179. Carolyn Wells — Murder in the Bookshop with Rebecca Rego Barry
AMY HELMES: Thank you for listening to Lost Ladies of Lit for access to all of our future bonus episodes and to help support the cause of recovering forgotten women writers, join our Patreon community, visit lostladiesoflit.com and click Become a Patron to find out more.
KIM ASKEW: Welcome to Lost Ladies of Lit, the podcast dedicated to dusting off forgotten women writers. I'm Kim Askew, here with my co-host, Amy Helmes, who is not a big fan of mystery novels, listeners.
AMY: No. I think, Kim, honestly, I've maybe only read one Agatha Christie novel in my life. I'm not keen on Sherlock Holmes. I know both of these facts are making you shudder a little bit right now. You love a good mystery, right Kim?
KIM: Oh yeah, I'm all over the place. Cozy British mysteries are great; like hardcore noir detective novels; French, Italian translations. I love the mystery/detective novel a lot.
Amy: So this is the episode for you then.
KIM: Yeah,
AMY: While I don't love a fictional mystery, I do really enjoy a real life mystery, and I think we've got one to explore today, namely, the quest to figure out why on earth a wildly successful and prolific writer who was pretty much a household name around the turn of the century, fell into complete obscurity.
KIM: We're going to call it The Mystery of the Vanishing Legacy, Amy. Carolyn Wells was a celebrity who counted Theodore Roosevelt, Thomas Edison and Mark Twain among her many famous friends and fans. She was, without a doubt, a pioneer of the detective mystery genre. She started writing locked-room mysteries a decade before Agatha Christie's work first debuted, and she even published a nonfiction how-to guide on the technique of writing mysteries. She was so famous that in 1936, Milton Bradley actually licensed her name for a game. It was a card game.
Amy: And while mysteries were Carolyn Wells's bread and butter, at a certain point in her career, she also wrote across genres, including books for children and young adults, humor pieces, short stories, poetry, puzzles, and anthologies. All told, she published, get this — 180 books in her lifetime, which is mind boggling, especially when you consider she started her writing career a bit later than many other writers we've featured on this podcast.
KIM: Wow. That's a lot by any standard. And speaking of mysteries, our special guest today had to do some sleuthing of her own to uncover the answer to the question Who was Carolyn Wells? What she found out along the way is pretty incredible. Are you ready to kick off this investigation, Amy?
AMY: Absolutely. So let's raid the stacks and get started!
KIM: Our guest today, Rebecca Rego Barry, knows a thing or two about old books. In addition to having a master's degree in book history, she is also a former editor of Fine Books and Collections magazine, and she currently works as the director of communications at the Raab Collection, a firm that buys and sells historical autographs and documents. She's the author of 2015's Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places, and her writing can also be found in From Page to Place: American Literary Tourism and the Afterlives of American Authors.
AMY: Rebecca's latest book, out just last week from Post Hill Press, is The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author. Our former guest Allison Gilbert from our episode on Elsie Robinson blurbed this book actually, calling it “an engrossing biography that reads like a detective novel.” This book will also make you laugh a lot with its frequent fourth-wall breaking. So it's kind of part biography and part glimpse also into how biographies are born.Rebecca, this book is such a delight. I'm so excited to talk about it today. Welcome to the show.
REBECCA: Thank you so much for having me. I've been such a fan of this podcast for years. So it's amazing to be on.
AMY: Thanks for listening.
KIM: Yeah, that's awesome, we love hearing that. Um, we mentioned moments ago that you were a lover and a collector of rare books, which is so cool, and that is what circuitously brought you first into contact with the ghost of Carolyn Wells. Can you fill our listeners in? It's such a great story.
REBECCA: Yeah. Um, well, for about 13 years, I was editor of this magazine called Fine Books and Collections. So, in sort of my daily work, I would end up going to these rare and antiquarian book fairs, and one year, 2011, actually, my husband came with me, tagged along. And while I was off doing something else, he went over and he bought a first edition of Walden, which has always been one of my favorite books. It was going to be a surprise birthday gift for me that year.
