See H. Rider Haggard in his study and garden.

H. Rider Haggard, c. 1905.
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs Div.

For today's 159th birthday of author Sir Henry Rider Haggard (King Solomon's Mines, She, etc.), you can watch 1923 footage of him working in his elegant Norfolk study, walking in his garden, and patting his dog.

BL's "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians."

1877 Chatto & Windus edition
of Wilkie Collins's
The Moonstone

The British Library's online exhibition on "Discovering Literature: Romantics and Victorians" has some items of interest for mystery fans:

• Under "the Gothic" are features on "The Victorian Supernatural," "An Introduction to The Woman in White," and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

• Under "The Imperial Gothic" are works by H. Rider Haggard and Richard Marsh, as well as Wilkie Collins's The Moonstone.

• Under "Crime and Crime Fiction" are "Crime in Oliver Twist," "Crime in Great Expectations," and "Juvenile Crime in the 19th Century." Also featured (by Judith Flanders, author of The Invention of Murder: How the Victorians Revelled in Death and Detection and Created Modern Crime that I reviewed) are "The Creation of the Police and the Rise of Detective Fiction" "Jack the Ripper," "Murder as Entertainment," and "Penny Dreadfuls" (including The Boy Detective, 1865).

Note that the attribution for Revelations of a Lady Detective (1864) is incorrect; it is not by the pseudonymous Andrew Forrester (James Redding Ware), but rather William Stephens Hayward.

Update. The BL has corrected the attribution for Revelations of a Lady Detective.

Dr. Barbara Mertz, trailblazer.

Barbara Mertz, right, with Charlotte MacLeod, 1989
Photo by Elizabeth Foxwell

It is impossible to grasp that the ebullient Barbara Mertz, aka MWA Grand Master Elizabeth Peters and Barbara Michaels, has left us at age 85. I first met her when I interviewed her for a University of Maryland journalism class. After 2 hours I emerged, somewhat dazedly (a typical state of affairs in Mertzdom), with a 17-page, single-spaced transcript and a friendship that would endure for nearly 30 years. To her I owe a great deal, not least my career in mystery and—like many other writers—warm memories of her encouragement, support, and singular presence.

Barbara's storming of considerable bastions in her life and career has benefited women from many walks of life as well as mystery readers and writers. When she was a graduate student in Egyptology at the University of Chicago, she was asked, more than once, why she was taking the place of a man, and why was she there anyway, because she was "just going to get married." She was divorced at a time when single parents were regarded as strange creatures, and she worked hard to support two children by publishing a minimum of two books per year and reviewing books. Well into her seventies, Barbara was descending into Egyptian tombs and maintaining a schedule that would make someone a quarter of her age relapse onto a Victorian fainting couch. Always embroiled in some offbeat enterprise, she once took me with her to purchase a cowboy hat, because she was embarking on a tour with Sharyn McCrumb and Joan Hess that would feature their country-music song stylings.

Given today's popularity of intrepid Victorian archaeologist Amelia Peabody Emerson and her inimitable spouse and son, as well as Barbara's Agatha Award for the Jacqueline Kirby novel Naked Once More, it is easy to forget that she had to fight to write humorous mysteries. Unease existed in the publishing world about reader receptivity to humor, and she had to adopt the Peters pseudonym for these books while maintaining the Michaels pen name for her twists on the Gothic novel. She created a stir with Borrower of the Night when art-historian heroine Vicky Bliss ditched two handsome men for a more attractive new job.

Unlikely Mystery Fan #2: Winston Churchill.

Part of a series on unexpected individuals who enjoy or enjoyed mystery-related works and authors.

Winston Churchill,
n.d. Library of Congress
Prints and Photographs
Division

Perhaps not surprisingly for someone who later broke out of a Boer prison camp, the future British prime minister was fond of the works of H. Rider Haggard, reading King Solomon's Mines several times. As Carlo D'Este reports in Warlord: A Life of Winston Churchill at War 1874–1945 (10), Haggard met with Churchill in 1888, expressing apprehension about the prospect: "I hope he will not put me through a cross-examination about my unworthy productions." Apparently it was such a meeting, but Haggard sent Churchill a copy of Allan Quatermain afterward.

