subjects include sci-fi and mystery author Grant Allen (I introduced the Valancourt Books edition of Allen's Miss Cayley's Adventures), writer Rebecca West, and artists Augustus John (father of Ian Fleming's half-sister Amaryllis) and Neville Stephen Bulwer Lytton (grandson of novelist Edward). Also featured are some photos by Shaw's friends such as T. E. Lawrence (aka Lawrence of Arabia) and Shaw productions such as Major Barbara with Wendy Hiller.

Bulwer Lytton's The Ghost of Rashmon Hall (1947).

Anne Howard and Valentine Dyall in 
The Ghost of Roshmon Hall (1947)

In The Ghost of Rashmon Hall, a psychic investigator (The Man in Black's Valentine Dyall) grapples with the presence of three poltergeists in a London house. The film is adapted from "The Haunted and the Haunters" (1859) by Edward Bulwer Lytton, who wrote proto-mysteries such as Eugene Aram (1832) and is best known these days for this writing contest.

In this article for Nineteenth-Century Contexts, Mark Knight discusses Bulwer Lytton's interest in the occult and his revision of "The Haunted and the Haunters" that reflected his attempt to reconcile leading philosophical theories of his day. It is possible that he based his fictional house on the one at London's 50 Berkeley Square, long reputed as a hotbed of paranormal activity. The story also is notable for Bulwer Lytton's choice to set it in a urban environment rather than the then-customary remote locale of such stories.

Stills from the film may be viewed at this site devoted to the work of director Harold Baim.  

Journal issue, law and gender in 19C England.

Edward Bulwer Lytton, NYPL.

The latest issue of Nineteenth-Century Gender Studies focuses on law and gender in nineteenth-century England, including articles on Wilkie Collins's The Law and the Lady (1875) as well as Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Edward Bulwer Lytton.

Lucy Sussex on 19C female writers and detectives.

Among the most popular posts on this blog are those dealing with early female detectives and women mystery writers. Lucy Sussex's Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre (2010; foreword by Val McDermid) is a solid discussion of women's major contributions to the emerging genre. Sussex has done much to shed new light on often neglected female writers in the genre (most notably Irish-born Mary Helena Fortune), and she published an article in Clues 26.1 (2007) on Edward Bulwer Lytton's contributions to the mystery field that garnered praise from the Hon. Henry Lytton Cobbold (Bulwer Lytton's great-grandson). Both Fortune's and Bulwer Lytton's roles are well reflected in the book.

Sussex traces the cross-currents among the gothic, the Newgate novel, newspaper crime accounts, and the sensation genre that were integral to the establishment of detective fiction. Writers covered include Catherine Crowe, Ellen Davitt, Anna Katharine Green, Ann Radcliffe, Harriet Prescott Spofford, and Fanny Trollope. There is some impressive literary sleuthing on Metta Fuller Victor (author of The Dead Letter, 1866) that significantly expands on my article in the Fall 2003 Mystery Scene ("Metta Fuller Victor: A Sensational Life"). Intriguing parallels are drawn between the work of Ellen Wood (East Lynne, etc.) and Agatha Christie as well as the surprising but plausible assertion that Mary Elizabeth Braddon created the first clerical sleuth ("George Caulfield's Journey," 1879). Readers also will like the timeline in the back of the book that traces true-crime milestones alongside ones in fiction (such as the first Newgate Calendar in 1728, the 1833 birth of Pinkerton agent Kate Warne, and the 1859 publication of Spofford's "In a Cellar"). All in all, this is an excellent resource for those who would like to learn more about women's contributions to the emerging mystery genre in the nineteenth century.

BYU exhibition, Literary Worlds.

Caricature of Chesterton
by David Low from
Lions and Lambs (1928),
NYPL

The Literary Worlds: Illumination of the Mind exhibition in Special Collections at Brigham Young University's Harold B. Lee Library focuses on the creative processes of writers. Among those included are Louisa May Alcott, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Orson Scott Card, G. K. Chesterton, Arthur Conan Doyle, Zane Grey, Eden Phillpotts, and Robert Louis Stevenson. It's on display until June, and some materials can be accessed online. I'm rather astounded that the précis on Chesterton fails to mention Father Brown.