AMY: Major husband brownie points.
KIM: Yeah.
REBECCA: It’s one of the only gifts in my life that has really knocked my socks off. And so I opened it, you know, on my birthday. There's a couple of book plates in there because obviously it's an old book, it's been owned by generations of people. And one of the book plates in it is a really kind of neo-Renaissance woman, and she's holding this funny little character in her hands, a little gargoyle like character. And it says along the bottom the name Carolyn Wells. So I was like, “Well, that's really interesting.” Like, I have no idea who this person is. And, you know, women collectors are pretty rare in the early 20th century, just because women didn't have the money or the agency to really be book collectors. So I just thought it was a neat thing and didn't really think about it too much. But again, going to all these book fairs, I started to see the name Carolyn Wells pop up on these first editions of 20s and 30s-era mysteries. And then in 2018, a British imprint put out a copy of one of her mysteries called Murder in the Bookshop. And that of course got my attention because it's a mystery set in a bookshop. It's all about rare books and antiquarian books. And it was such an “A-ha” moment. I was like, “Oh my God, she is not only a book collector, but she's a mystery author, and she wrote a mystery about rare book collecting.” And it really all just came together. And, um…
AMY: And I have one of her books with her book plate in it.
REBECCA: Exactly.
AMY: So you have this a-ha moment, but then at what point did you decide, “Hey, I want to write the story of this woman's life.”?
REBECCA: What happened was, because I was a freelance journalist I thought to myself, “Okay, I'm going to write an article about her.” So I pitched it to Crime Reads, which is a website about mysteries that I love, and, you know, they accepted it, and I just wrote a little article about her. But in the process of writing that I found out about all these other facets of her life in which she excelled, you know, and I just thought, “Wow, this is a much bigger project than I think it is.” And that article actually came out in March 2020, like the week the pandemic started, so I had all this time on my hands to really say to myself, that's not just an article, it's a bigger project.
KIM: And fittingly, this book reads like a mystery novel in its own right as you're attempting to track down information about Carolyn's life and career. So tell us how difficult was it, and can you also, um, tell our listeners some of the more surprising twists and turns that happened along the way?
REBECCA: Yeah. I mean, probably for a lot of figures, you plug them into Google and not much comes up or not much that's reliable. You could certainly find her in Wikipedia, and she pops up in a couple of reference books, but there was no biography of her and I couldn't find any library that had a substantial archive, like her manuscripts and letters and that kind of thing.
So I just started thinking, “Where is this woman? Why is she not well known? Why is there nothing really out there substantial about her?” And I talked to one scholar when I was writing the Crime Reads article who said to me, “I have been thinking about this for decades. I really hope you run with this because somebody has to.” So, like I said, it was the beginning of the pandemic, so I just kind of spent a lot of time doing some digital research. Carolyn Wells never had any children, so I knew that there wasn't going to be some kid out there who's got an attic full of her stuff or a grandkid. But I thought to myself, “Well, maybe I can just find somebody.” And so I started looking around in Ancestry.com and Find a Grave and all these other websites to see if I could find any family members, and I happened upon her brother and I was like, “Okay, she has a brother! Great!” And then from there, I found out that he had three children, one of which was still alive. And so I sleuthed around and I found an address, and I wasn't even sure it was the right woman. It's a woman named Phyllis.I wasn't sure if it was the right person, address. I knew she'd be in her late 80s. So I thought, you know, she might be compromised. She might be ill. Who knows? But I wrote a letter and I just sent it out into the world. Four days later I get an email back from this woman and she's like, “Yes I am who you think I am and I'm so excited about your project and would you like to come visit me and see what I have?” And I was just like, “Oh my God, this is going to happen.”
Amy: Oh my gosh.
