How I ‘Found’ Carolyn Wells, the Once Famous, Now Forgotten Mystery Author by Rebecca Rego Barry

How I ‘Found’ Carolyn Wells, the Once Famous, Now Forgotten Mystery Author

by Rebecca Rego Barry

I first learned of Carolyn Wells in the spring of 2011. For most of my life, I’ve been drawn to books, especially old books. So it’s not particularly surprising that I ended up dabbling in rare and antiquarian books, earning a master’s degree in something called book history, and editing a magazine for book collectors. That year, my husband tagged along with me to the New York Antiquarian Book Fair, and while I was inspecting the wares in another dealer’s booth, he was over at stand B24 surreptitiously buying a first edition of Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 nature classic, Walden, as a birthday present for me.

         Even in a slow economy, it was an expensive book, one I had coveted since falling in love with Walden in eleventh-grade English. I don’t think I’ve ever been as stunned by a gift as I was by that one.

         As old books often do, this one had an interesting provenance. Two bookplates are affixed inside. The one on the pastedown, where bookplates are typically adhered, bears the name of English critic and poet Sir Edmund Gosse. I recalled using a pretentious quote of his in my thesis. Gosse’s jaunty ex-libris matches the bookplate that faces it on the free front endpaper. It too is pictorial and whimsical—a Renaissance-styled woman holding the Lincoln Imp, a gargoyle-like statue that resides at London’s Lincoln Cathedral, in her hands like a Teacup Yorkie.

A name runs along the bottom in blackletter font: Carolyn Wells. I had no idea who she was, and the bookseller’s catalog note, slipped into the clamshell box that secured the rare volume, shed no light. From another clipping tucked into the back I could tell that someone had once purchased it for $150.  

Carolyn’s name stuck with me because there were few serious female book collectors in the early twentieth century, so when I noticed that same name—as an author, not an owner—while browsing 1920s-era first editions at rare book fairs over the ensuing six or seven years, I was perplexed.

It took me a while to catch on to the fact that they were one and the same, and it all finally clicked in 2018 when I heard that the British imprint, Detective Crime Club Classics, would be issuing a reprint of Murder in the Bookshop by Carolyn Wells. Because the 1936 novel centers on a stolen rare book, and several scenes take place in a private library and an antiquarian bookshop, it is one of her more collectible titles among bibliophiles, worth four figures in fine condition. Given my daily occupation of reading and writing about rare books, I figured this was my chance to find out more about Carolyn, as an author and as a collector.

What I uncovered astonished me. Carolyn lived between 1862 and 1942, and during that time, she wrote more than 180 books, 82 of which were incredibly popular detective novels. She was also a poet, a humorist, an author of children’s and young adult novels, a puzzlemaster, and an anthologist. On top of that, she had worked on sixteen silent films, half with Thomas Edison, and on a few Broadway plays. 

         The trouble was, although Carolyn produced so much, there is little written about her. Obituaries, yes; contemporary reviews, sure. Several vintage crime bloggers have shared posts about her mysteries, and concise accounts of her life appear in several reference books. Academia has all but ignored her, except for a handful of academic essays and articles over the past two decades. More recently, she has been included in two anthologies of note: The Big Book of Female Detectives, edited by Otto Penzler (2018) and In the Shadow of Agatha Christie: Classic Crime Fiction by Forgotten Female Writers, edited by Leslie S. Klinger (2018). Until now, no biography has been attempted. Carolyn was almost entirely erased from the annals of literary history. Why, I wondered.

That simple question launched my investigation and would ultimately result in my biography titled The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells, out this month from PostHill Press. But the short answer, I came to understand, is that there is no “Carolyn Wells archive” to mine, no central repository where her “papers” are stored in thirty or so buff-colored boxes on metal shelves in a climate-controlled bunker.

Biographers and scholars rely on paper trails, and hers had simply vanished. She had made arrangements to bequeath her rare Walt Whitman editions to the Library of Congress—where they still reside—upon her death, but it appears that no plans were made for her voluminous correspondence, her manuscripts, typescripts, and her own copies of her books—the kinds of documentation that comprise an author’s inner sanctum. Not to mention the antiques she collected and whatever else filled the Manhattan duplex she lived in for twenty-five years. How had that happened? I had to find out. 

         I turned up bits and pieces from private and institutional collections across the country in more than a dozen states, trying to retrieve whatever traces remained of her life and legacy that still existed. This was a puzzle that came together with the aid of digitized books and newspapers but also collectors, antiquarian booksellers, archivists, and librarians, all of whom helped me get closer to a woman writer who was both “too much” and not enough—i.e., extraordinarily prolific, but in genres not taken seriously at the time or for decades after. For that reason, this bit of literary sleuthing offers, I hope, more than just a fresh and exciting tale of a woman lost to history and now rediscovered. It considers this important question: who gets remembered? 

—

Rebecca Rego Barry is the author of The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author. For almost two decades, her articles about books, history, and the culture of collecting appeared in The Guardian, Financial Times, Smithsonian, Slate, Literary Hub, CrimeReads, and elsewhere. Her first book, Rare Books Uncovered: True Stories of Fantastic Finds in Unlikely Places (2015), developed from her longtime editorship of Fine Books & Collections magazine. She is currently the director of communications at The Raab Collection, a firm that buys and sells historical autographs and documents. 

Website: https://rebeccaregobarry.com

Linktr.ee: https://linktr.ee/rebeccaregobarry

Insta: @rebeccaregobarry

X: @rrb_writer

Goodreads: @RebeccaRegoBarry 

 

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing