going back to what I love reading and jumping right into the '20s: The Unclaimed Letter by Anna McClure Sholl

I have been the queen of sporadic posting lately due to stuff at home but hopefully I can get on with journaling my crime reading at the usual pace once again.

It's no secret that I love reading old books, especially if they're written by authors who have tended to fade into obscurity.  Anna McClure Sholl is one of these; in fact, she's so obscure that trying to find any information about her other than her birth and death dates (1868 - 1956) is incredibly difficult.  I know she was a painter as well as an author, that she was born in Pennsylvania and attended Cornell University, from which she graduated in 1895.   There is a brief blurb about her at Wikisource: "Woman's Who's Who of America, 1914-1915 which reads as follows:

"Sholl, Anna McClure, National Arts Club, NY City.  Novelist; b. Philadelphia; dau. William J. and Clara (Corson) Sholl; ed. Ogontz Coll.; special student at Cornell University.  Engaged in newspaper work and was on staff of the NY Commercial Advertiser as editorial writer, 1896-97.  Collaborated on the Charles Dudley Warner Library of the World's Best Literature, 1897-98, and other publications; contributor to the magazines.  Author: The Law of Life; The Port of Storms; The Greater Love. Clubs: Lyceum (London), National Arts (NY City). "

She also used the pseudonym Margaret Carpenter in some of her many short stories, and her work has been published in  Harper's, Munsey's and a host of other periodicals.   I did find a photo of her at the website of The Museum of the City of New York in which she is at a dinner to honor Mark Twain's 70th birthday at Delmonico's in 1905; the problem is that even though the participants are listed, I'm not quite sure which woman is Sholl. 

from The Museum of the City of New York

From there, she remains a mystery to me; if anyone has any info he/she would care to share, I would be appreciative.    

One book not mentioned in the above "Who's Who" blurb is her The Unclaimed Letter, published in 1921.

My edition is from Forgotten Books (2018, 9781527638426), with yet another unexciting cover, but I will say that a) the spines all look great together on the shelves and b) I appreciate that Forgotten Books keeps publishing these old tomes.  (For those of you who don't do physical books, The Unclaimed Letter  is also available online for free.) The publication info page offers two copyrights, one from Crowell Publishing Company and one from Dorrance and Company.  [As an interesting aside, Crowell Publishing Company was incorporated in 1920, changing its name in 1939 to Crowell-Collier.  In 1965 it changed again to Crowell, Collier & Macmillan, ultimately becoming the Macmillan Publishers we all know today. ]

In a story where whodunit blends with pulpy revenge tale, Frederick Dewitt has been ordered to take some time away "for his health," and he decides to spend it at his "old haunt" in the mountains of East Burleigh in Ulster County New York.  As we first meet Dewitt, he's striking up a conversation with the local postmistress, Miss Almira, who's been holding on to a "sinister letter"  that had arrived.  She's actually been saving it so that he would take a look at it, because it's making her nervous.  It is addressed to "the person who committed the Murder at the The old Bostwick Farm,"  which turns out to be the property of Miss Almira's uncle, Abraham Bostwick.  Uncle Abraham's been dead five years, and it's been shut up ever since his death. It's been on the market with no takers, "situation's too lonesome; ground too rocky," and it comes with a legend about a young woman who'd been killed there who continues to cry and walk the house for years.  Neither feels good about opening the letter, but  Dewitt is intrigued, and decides to check things out.   After obtaining a key to the old place and making his way there on foot, he is surprised to see the face of a woman through a window.  At first the old legend pops into his head, but she is very real, claiming to have become lost on her way to where she's actually staying, a house built some one thousand feet above the farm.  Dewitt is instantly smitten and offers to go back into the village and get a car to drive her there, but when he returns, she's gone.  Instead, he meets a man by the name of Ramah Tong, who happens to be the now-disappeared woman's Indian servant, and learns of an "accident" that had happened two days earlier, when a man by the name of Martin Carfax just happened to lean over a cliff and fell into a deep quarry.  Because the accident had happened on April 1, when Tong had gone to seek help the owner of the land containing the quarry had thought Tong was wearing some sort of costume and that he was trying to pull a fast one, and didn't bother to take a look. Dewitt organizes a rescue mission and the body is found.  Eventually a witness comes forward to reveal that it was no accident, and Dewitt finds himself investigating a murder involving his mystery woman, who turns out to be the newly-widowed Christine Carfax (whose husband died on their wedding day), and her former lover Gordon Brent, who not only swears he's innocent but that he has an alibi. As Dewitt begins nosing around, things get even stranger and the body count starts to multiply.

