Edward Gorey, mystery fan.

Sign for the Edward Gorey House.
Photo by Elizabeth Foxwell.

I recently visited the Edward Gorey House in Yarmouth Port, MA, which was a fascinating place—full of collections compiled by the distinguished artist and author (winner of the Tony Award for set design and costume design for Dracula—the docent referred to the Gorey House as "the house that Dracula built"). His book collection included some 26,000 volumes and is now housed at San Diego State University (about 35 percent of it can be searched here).

Gorey (1925–2000) was a devoted mystery fan. A short browse through his library yields 41 works by Agatha Christie, 39 works by Wilkie Collins, 30 books by Guy Boothby, 24 books by Margaret Sutton [Rachel Beebe], 16 Nancy Drew books, 16 novels by Phoebe Atwood Taylor, 11 works by Jane Langton, 8 books by Patricia Wentworth, 7 books by Catherine Aird, and 6 books by Ross Macdonald [Kenneth Millar].

Some sample titles:

• Catherine Aird [Kinn Hamilton McIntosh], The Religious Body (1980 ed.); Henrietta Who? (1981 ed.); The Stately Home Murder (1980 ed.)
• Grant Allen, Miss Cayley's Adventures (1899)
• Agatha Christie, Death in the Air (1935); Miss Marple: The Complete Short Stories (1985); Mort Sur Nil [Death on the Nile] (1948; note that Gorey earned a degree in French literature from Harvard); Murder in Three Acts (1934) 
• Wilkie Collins, Armadale (1866); No Name (1978 ed.); The Dead Secret (1979 ed.)
• J.S. Fletcher, The Markenmore Mystery (1923); Ravensdene Court (1922)
• Michael Gilbert, The Black Seraphim (1985); End-Game (1983)
• Patrick Hamilton, Hangover Square (1941); Mr. Stimpson and Mr. Gorse (1953)
• Jane Langton, Divine Inspiration (1994 ed.); Emily Dickinson Is Dead (1985); Murder at the Gardner (1989)
• Ross Macdonald, The Doomsters (1958); The Blue Hammer (1976)
• A.E.W. Mason, They Wouldn't Be Chessmen (1985 ed.)
• Ed McBain [Evan Hunter], Lightning (1985)
• Phoebe Atwood Taylor, The Cape Cod Mystery (1965 ed., 1988 ed.); The Criminal C.O.D. (1972 ed.); Death Lights a Candle (1989 ed.), Diplomatic Corpse (1986 ed.); The Left Leg (1988 ed.)
• Patricia Wentworth, Grey Mask (1952 ed.); Poison in the Pen (1980 ed.); She Came Back (1981 ed.)
  
  
  

  

  Edward Gorey in his kitchen, Aug 1999. 
  Wikimedia Commons, 
  Photographer: Christopher Seufert 

  
  

A blue plaque for J.S. Fletcher.

The Pontefract [UK] Civic Society announced the placement of a blue Heritage Plaque at Denby Farm, the childhood home of mystery writer J.S. Fletcher (1863–1935; author of The Middle Temple Murder [1919], etc.). In the February 1933 issue of American Mercury, Fletcher—seeking to address a question regarding his output vs. that of Edgar Wallace—reported that he had published 233 books, according to the British Museum. 

J.S. Fletcher, ca. 1912. 
Wikimedia Commons

J. S. Fletcher on his ouput.

As reported in the February 1933 issue of American Mercury, mystery author J. S. Fletcher (1863–1935) wrote to his publisher, Alfred Knopf, on 7 November 1932 about his output: 

Some controversy having arisen in a literary journal as to whether I have written as many books as Edgar Wallace, I asked the British Museum people to tell me how many books I have published. I have just had their reply—233. 

Awful!

"Kentish Tales" exhibition.

J.  S. Fletcher

On view until the end of the month at the Augustine House library at Canterbury Christ Church University (UK) is the exhibition "Kentish Tales: Stories of Love, Smuggling, and Murder" that focuses on authors who lived in or wrote about Kent. A mystery-related title in the exhibition is The Passenger to Folkestone (1927) by J. S. Fletcher, in which a murder appears to result from robbery but eventually reveals other facets (the online info on the exhibition includes an audio excerpt from the book). Also included is the comedy The Green Alleys by Eden Phillpotts, who was Agatha Christie's mentor. The exhibition is curated by the digital humanities project Kent Maps Online.

J. S. Fletcher celebrates a centenary.

New HarperCollins edition of Fletcher's
The Middle Temple Murder

In the Oxford Times, Christopher Gray celebrates the centenary of the publication of The Middle Temple Murder (1919) by Yorkshire-born Joseph Smith Fletcher, better known as J. S. Fletcher (1863–1935). Says Gray, "The novel put me very much in mind of John Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps." In the novel (read by presidential mystery fan Woodrow Wilson), a journalist and a Scotland Yard inspector see something more in a violent death than a robbery gone wrong.

More on Fletcher (who apparently also was a friend of T. S. Stribling)

Jan 31 app deadline, UT-Austin Ransom Center.

Baroness Orczy, from the
May 26, 1906
San Francisco Call

The application deadline for research fellowships at UT-Austin's Harry Ransom Center is Jan. 31. Fellowships range from 1 to 3 months and from $1200 to $3000 for individuals who need to consult the center's collections (including those working on dissertations). Its mystery collections include the Sherlock Holmes and Sherlockian Collection; correspondence from Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Wilkie Collins, Patrick Hamilton, and Edgar Allan Poe; and manuscripts of J. S. Fletcher, Dashiell Hammett, A. E. W. Mason, Beverley Nichols, and Baroness Orczy.

Woodrow Wilson, mystery fan.

Woodrow Wilson, 28th president of the United States, was quite the mystery fan. "I read detective stories to forget," he wrote to Nancy Saunders Toy in December 1914, "as a man would get drunk!" He added in Eugene C. Brooks's Woodrow Wilson as President (1916), “There are blessed intervals when I forget by one means or another that I am President of the United States. One means by which I forget is to get a rattling good detective story, get after some imaginary offender and chase him all over…” (530).

Authors and works mentioned by scholars as Wilson favorites include Joseph Smith Fletcher, Mary Roberts Rinehart, and E. Phillips Oppenheim's The Great Impersonation (1920). Wrote Christopher Morley in The Ironing Board (1949), “I remember Mr. Wilson, after leaving the White House, telling me he couldn’t find enough really readable detective stories. So I sent him my precious Fugitive Sleuth [by Hulbert Footner]” (168).