Mystery-related classes I'd like to take

Extinct Authors? Little-known Female Mystery Writers? Sign me up!

A while ago, E.A. Mayes wrote a substack post titled “Who Is Missing from Crime Fiction?” about the almost-forgotten mystery writer Anna Katharine Green.

Somehow this triggered one of those thought-chains that happen so quickly, bam, bam, bam, that they’re impossible to capture, and one goes from point A to point E without quite knowing how. I went from Anna Katharine to extinct authors to college classes to several other topics, all too nebulous to pin down, but which filled me with a wistful nostalgia for graduate school. Sometimes I miss those discussions…

Anyway, I began thinking about all the potential classes that professors could create related to the mystery genre. Here are two that I dreamed up.

Photo by Markus Spiske on Unsplash

• Almost extinct authors course

Think of the recent New York Times bestseller list, or the buzzy “it” books of the season. Now consider whether those same books will still be in print a century from now, or if readers in 2124 will scratch their heads at the mention of that now-deceased author. Books by these authors might exist somewhere, perhaps on Amazon (or its 22nd century version) or on Grandma’s bookcase or an antique ipad that no one’s certain how to recharge. These authors have become almost extinct.

Given the number of authors in recent history, we’d need some parameters for what authors to include. Perhaps once-bestselling authors (say, writers who reached the top ten list on the NYT); who published more than one bestseller; who published before 1924, a century ago.

Questions the class can consider:

• Who are these authors?

• What made them fall out of favor?

• Are all books worth saving?

• Which authors survived?

• Who decides whose books live or die?

What does this say about our society’s changing values?

Banned Books

• This is fairly straightforward and I’m sure that other HAVE actually created this course.

• Female mystery writers before Agatha Christie

(L to R) Mary Roberts Rinehart (from AllegenyCity.org) Marie Belloc Lowndes (from imdb.com), Anna Katharine Green (from blogs.stockton.edu)

Not to knock the great Christie, but no one seems to pay much attention to her female predecessors. Louisa May Alcott wrote a mystery¹. And there are others, such as Anna Katharine Green (1846-1935)², Mary Roberts Rinehart (1876-1958)³ and Marie Belloc Lowndes (1868-1947⁴), who were writing and publishing before Christie’s The Mysterious Affair at Styles in 1920⁵.

No, I have no clue why her name is spelled “Catherine” here when everywhere else it’s Katharine.

• Anna Katharine Green wrote one of the first American detective novels, The Leavenworth Case in 1878.⁶ Yes, Poe wrote the first story, and Green often receives credit for writing the first detective novel. But according to some sources, this honor belongs to another female, Seeley Regester, with her 1866 novel The Dead Letter. (See Penzler, Otto, November 16, 2005. "A Deadly Month". The New York Sun. New York: Ronald Weintraub. There’s some debate about exactly when Regester—a pseudonym of prolific author Metta Victor—wrote and published The Dead Letter. I just finished it and I’ll be writing about it in later posts. I’m currently reading The Leavenworth Case; it’s fascinating so far.)⁷

• Mary Roberts Rinehart was known as the American Agatha Christie. Never mind that she wrote before Christie. She’s apparently one of the main reasons “The Butler Did It” is a trope in the mystery genre⁸ even though the phrase isn’t used in her 1930 novel The Door. And that “had I but known” style writing? Yeah, blame her, too. (Or praise her, if you like that style. I rather do, if only because it’s so dated that it’s kind of fun to read.)

• Marie Belloc Lowndes wrote The Lodger, which is a Jack the Ripper inspired novel. From the Project Gutenberg site: “The story revolves around Robert and Ellen Bunting, a struggling couple living in a modest London home, who find their lives forever altered when they take in a peculiar lodger named Mr. Sleuth. The Buntings are on the brink of poverty, and Mr. Sleuth seems like a potential solution, yet his enigmatic demeanor, along with his deep interests in dark subjects, sets a foreboding tone.”⁹ (Goodness, one could have an entire class about Jack the Ripper inspired novels!)

• Have ideas for a mystery-related class you’d love to take? Share it in the comments!

Quick update on my writing. I’m query agents with my mystery, tentatively titled The Death of an Angel. (See my pinned post An Angel’s Death for the backstory of the title.) As anyone who’s ever queried agents knows, it’s a bit of a rollercoaster ride of emotions. I’ve done my best to do everything in my submission package as strong as possible: think multiple rounds of feedback from experienced readers (editors, etc.) on sample pages, query letter, synopsis, and pitch; lots of tweaking and prodding and cajoling those words to please, for the love of all that’s sacred to writers, please arrange yourselves into the best possible order; days of pounding my head on the desk and wondering why the (bleep) am I doing this?! Then returning to the sequel-in-progress and remembering why I actually started this entire process: I love writing.

References

1. This may have been The Mysterious Key and What It Opened, which is available to read on Project Gutenberg.

2. Library of Congress records for Anna Katharine Green

3. IMDB record for Mary Roberts Rinehart

4. Library of Congress records for Marie Belloc Lowndes; See also LibriVox’s audiorecords of her most famous work, The Lodger (1913) and other work. The Lodger

5. Archived website, Official UK website for Agatha Christie, Agatha Christie books reading order

6. Look at the footnotes and sources on Wikipedia’s entry for Anna Katharine Green

7. Ditto above.

8. Where Did the Phrase the Butler Did It Come From?

9. Project Gutenberg, The Lodger, Marie Belloc Lowndes, Summary