While I'm happy to have read this obscure book  (the more the merrier for me),  from a reader standpoint it's one of the most seriously convoluted mysteries I've ever experienced.   While it starts out as a definite whodunit, it actually has much more of that sort of vibe associated with old pulpy mysteries, where the whys of the crime go back in time.  As a whodunit, it didn't exactly work for me, but I did have fun with the clues that the author threw in that put it more into the zone of the strange, including a mysterious "brotherhood,"  "Buddhist rosary beads," sinister-looking East Indians, and the questions that crop up dealing with astral projection and  "wireless photography" in which someone's dream just might turn into a photo that becomes imprinted on other people's consciousness.  However,  as much as I love reading old pulpy mysteries, a little reining in on the author's part wouldn't have gone amiss here; while The Unclaimed Letter  had its  enjoyable moments,  I found myself mentally willing the story to move on when it started to get bogged down, which was more than a few times.  I won't even mention the flaws in the plot itself, leaving them for others to discover, but trust me, they're there, along with the element of romance.  Still, the point is to discover and read these long-forgotten books and authors, something that brings me joy in the long run, so I can't really complain too much.

The Unclaimed Letter is probably best suited for readers who, like myself, are into discovering books that have disappeared into the void of obscurity; it does require a bit of patience but the upside is that this is not your average mystery story, something I genuinely appreciate.

*Scientific detectives of yesteryear

"There is a distinct place for science in the detection of crime."

                                                        -- Craig Kennedy, Scientific Detective 243

The name John Thorndyke should be well known by avid crime/mystery fiction fans, but what about Luther Trant or Craig Kennedy?  What they have in common is that all three use science in some fashion to solve various mysteries,  Thorndyke in England and  Trant and Kennedy in America.

9780755103744
House of Stratus, 2001
originally published 1907
214 pp
paperback

 R. Austin Freeman's The Red Thumb Mark is the first of twenty one full-length novels to feature Dr. John Thorndyke; there are also a number of short story collections in which he does his scientific magic.  Freeman noted in the introduction to his 1909 Dr. Thorndyke's Cases that his stories have, "for the most part, a medico-legal motive,"  and that the methodology used in solving them is similar to what is "employed in actual practice by medical jurists."   According to Mike Grost, whose A Guide to Classic Mystery and Detection is one of my go-to places online and  visited quite often when I am looking for books to read, Freeman was the "founder" of the "school of detectival realism." In that same introduction to Dr. Thorndyke's Cases, Freeman goes on to say that "the experiments described have in all cases been performed by me," so obviously this is a man whose feet were firmly on the ground sciencewise and someone who knew what he was talking about.  

The case of The Red Thumb Mark centers around the theft of a parcel of diamonds ("stones of exceptional size and value"  from the safe belonging to a Mr. John Hornby.  Whoever stole them seems to have either cut or scratched his thumb in the process, leaving "two drops of blood" at the bottom of the safe.  Along with a couple of "bloody smears" left on a paper, there was also a "remarkably clear imprint" of a bloody thumb mark.  Hornby's nephew Reuben has been blamed for the crime. Unfortunately for him, he'd earlier provided his aunt with a thumbprint for her Thumbograph (sort of like an autograph book using thumbprints) which matched the print from the safe. Fortunately, while his lawyer advises him to "plead guilty and throw himself on the mercy of the court..." since there was no possible way for a defense case to stand up against the evidence, Reuben swears that he is innocent, and Dr. Thorndyke agrees to take the case. 