KIM: Amazing. I love that.
Amy: Her name is Phyllis.
REBECCA: Yeah. She is the grandniece of Carolyn Wells and really the last living link, because she was about seven when Carolyn died. So she doesn't remember meeting her necessarily, but I'm sure they probably did. I just think of her as like the last living link between Carolyn's world and our world.
AMY: I'm just imagining how gratifying it was to hear from you, like, somebody cares about this woman that was related to me I know is important. Every biographer sort of has these stories, the kind of behind-the-scenes maneuvering of how they find all the information. You choose to include a lot of these personal stories, like, your journey in your book, which I loved, and you have all these footnotes that you include that are just hilarious. And I feel like that aspect of the book really makes this biography shine. So listeners, even if you think to yourself, “Oh, I'm not a big non-fiction person, I don't want to read like a big, heavy scholarly biography,” that's not this book of Rebecca's. Did you know that you wanted to write the book in this sort of personal way?
REBECCA: Well, a couple of things, and thank you for saying that because I kind of thought to myself as I was writing, and even now when I look at the finished product, I think some people are going to love this part of it and some people are going to hate this part of it. You know, those like the footnotes and the little side stories and that kind of thing.I kind of knew that people aren't going to want to read four or 500 pages, you know, a scholarly tome about a woman that they've never heard of. And Carolyn being Carolyn, you know, known for being funny and witty, I wanted it to be a little irreverent. You know, she says in her memoir the reason for writing, to her, was to entertain and to amuse, and so I kind of took that and I thought, I have to do something like that. I can't just plod along from birth to, you know, all of her different books and what scholars thought of them and then death. I didn't want to do it that way.
AMY: And also the mystery aspect is fun. You're the Fleming Stone sleuth of this biography, you know?
KIM: Totally. So let’s go ahead and dive into the life of Carolyn Wells. She was born in 1862 in Rahway, New Jersey. Rebecca, is there anything about her youth that maybe would have offered up a clue, (ding ding!) about her mystery writing future?
REBECCA: She had a very, um, “privileged” is definitely the word, lifestyle growing up. Although I will say this: her father decided what she could read and what she couldn't read, so she didn't really come into her own as a reader, um, until she was in her teens and she figured out that there was a public library she could walk to and she could get any book she wanted and her father didn't have to know about it. So, you know, that's one facet of it. She didn't grow up in a house full of books and she wasn't destined to be a writer necessarily. But one of the things I talk about in this book, and this is just purely a hunch, and it's, you know, certainly not something that can be proven, but there is this really violent and unsolved murder that happens streets away from where she lives when she's 25. And the victim is actually about 25 as well, and it's a woman that no one apparently knows anything about. She's found, it's sort of like a Jack the Ripper-esque murder. They never find the killer, but it goes on for months, the search for the killer, and the search to find out who this woman is. They call her The Unknown Woman. And they had like hordes of media come to this tiny town and people thinking they could figure out who the woman was. And I can't help but think that that kind of planted a seed for her, not only to be a writer, but to write mysteries in which they always get solved. There's always a detective. He always finds out. The right thing always happens. You're never left wondering if the killer is still out there, you know?
KIM: Right.
REBECCA: It's just a funny thing that I happened to notice when I was at the cemetery where she is buried, The Unknown Woman is also buried.
AMY: Oh, wow.
REBECCA: And they still don't know who she is. I mean, I guess they could, you know, excavate her and do some DNA testing, but they don't want to do that. So it is something that the town actually cherishes as a mystery.
KIM: Hmm. Interesting.
AMY: You mentioned, you know, she started cultivating her own literary tastes later in her youth. Did she read any mystery writers?