Valancourt reissues Bulwer Lytton's Eugene Aram (1832).

Valancourt Books has republished Edward Bulwer Lytton's Eugene Aram (1832); as Lucy Sussex discussed in this article for Clues 26.1, Bulwer Lytton (friend of Dickens and Collins) made important contributions to the mystery genre with Eugene Aram, Paul Clifford (1830), and Night and Morning (1841; go here to read Edgar Allan Poe's review of this book) .

About the image: Edward Bulwer Lytton. Courtesy of Knebworth House.

Clues moves to McFarland.

Clues: A Journal of Detection, the only U.S. academic journal on detective/mystery fiction (I am its managing editor), has moved to McFarland & Co. in Jefferson, North Carolina. Heldref Publications, the former owner, sold it as part of a general restructuring effort.

Clues is a good match for McFarland, which has a strong popular culture line, including mystery reference works (I am editing a new series, the McFarland Companions to Mystery Fiction, for the publisher). In addition, McFarland's existing relationships with distributors such as Ingram and Baker & Taylor should facilitate the ordering of Clues for bookstores, libraries, and others. Online access to individual articles and entire issues via Metapress will continue (Clues is indexed in the MLA International Bibliography and by the Crime Fiction Canada Web site).

The editorial team for Clues remains in place, with the additions of assistant editor Vassilena Parashkevova (London South Bank University, UK) and book review editor Jim Mancall (Harvard University); Clues reviews nonfiction mystery materials and those that would be useful in the classroom. Executive editor Margaret Kinsman (London South Bank University, UK) and I are busy with upcoming issues. The first issue from McFarland (vol. 26, no. 1) is part 2 of an issue on Victorian crime fiction, guest edited by Janice M. Allan (University of Salford, UK) and featuring articles on British-born but New Zealand-raised novelist Fergus Hume; British writers Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Edward Bulwer Lytton, Arthur Conan Doyle, and Catherine Louisa Pirkis; and American author Harriet Prescott Spofford. It will be followed by an issue on Scottish crime fiction, guest edited by Gill Plain (University of St. Andrews, UK). We have just issued a call for papers for a theme issue on Chester Himes and his legacy, guest edited by Norlisha Crawford (University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh).

In addition: A gallery of Clues covers has been posted, and, thanks to the efforts of a small army of enthusiastic volunteers, article abstracts for the first 22 volumes of Clues are now online. The abstracts are highly educational: Where else could one learn that author-screenwriter Horace McCoy (They Shoot Horses, Don't They?) also wrote a gangster novel?

Margaret, the Clues editorial board, and I hope the mystery community will continue to support Clues as a vital avenue of information and scholarship on mystery fiction.

About the cover: Neve McIntosh as Lucy, Lady Audley, and Stephen Macintosh as Robert Audley in Mary Elizabeth Braddon's Lady Audley's Secret, broadcast on PBS's Mystery! in 2000. Image courtesy of WGBH, Boston.

It Was a Dark and Stormy Night.

Happy birthday to Snoopy inspiration and Dickens pal Edward Bulwer Lytton (1st Baron Lytton), who was born today in 1803. Stay tuned for the Clues issue that features an article on Bulwer Lytton's contribution to crime fiction.

And birthday cake also goes to Jason Bourne creator and former actor-producer Robert Ludlum, born today in New York City in 1927.

It was a dark and stormy night...

Edward Bulwer Lytton (1st Baron Lytton) was born today in 1803. He died in 1873. Friend of Dickens and Collins (Dickens and Collins first met when they appeared in a Bulwer Lytton play), he had a fruitful literary career, but is now mostly known for the contest that celebrates bad writing (go here to see the 2006 winners [?] in the detective fiction category).

However, according to Lucy Sussex's article coming up in the fall issue of CLUES, Bulwer Lytton made several significant contributions to the mystery field, including Pelham (1828) and Night and Morning (1841).