I wish I had a lot of time to reflect on what's in this book aside from the mystery at hand and Thorndyke's scientific work. I'll just buzz through a few things here -- Thorndyke's views on the presumption of an accused man's innocence, the problem of  "hooligans" on the streets of London, and criticism of the Edwardian judicial system. Reader beware: the solution is easy to figure out, but that's okay -- there's plenty of other things going on this book that completely make it a worthwhile read. 

Moving on, we come to one of our own American crime solvers, Luther Trant. 

9781332612697
Forgotten Books, 2017
originally published 1910
364 pp, paperback

The authors of this book, Edwin Balmer and William MacHarg, were both reporters for the Chicago Tribune, so it's no surprise that most of the action takes place in this city.  There were, according to Robert Sampson in his Yesterday's Faces, Volume 2: Strange Days (1984), twelve original Luther Trant stories (17).  The Achievements of Luther Trant leaves out three of them, but 

original 1910 cover, courtesy of L.W. Currey

in the space of the nine stories we do have,  we watch as the main character Luther Trant evolves from a "callow assistant in a psychological laboratory" into a man whose fame has spread so widely that he could

 "not now leave his Club, even on a Sunday, without disappointing somewhere, in the great-pulsating city, an appeal to him for help in trouble."  

Indeed, after his first case, "The Man in the Room", in which he proved that a suicide was actually a murder,  young Trant asks for a leave of absence from his university job to "try the scientific psychology again," putting his talents to work in solving the mystery of the murder of Chicago's prosecuting attorney.  If that is successful, he notes, he'll resign and "keep after crime -- in the new way."

As we learn from the authors in the foreword, Trant's methods are real, as are "the tests he employs," and are

"precisely such as are being used daily in the psychological laboratories of the great universities -- both in America and Europe -- by means of which modern men of science are at last disclosing and defining the workings of that oldest of world-mysteries -- the human mind." 

 His research involves a number of experiments which measure physical changes in someone under stress that may be slight enough to go unnoticed by the human eye.  He believes that in scientific psychology

"there is no room for mistakes...Instead of analyzing evidence by the haphazard methods of the courts, we can analyze it scientifically, exactly, incontrovertibly -- we can select infallibly the true from the false."

In short, his idea is that by using these methods, which generally include some sort of "apparatus" or "device," including plethysmographs, automatographs, galvanometers (all real -- I looked them up), etc. (one time adding banana oil to the mix),  scientific psychology will be the future of police work. While most of the cops have tried everything but failed to solve the cases Trant is eventually brought into, they also start out wary of his methods. For example, in "The Empty Cartridges," one policeman asks him if he'll be doing his "psycho-palmistry," but has to sort of eat his words when all is said and done.

Of course with nine stories, some are better than others, and my favorite in this collection is "The Chalchihuitl Stone," which in a very big way reads like a cross between a mystery story and a good, old-fashioned pulp fiction yarn, complete  with ancient Aztecs and an expedition to Central America.  Another that reads as a pulp adventure is the above mentioned "The Empty Cartridges," which I have to say is also one of my favorites in this volume.  Some are pretty easy to figure out for the armchair detective, but all in all, it's a great collection that would likely have remained in oblivion had it not been for Hugo Gernsbach, who, according to Sampson, "found these device-oriented cases fascinating," and allotted five of them space in his Scientific Detective Monthly, with four more added  later to Amazing Detective Tales.  Below is a reproduction of Scientific Detective Monthly with  the red-haired Trant at the helm.

from Internet Speculative Fiction Database

I do need to say that while I enjoyed these stories tremendously and that I had a lot of fun reading them, there are several spots where the racist attitudes of the time are made very clear, so beware.  One more thing: had I known before buying my edition from Forgotten Books (a publisher I LOVE),  I would have picked up the Coachwhip Books collection, 2 Detectives, where Trant's adventures are paired with those of Inspector Addington Peace.  I know there are also e-versions of this book; online I'm not sure about.