REBECCA: Well, you know, she started as a librarian, for about 10 or 12 years. She basically said, and I kind of point out in the book, librarians would kill you if they heard this, but she said, I basically just ordered books, sat there and read them. That's what she did as a job, which she loved because she got to read all of the magazines that came in, all the new books. So she read pretty broadly. And during the 1890s, Sherlock Holmes was like the biggest and best thing, and she loved him. She loved Arthur Conan Doyle. But she does talk in her memoir about being home one day, it's a rainy day, and she and her mother are there, and someone comes over and they want to read aloud to them this novel, and it's one of Anna Katharine Green's novels, mystery novels. And she says something in her memoir along the lines of, I had never heard this before and I was blown over and from then on I couldn't get mysteries out of my blood.
KIM: Ooh, I love it.
REBECCA: So I think between Anna Katharine Green and Arthur Conan Doyle, she was just hooked.
AMY: And listeners, we're going to be talking about Anna Katharine Green in a bonus episode coming up. So, um, we'll get more into her, but okay, so she's working as a librarian, but really just sitting there reading, which is funny because in high school, I was like a library assistant. That was my job. And I would pretend to be off in the stacks straightening or whatever, but I'd really just be sitting there cross legged diving into a book. So I totally can understand that. So how does she go from librarian to professional writer?
REBECCA: Yeah, while she's a librarian, like I said. She's reading all of these magazines we don't necessarily remember today, but they were like small literary slash humor magazines. And she kind of gets it into her head that she's going to start pitching these editors with some poetry and little bits of prose and puzzles she's really into. I mean, she's a literary nobody and she just thinks, Well, I can do this. So she lands a piece in Vogue and she lands a piece in Puck, and then she parlays every small publication, every little success into the next thing. By the end of the decade, she's writing for Life, and she's writing for Judge, which is a British humor magazine. And it takes her a long time before she finally can say to herself, “I am a writer,” and leave the job as a librarian. It's 1902 when she does that. She's 40 years old when she makes the break.
KIM: Wow.
AMY: So getting kind of a late start as a writer. Yeah.
REBECCA: Mm-hmm.
KIM: So even before she started to focus on mysteries, she wrote a lot of novels for children and young adults, right?
REBECCA: Yeah, the interesting thing about her is she's doing all of this concurrently. She's writing poetry. She's writing for children's magazines. She's writing humor pieces. Uh, then she starts writing a bunch of young adult books, particularly a series called the “Patty” books, of which she writes 17. And they are immensely popular. They're reprinted for decades. And then in 1909, she writes her first mystery. But again, all of this is happening at the same time. And in some years she's writing six, eight, I think nine or 10 is the max per year.
KIM: That's more than Stephen King, right? Wow.
REBECCA: It's not a record. For a while, I thought, Oh my God, is she a record breaker?
KIM: Totally. Yeah, you're like, “Guinness..!” Yeah.
AMY: I want to get back to her humor writing. Didn't she do a parody of, I want to say Upton Sinclair? Who was it that she parodied?
REBECCA: Uh, Main Street was the name of the novel. I think, is it Sinclair Lewis?
KIM: Sinclair Lewis. Yep. Main Street.
REBECCA: Yeah. Which was like the number one bestseller of the year. I guess she just didn't like the plot of it, and she decided I'm going to parody this. And she writes a novel that's called Ptomaine Street. I think that's a, is it a type of poison? I'm not sure.
AMY: It's some sort of illness, or yeah.
REBECCA: And uh, yeah. Writes an entire novel and really just for the fun of it, in the middle of everything else she's doing.
AMY: And it seems like the response to all that, I just wanted to point out, was, you know, people were delighted by her, but also surprised that a woman could write anything funny.
REBECCA: Very much. Yeah. I mean, this whole thing that, you know, we've heard in our lifetime, “Are women funny?” is something that they were literally writing the same phrase, the same question a hundred years ago and addressing it at her. “Are women funny?” And then they'd hold her up as a woman who, in fact, is funny. Like, can you believe it? She's funny.
