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.

A mystery fragment from Mark Twain.

Part of Twain's "A Skeleton Novelette" ms.
Bancroft Library, UC Berkeley

Among the items of the "Mark Twain at Play" exhibition of UC Berkeley's Bancroft Library is "A Skeleton Novelette," a tantalizing 1893 outline in which (according to the Complete Letters of Mark Twain) Twain and editor William Dean Howells proposed that 12 authors write a mystery with the same plot and characters but without knowledge of the other participants' approaches. "There ought to be a murder," Twain wrote. "It ought to be a mysterious murder and the criminal be found out through circumstantial evidence." I am uncertain who wrote the faint inscription "Same old idea" on the paper, but Twain biographer and letter commentator Albert Bigelow Paine seemed equally unimpressed with the idea, writing, "perhaps it was just as well for literature that it was never carried out."

Mark Twain on galleys and mysteries.

Mark Twain to author-editor-critic William Dean Howells, June 28, 1884:

My days are given up to cursings—both loud and deep—for I am reading the H. Finn proofs. They don't make a great many mistakes; but those that do occur are of a nature to make a man curse his teeth loose. (Mark Twain-Howells Letters 493)

(For examples of Twain's spoofs of the mystery genre, read the Conan Doyle-inspired "A Double-Barreled Detective Story," 1902, and "The Stolen White Elephant," 1882.)

Happy birthday, Nevada Barr; William Dean Howells.

Agatha and Anthony Award winner Nevada Barr, the creator of park ranger sleuth Anna Pigeon, turns 56 today. Her latest novel, which will be out April 1st, is Winter Study.

And Atlantic Monthly editor and critic William Dean Howells was born today in Ohio in 1837. Author of The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885) and other novels, he also edited one of the earliest round-robin novels, The Whole Family (1908), with contributors such as Mary R. Shipman Andrews, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Henry James, and Elizabeth Stuart Phelps. He promoted the work of Henrik Ibsen, Henry James, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, and Emile Zola, among other writers, and was a member of Boston's Dante Club. He died in 1920.