If you look at the top banner on the photo above, you'll see two names: Arthur B. Reeve and Craig Kennedy, which takes us to book number three, volume 1 of  Craig Kennedy: Scientific Detective.  

9780857060136
Leonaur, 2010
448 pp
paperback

My edition comes from another favorite press, Leonaur, and it is the first of seven volumes of stories to feature "The American Sherlock Holmes."  Kennedy's first appearance was in in Cosmopolitan Magazine, December 1910, and his cases continued to be published through 1935 in a variety of different publications.   At the beginning of the section of stories called "The Silent Bullet," Kennedy offers readers his "theories," in which he says that "there is a distinct place for science in the detection of crime." He plans to

"apply science to the detection of crime, the same sort of methods by which you trace out the presence of a chemical, or run an unknown germ to earth."

Like Holmes, Kennedy  has a sort of sidekick guy, reporter Walter Jameson; unlike Holmes, as we learn in J. K. Van Dover's You Know My Method: The Science of the Detective (1994),

"Craig Kennedy does not search for identifiable cigarette ashes in rooms with twisted carpets, half empty wine glasses, torn bell pulls, and French doors slightly ajar." (172)

Kennedy is a professor at a New York University, and bemoans the fact that "no one has ever endowed a professorship in criminal science in any of our large universities."  As a detective, he investigates a variety of different crimes, ranging from poisonings to arson to fake mediums, always applying the latest science, scientific principles and methodology in each case.  I will say that in more than one case, I was actually appalled at how science was used at the time, especially in the story "The Silent Bullet," when Kennedy spoke of how he used blood tests to determine that the criminal was a "negro waiter."  This is quite frankly pure scientific racism, in which Kennedy reveals that in "adding to our knowledge of evolution," the Carnegie Institute had come up with a study linking the "blood of a certain branch of the human race" to "the blood of a certain group of monkeys, the chimpanzees," with "the blood of another branch" linking to "the gorilla."  By and large, though, most of the stories aren't like this, and actually in most cases have intriguing plots, some crazy enough (like one of my favorites here, "The Invisible Ray") to be great for readers of old pulp fiction.

All three books are but samples of what's out there in the realm of scientific detective stories, and aside from the reflected racism of the time, are actually quite enjoyable.  All of these books I would recommend mainly to people who are interested in the history of mystery/crime fiction, or to serious readers of old pulp fiction. 

back now to my history of mystery project with *Hargrave, by Frances Milton (Fanny) Trollope.

When I decided to read early crime literature this year, I picked up all kinds of nonfiction books on the topic to help me figure out what exactly to look for.  I came across Hargrave, Or the Adventures of a Man of Fashion in an excellent book by Lucy Sussex called Women Writers and Detectives in Nineteenth-Century Crime Fiction: The Mothers of the Mystery Genre.  

the author, from www.trollope.org 

 Frances Milton (1779-1863) was a most prolific author with some 34 novels under her belt and seven works of nonfiction.   She married barrister Thomas Anthony Trollope in 1829, and they had seven children, including Anthony Trollope, who would go on to become "one of the most successful, prolific and respected novelists of the Victorian era."  After the family fortune went from bad to worse, Fanny, son Henry and her two daughters left for America in 1827, returning to England in 1831. Her travels and experiences led her to write her famous Domestic Manners of the Americans," which as the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (ODNB) notes, "launched Fanny's career as writer."  (Just FYI - the link will take you to a subscription-only page, but I will give the reference anyway -- article 27751.)  After her Domestic Manners, she began trying her hand at fiction, publishing her first novel in 1832. The ODNB article notes that she "experimented with several different genres," including Gothic fiction, social themes, including an anti-slavery novel, Jonathan Jefferson Whitlaw, which was published in 1836.  Later she would go on to write books with "melodramatic plots," aiming to "hit the somewhat lowbrow taste of the circulating library," seriously right up my alley.   And so now we have Hargrave, published in 1843,  her sixteenth novel. As with so many of the authors I read, her work has mostly been forgotten, but thanks to one of my favorite publishers, Forgotten Books, I was able to pick up Hargrave complete in three volumes.  