AMY: Shocker! Yeah. And smart, too, because she's also doing these puzzles and brain teasers for newspapers and magazines. So she was kind of actually a crossword puzzle pioneer, and I wanted to correlate this back to what I mentioned in the introduction about my not loving mysteries so much, because I don't really like any sort of brain teaser games or logic puzzles. It just hurts my head.
KIM: Which is so funny because you are so smart. I mean you were on “Jeopardy!”
Amy: Yeah, no, I have no time for it. I do like the occasional crossword puzzle, but I think the fact that I don't like these logic games so much, it makes sense that I don't, therefore, love to read mysteries. Because there's a lot of synergy between the two.
REBECCA: I feel exactly the same way as you do. I'm just not big on puzzles. I'm not big on like Wordle. My family gets mad at me when we play Scrabble because they say that I ponder too long on the letters, and same thing with mysteries. I kind of feel like when I open a mystery or any novel and I'm starting to read it, I don't want to think about what's going to happen. I don't want to know before everybody else knows. I want it to just play out. But mystery readers don't. They want to solve that puzzle before the big reveal. So for me coming into this project, it was like, “Okay, I'm going to have to read a lot of mystery novels and try to get into that headspace,” which I'm not in. But yeah, she actually equated poetry with puzzles and puzzles with mysteries. She would equate them to math equations.
AMY: Which I also hate.
REBECCA: Me too! Yeah, she always said the heart of a mystery is the clues and the puzzle at the heart of it. She actually didn't care much about the characters, the motivations, and this is a little bit where, you know, modern ears don't necessarily like her writing or, you know, some critics have said, “Oh, well, you know, it didn't have enough depth.” That's not what she was doing. And it's just not the way she came at writing mysteries.
AMY: This is tracking.
REBECCA: Yeah.
KIM: Yeah, that's like, I guess you could see it as a weakness, but then, what do you think made her so uniquely good at writing mysteries?
REBECCA: Well, she was great at that puzzle aspect, but that puzzle aspect was something that was happening in the earlier years. When she published her first mystery in 1909, that was like the height of the fashion for mysteries. But by 10, 15 years later, when you're in the Golden Age of mysteries, that's all changing and they don't want that anymore. They want good characters and they want motivation. But also, I mean, I feel like she had a lot of ingenuity. She's writing three, four, five a year, saleable mystery novels that are reviewed well, that are selling 15, 20, 000 copies each, which is unheard of. I mean, aside from somebody like Mary Roberts Rinehart, who was her nearest competitor in the mystery market in America, there's no one else selling that many novels. So she's coming up with good ideas and good plots, but when we look back on her as critics did in the 60s, 70s, 80s, whichever critics actually paid any attention to her at all, it's to say, Well, that was old-fashioned.
KIM: Mmm, okay. So I think now is a great time to talk about one of Carolyn Wells’s mystery novels. As we said, she wrote 82 of them. The most famous were her Fleming Stone series. We decided to focus on Murder in the Bookshop, the one we mentioned earlier, because it dovetails so nicely with your own interest in rare books, as you said, right, Rebecca?
REBECCA: I mean, she did sprinkle rare books into some of her other mysteries, but this one is the one where she really focuses her attention on that entire market, you know, the rare book collector is a man who gets killed within the first few chapters and then also a rare book is stolen. The librarian is suspected and the wife is suspected and the book dealer is suspected. And for people who love rare books and antiquarian books, the scenes in the library, the bookseller's office, I mean, it's all really cool.
KIM: Yeah, yeah.
AMY: So we mentioned the Fleming Stone series. Fleming Stone comes up in this novel. Rebecca, how would you describe him?
REBECCA: I think she tries to make him seem like he's a scholar detective.
KIM: Mm-hmm. He's literary.