Another reported Churchill favorite: Treasure Island by Robert Louis Stevenson.

Haggard spoof on National Radio Hall of Fame.

H. Rider Haggard

This month's audio highlights from the National Radio Hall of Fame and Museum include a spoof of King Solomon's Mines from Jack Benny's January 7, 1951, show with Deborah Kerr, and Edgar Allan Poe's "The Pit and the Pendulum" from Suspense, January 12, 1943.

Conan Doyle visits Kipling, Thanksgiving 1894.

Rudyard Kipling, c. 1897
Library of Congress, Prints
and Photographs Division

In Rudyard Kipling: Hell and Heroism (2005), William B. Dillingham reports that Arthur Conan Doyle, who was in the United States on a lecture tour, visited Rudyard Kipling in Brattleboro, VT, over Thanksgiving 1894, but it appears all was not serene over the turkey and cranberry sauce:

Arthur Conan Doyle
Library of Congress,
Prints and Photographs
Division

Conan Doyle . . . tried to persuade Rudyard to be kinder in his remarks about America. They argued a good deal but parted on good terms thanks to the determination of both men to be as reasonable and generous as possible. Conan Doyle's attitude . . . was that Kipling was misguided but that he could bring him around. . . . Kipling told [H.] Rider Haggard . . . that he "got nothing from [Conan Doyle]." (303) 

Adds Dillingham, "What appears to have alienated [Kipling] the most was Conan Doyle's immeasurable gullibleness" (303).

Conan Doyle had a rosier view of the visit, as he recounted in Memories and Adventures (1924): "I had two great days in Vermont, and have a grateful remembrance of Mrs Kipling's hospitality . . . We parted good friends" (220).

Exhibition: M. P. Shiel, Christopher Morley, etc.

Roberts 1895 edition of
M. P. Shiel's Prince Zaleski.
Providence Atheneum.

The University of Delaware exhibition "London Bound: American Writers in Britain, 1870–1916" includes M. P. Shiel (author of the Haycraft-Queen Cornerstone work Prince Zaleski, 1895, and friend of Arthur Machen); Baker Street Irregulars founder Christopher Morley; and Stephen Crane's "The Ghost," to which authors such as Henry James, H. Rider Haggard, and A. E. W. Mason (the latter the author of At the Villa Rose, 1910) contributed. The exhibition is on display until Dec. 17.

Happy birthday, Peter Cushing.

Hammer Films stalwart Peter Cushing, OBE, was born today in Surrey in 1913. He died in 1994. Among the notable roles in his long career were Sherlock Holmes in The Hound of the Baskervilles (and in a subsequent TV series), Josef Vadassey in the TV series adapted from Eric Ambler's Epitaph for a Spy (1953), Dr. Who in Dr. Who and the Daleks (1965) and Daleks' Invasion Earth: 2150 AD (1966), Holly in H. Rider Haggard's She (1965), and Grand Moff Tarkin in Star Wars (1977).

About the image: Peter Cushing in The Hound of the Baskervilles (dir. Terence Fisher, 1959)

What they (supposedly) wanted us to read in 1895.

Harvard, as part of its exhibition "Reading: Harvard Views of Readers, Readership, and Reading History," is offering online the 1895 List of Books for Girls and Women and Their Clubs, issued for the American Library Association. The fiction list, "chosen and annotated by a reviewer for The Nation," tends to snarkiness, especially about popular books by women. Some of the listings:

• Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Aurora Floyd, Eleanor's Victory, Lady Audley's Secret. "The worst that may be said of her books is that the impression of life conveyed by them is generally false."

• Arthur Conan Doyle, Micah Clarke, Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes. "His best books are narratives of military adventure, though perhaps the most popular describe the commission and detection of crime."

• Marie Corelli, Vendetta, The Soul of Lilith. "She enjoys great popularity."

• Anna Katharine Green, The Leavenworth Case, The Mill Mystery, A Matter of Millions, A Strange Disappearance. "She scorns probability both in plot and character, and, to persons of reason, her books are tiresome and nonsensical. From her popularity it would appear that reason is scarce..."