9781330856727
Forgotten Books, 312 pp

Anyway, to get down to it, the story focuses on Charles Hargrave and his family, who are living in Paris as the story begins. Hargrave is a widower with one daughter from his marriage, Sabina, and a stepdaughter Adèle de Cordillac.  His dead wife's sister, Madame de Hautrivage,  also lives with the family, along with a number of servants. Hargrave's reputation is such that he is a man with a gigantic fortune, well known for his huge gala balls that run into the wee hours of the morning, his fine taste in clothes, etc., and he is at the top of the social ladder of the city.  It isn't too long though until we discover that it's all a sham and that he's become desperate for money, in debt to several people and having bills he's having trouble meeting.  He keeps his secret from the rest of his family and the rest of society, however, and goes on living the high life.He knows that he must get his daughters married off to wealthy suitors and depend on them to take care of him.    Meanwhile, the police are looking for answers as to who's been robbing high rollers coming out of a local club called Riccardo's.   While Adèle and Sabina are meeting the men of their dreams (the plans of which are thwarted soon enough),  Hargrave has a huge fete (another one of his gala extravaganzas) and has invited a certain Madame Bertrand along with her husband to attend. She is rich and flaunts her wealth by wearing diamonds sewn onto her dresses, but at the end of the party around 4:30 a.m. or so, she turns up missing.  Hargrave's opinion is that the young lady has eloped, gone off with a lover.

9781333070342
Forgotten Books, 311 pp

There's a big problem brewing, though, and that's Adèle, who had heard and seen things both during the fete and afterward from her bedroom window.  She decides to investigate on her own, and discovers certain evidence that leads her to believe that Hargrave is involved, and decides that the family should make a run for it.    However, before all of this plays out, at the same time Mme. Bertrand had gone missing,  Adèle had sent her servant Roger Humphries on a personal mission that will later come back to bite the pair of them, since the police are out in force looking for Mme. Bertrand's abductor; Roger just happens to be at the wrong place at the wrong time. The family makes up some rather stupid but credible excuse to feed to the chatty aunt about why they're leaving and establishes a false trail in case anyone comes after them.

9781333334048
Forgotten Books, 325 pp

In Volume three, our fugitives are safely ensconced incognito  in the forest near Baden, and while Charles is missing his once-great life, Adèle has begun to hate him, knowing exactly what kind of man he really is. Things come to a head when she learns that Roger's been imprisoned for the kidnapping and supposed murder of Mme. Bertrand and she realizes that she has the power to save him.  Charles is too caught up in worrying about his own reputation and his own future to let her go and threatens to lock her in to prevent her leaving.  While I won't reveal how things play out , I have to say that Trollope has spun a cracking good yarn with this book, which over the space of its full 900-plus pages gave me hours of sheer, lowbrow pleasure.

 To be fair, this is not strictly one hundred percent a crime novel. Sussex says that it is  "a romance plot yoked to a crime mystery," and it may be that, as  Kate Watson notes in her book Women Writing Crime Fiction, 1860-1880: Fourteen American British and Australian Authors, Trollope

 "simultaneously uses the conventional trappings of sentimental romance in Hargrave; this incorporation suggests the social and literary limitations place upon women writers; they had to conceal both crime in their fiction and the crime of writing about such an unsuitable subject." (20)

 So far in my own explorations, Hargrave seems to be one of the earliest works of crime literature written by a woman, which makes it beyond noteworthy, although Watson makes the point that Catherine Crowe's Adventures of Susan Hopley; or Circumstantial Evidence (which I should have read but  forgot that I actually own until this very second) came out two years earlier in 1841. The real point here, stated so eloquently by Kate Watson, is that even at this early date, 

"...women were writing crime, and it seems that their texts have somehow been repressed or dismissed in favor of the male canon." 

Once again I've picked up a novel that not very many people will want to read, and that's okay. I wouldn't have even known about it before starting this project, but as it turns out it was a fine novel, easy to read, and above all, fun.