REBECCA: He's literary. And I think his name, Stone, is meant to convey a certain blandness, which he is. He's kind of a gray, bland character, but then he just shows up and he's like, “Okay, I know what happened here.” I think, you know, she got some criticism because in some of the Fleming Stone novels, he doesn't show up until like the last 15 pages. So, you know, you go through this entire mystery, there's no detective. There's police, and they're always bungling, and there's the actual characters themselves trying to figure stuff out, and then, you know, you'll get 75 percent of the way through the book, and then someone's like, “Maybe we should call Fleming Stone!” So that was one thing that when she got criticized for Fleming Stone novels. It was like, well, why does he not show up until nearly the end of the book? This book is not like that.
AMY: Yeah, but I do have so much to say about Fleming Stone, um, and I think “bland” is a good word, because he is not your charismatic Sherlock Holmes. It almost seemed like his underlings that he would recruit to help him out were the actual heroes in terms of solving the crime. I read two of her books for this episode, but in each case, it was like, “Okay, his assistants are the ones doing all the work, and they're more interesting characters!”
KIM: They have so much personality!
AMY: Yeah, yeah. What did you think of the book, Kim?
KIM: I love that it was set in the 1930s. I love the literary aspects of it. So I was looking up some of the quotes and things from Fleming Stone that he was throwing in his conversation. Um, I felt like some of the things that happened kind of contradicted itself. So even though she had the puzzle aspect, it did feel a little bit rushed, to be honest. What did you think?
AMY: I got a lot of chuckles out of it. So Fleming Stone, his relationship with the police is so hilarious. The police give him so much leeway. It's just like, Oh sure, this random guy, let's tell him everything we know!
KIM: Yeah, it wasn't that typical animosity that you usually see between the detectives, at least today, anyway, in mystery novels.
AMY: And they decide it would be a good idea for Fleming Stone to have a key to their home so that he can do some solving in their house whenever he wants to.
KIM: Oh, totally! Oh, and also can I say they… I'm not going to give anything away because I'm not going to say who, but they let a prime suspect go do their job for them!
AMY: There is a lot of citizen sleuthing.
KIM: Yeah,
AMY But I agree, like, getting a window into the time frame, this upper class world..
KIM: That's what I loved.
AMY: 1930s rich people and how they lived is really fun to follow along, right?
REBECCA: Yeah. And that's what she did best. And actually Anna Katharine Green did that as well. Carolyn liked setting her novels either on Fifth Avenue and grand apartments or it's a country house in Connecticut or it's a country house in Long Island. Once in a while, it's a country house in Wisconsin, but they're almost always in the Metro New York area. And it's always your upper class, your upper middle class. And yeah, when the detective shows up and his assistant shows up, they're like, “Yeah, just stay here for the weekend. Until we all figure this out, you can just stay here with us.” And they're all like that!
KIM: “We have innumerable rooms,”was the phrase.
Amy: Was it also a theme across her mysteries that the murderer victim, you always kind of weren't too upset that that person died? Like, you find out that they're actually not the greatest, so you're not really feeling too much sympathy for them?
REBECCA: Yeah. Yeah. And I think this is in a lot of the novels from this era, you know, they'll end up committing suicide or they'll end up doing something so that the police don't have to arrest them and put them on trial and she wants to skip all that.
KIM: So it's like a convenient end.
REBECCA: She wants it to just end quickly and be done.
KIM: yeah,
AMY: I will say also, she does a great job at having lots of potential suspects all with valid motives. So I was never at any point in the two books that I read feeling like really early on, “Oh, I know who did it.” Actually, no, Murder in the Bookshop, I definitely was like, “It's probably this guy.” But you are given a number of options as you go along. And of course, she withholds very important information from the crime that you find out, like, three fourths of the way in. And you're like, “Well, that would have been nice to know.” So I think that's also why I don't love mysteries. You're being manipulated with the information you're given, right?Um, But the end of this novel, we're not going to give anything away, but the way that Fleming Stone solves this mystery, I was rolling on the floor laughing. so funny, ridiculous, however you want to say it. All credit to Carolyn Wells, I'm just saying I think it's right that this is not necessarily going to appeal to all modern readers. But for a laugh, it's really good. And, there are parts that are great. There are parts of her writing that are wonderful. It was uneven, is how I would describe it.