• H. Rider Haggard, King Solomon's Mines, She, Heart of the World. "He is ingenious."

• Anthony Hope, The Prisoner of Zenda. "...The impossibility of all is a cold afterthought."

• Edgar Allan Poe, Tales. "Morbidly imaginative."

• E.D.E.N. Southworth, A Leap in the Dark, The Lost Heiress. "Her distortion of truth and fact is wonderful, and her sentimentality appalling."

• Lew Wallace, Ben Hur, The Fair God, The Prince of India. "His books are extremely long, the construction is intricate, and the grammar imperfect."

• Ellen Wood, East Lynne, Danesbury House. "The work is much better than much of its class."

(Hat tip to PhiloBiblos. About the image: Cartoon of Mary Elizabeth Braddon from Punch, 1881, NYPL.)

Happy birthday, Andrew Lang.

The waspish novelist, poet, journalist, translator, and critic Andrew Lang, best known for editing various volumes of fairy tales (The Blue Fairy Book, etc.), was born today in Selkirk, Scotland, in 1844. His prodigious literary activities include angering his countrymen in Pickle the Spy (1897) when he proved that a Scottish nobleman once spied for the British (gasp!); cowriting The World's Desire (1890) with
H. Rider Haggard, which imagines Odysseus's last voyage; and penning the "shilling shocker" The Mark of Cain (1886), which features, according to The Westminster Review, "one out-and-out villain, who had himself elaborately tattooed for felonious purposes" (590). For some of Lang's critical essays, see his Adventures among Books (1905) and Letters to Dead Authors (1886); another interesting work is The Valet's Tragedy (1903), where Lang discusses historical mysteries such as the Man in the Iron Mask. An overview of his work is provided in "Two Scotsmen of Letters" by Brander Matthews in Aspects of Fiction and Other Ventures in Criticism (1902).

Happy birthday, Peter Tremayne.

The multifaceted Peter Berresford Ellis, better known in the mystery world as Peter Tremayne, was born today in Coventry in 1943. His extensive background in Celtic history is reflected in his series of mysteries set in seventh-century Ireland featuring Sister Fidelma. Among his many nonfiction books is A Voice from the Infinite: The Life of Sir Henry Rider Haggard, 1856–1925 (1978).

100 Books Every Child Should Read.

The Telegraph's list of 100 Books Every Child Should Read includes Roald Dahl (5 entries), Joan Aiken's The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, Arthur Conan Doyle's The Hound of the Baskervilles, Daphne du Maurier's Frenchman's Creek, H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, and Charles Portis's True Grit.

What—no Freddy the Detective?

Plus ça change...

I've been perusing My First Book, in which several notable writers (e.g., Conan Doyle, Kipling, Bret Harte, Marie Corelli) discuss their first published work. Although this edition was published in 1897 by Chatto & Windus, today's writers will detect a number of familiar themes. To wit:

"... I read that whatever success I had met with as a writer of fiction was due to my literary friends and 'nepotic criticism.'" -- H. Rider Haggard (135; seen at left)

" 'I want to learn to write very, very well indeed,' he suddenly added . . . 'then I'll be able to earn heaps of money.'

"It rose to my lips to answer him that it was not always the books written very, very well that brought in the biggest heaps of money; that if heaps of money were his chiefest hope he would be better advised to devote his energies to the glorious art of self-advertisement and the gentle craft of making friends upon the Press." -- Jerome K. Jerome (x)

"[I]t is a curious fact ... that I have never been able to take kindly to a plot--or the suggestion of a plot--offered to me by anybody else. ... it is, I believe, a fixed idea in the novel-reader's mind that any combination of events out of the beaten way of life will make an admirable subject for the novelist's art." -- Mary Elizabeth Braddon (110-11)

"Anybody can write a short story--a bad one, I mean--who has industry and paper and time enough; but not everyone may hope to write even a bad novel. It is the length that kills." -- Robert Louis Stevenson (298)

Jerome's "glorious art of self-advertisement" seems to resemble today's Blatant Self-Promotion (BSP).