REBECCA: Yeah. and, you know, the funny thing is that this is probably, Murder in the Bookshop, her biggest bestseller. And it was a New York Times bestseller in 1936.
AMY: I think that's an important thing to touch on, Rebecca. We don't necessarily need to judge her based on what we think of the books, right? We need to judge her based on the success, tremendous success, that she had during her lifetime.
KIM: Yeah, obviously people were just craving what she was writing.
REBECCA: Mm hmm. A getaway really.
KIM: Yep, exactly.
REBECCA: Yeah, I agree. And I kind of make this point a few times in the book. Like, I didn't write this biography of Carolyn Wells because I loved her books and I thought she was a brilliant mystery author. It didn't really have anything to do with that. It really had to do with mostly the fact that she excelled in all these different facets of, you know, literary, film, humor, children's literature, like all these different facets. When you add them all up, it's like, “Oh my God, this one person did all of these things!” But yeah, I mean, in terms of whether or not I subjectively thought this novel was good or that novel was good, I don't really think that matters much. And I also think, like you were saying, it's very hard to be a hundred years removed from the publication and think of it the way contemporary readers thought of it.
KIM: Absolutely.
AMY: And hey, Theodore Roosevelt loved it.
REBECCA: Exactly. She actually was acquainted with four different presidents, Thomas Edison and Mark Twain. Maybe not that that matters too much, but what I'm saying is she was a household name, so much so that, you know, they tried to make a radio show out of her name. They made a card game out of her name. I mean, these are things that don't happen to everybody, that's for sure.
KIM: Right.
AMY: Rebecca, we had discussed ahead of this recording whether we should read Murder in the Bookshop or this other very popular novel of hers, Vicky Van. And we ultimately settled on Murder in the Bookshop because of the rare books collection, but, , um, I actually liked Vicky Van better than Murder in the Bookshop. So I would recommend to listeners, if you were gonna do a starter Carolyn Wells novel and wanted to try one out, I would point you in the direction of Vicky Van. I thought it was fun. Again, a good snapshot of an era.
REBECCA: I would agree. I mean, even though I say personally Murder in the Bookshop I love because of the book element, but I think generally critics, you know, when they talk about her work, they will say her early work is better than her later work, um, which makes some sense. By the time she's, you know, writing in the third book late 20s and 30s and 40s, you know, she's definitely older and she's definitely got a formula that she's employing. But the earlier work maybe has a little bit more interest to it. You know, when I started this project, everyone was like, “Oh no, she's, you know, very bland and very formulaic and don't really bother.” I had a couple of mystery scholars tell me that kind of thing. And when I went back into the reviews of each and every novel, The New York Times, The Boston Globe, like all the local papers, Publisher’s Weekly, I found more good reviews than bad reviews, which tells me that the readers then enjoyed the work. Again, when you're looking at it from a hundred years later, or maybe not even a hundred years later, you just have different expectations for literary work than they did then.
AMY: I want to go back and read from Murder in the Bookshop because I feel like we've been tough on poor Fleming Stone. He does have a lot of moments of humor, as does Carolyn Wells, his creator. So I just wanted to read this little section that did make me really laugh.
Fleming Stone has a hunch about who his suspect might be, and he says, I am not absolutely sure of my man, but if he is the one I think, he must be put out of commission entirely, as soon as possible. “I don't want to kill him, but if it is a question of his life or mine, I shall certainly try to remain in the telephone book.”
KIM: Totally. I love Yes. Totally. I love those lines. Listeners, there are a lot of lines like that. So we talked about this being set amongst the rare book trade and this is a pursuit that Carolyn got really into later in life as well. It's actually a pretty important part of her legacy, right, Rebecca?
REBECCA: Yeah, um, she got married late in life, she got married when she was about 55, a man named Hadwin Houghton, and…
AMY: Can we interrupt and talk about the possible way that they met each other?
REBECCA: Yes, although it’s difficult to know because Carolyn was always cagey about giving away personal information. But in some interviews she did, she puts out there that the way that they knew each other is that he loved puzzles. I don't think we really touched upon this before. You asked and I never really answered about her puzzle making, but for 15 years, she made puzzles that were published in various magazines, one of which was related to The New York Times. She claims in one of these interviews at Hadwin would write in answers to the puzzles and that they kind of struck up a correspondence that way and that's how they got to know each other. Whether that's true or not, I love that story. So…
AMY: I'm just gonna believe that that's true because it's such a cute story.
KIM: I love that.
REBECCA: So they got married late in life. They move into this beautiful apartment, but then he dies a year and a half later. And when he dies, some friends step forward and say to her, “You know, you really need a diversion in your life. Why don't you try collecting rare books?” And she's like, “Okay.” You know, I mean, I guess she's got, like, time and money and obviously an interest in books. And she starts collecting pretty broadly, but Walt Whitman in particular. And she treats it like a job. She just goes after every Walt Whitman, first edition, second edition, letters, manuscripts, whatever she can get her hands on. And within, like, a year or two, she's got like one of the biggest and best Walt Whitman collections in the world, which she holds on to, um, and when she dies, that collection goes to the Library of Congress. It's amazing. And the rest of her books,she collected Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, um, what she referred to as the Concord poets, meaning Emerson and Thoreau and Hawthorne and that group, um, there were four different auctions just to get rid of all the books that she amassed.
AMY: And the Concord Poets bring us back to your Walden.
REBECCA: Yeah. Yeah. And I actually have a letter that she wrote to her friend about how she had stopped at a bookshop and bought a first edition of Walden and what she paid for it. It's amazing because this is a letter she's writing to her best friend about the book that I currently own.So now I have the book and I have the letter.
KIM: Oh, that's so cool.
Amy: And you have the biography of Carolyn Wells that you've written. Amazing. Rebecca I'm in awe of the legwork you did to bring her story to light and even though I'm still not a convert to mystery novels, I really loved reading your book and learning about this amazing woman and everything she did, and also getting your account of sniffing out her story. You are a literary Nancy Drew, if ever there was one.
REBECCA: You know, I was listening to one of your podcasts, the one about Rona Jaffe, and I went and bought a copy of The Best of Everything, which I'd always known about, but never gotten to. And I bought a copy. It has an introduction by Rachel Syme, and, um, she's got this wonderful line in the introduction where she says that “Rona Jaffe's legacy was bigger than her literature.” The same goes for Carolyn. It’s so, so much bigger than, you know, whether or not you think she was a clever mystery author or, you know, if she's the best. It just kind of transcends all of that.
AMY: Absolutely. She was a superstar of her day.
REBECCA: I think so. And I think she deserved a biography at the very least. So that's why I was like, “I’m going to do this.”
KIM: Definitely. Well, I'm so glad you did. And I know Amy is too.
Amy: Yeah. And we're so glad that you stopped in today to talk to us about her. Thank you so much for joining us.
REBECCA: Thank you. It's been my pleasure.
AMY: So that's all for today's episode. If you're a Patreon member, you can join us next week for a follow up on today's discussion when we'll be discussing Anna Katharine Green, aka the Mother of the American Detective Novel, and her novel, The Leavenworth Case. This is the author who kind of inspired Carolyn Wells to write mysteries. So visit lostladiesoflit.com patron to find out how to access all of our exclusive content.
KIM: Our theme song was written and recorded by Jennie Malone and our logo is designed by Harriet Grant. Lost Ladies of Lit is produced by Amy Helmes and Kim Askew and supported by listeners like you.