Recently, on a lark, Josh Stubbs spent $1 for a bargain-bin copy of a murder mystery featuring 19th Century novelist Jack London as the sleuth.
“It struck me as odd,” says Stubbs, a bookstore clerk in Vancouver, “that an author could just take a real person like that and put them in an improbable mystery.”
He and his friends had a good time poking fun at the concept of historical figures solving whodunits. “We would laugh at the idea of them talking Sam Spade style,” he says. “We joked about [London, known for his Klondike tales], checking the ‘gams’ on the St. Bernard.”
Stubbs even mockingly came up with the idea for a mystery featuring Groucho Marx as the detective, called “Either This Man Is Dead, or My Wristwatch Has Stopped.”
Little did he know that the Hollywood legend, who died in 1977, has been solving crimes as an amateur gumshoe since 1998 in a series of five mysteries from Ron Goulart with such titles as “Groucho Marx, Private Eye” and “Elementary, My Dear Groucho.”
Unless you’re a devotee of historical mysteries, you’re probably as surprised as Stubbs was to find dead-and-buried heroes wandering the pages of crime fiction searching for clues, solving puzzles and locking up miscreants.
Yet, this sub-subgenre, which sparks strong feelings pro and con among historical mystery fans, has been on the rise for more than a decade. Since 1990, at least 61 historical figures –ranging from Oscar Wilde to Alfred Hitchcock, from William Shakespeare to Mozart — have starred in one-shot novels or ongoing series.
Consider these books hitting the store shelves in the next three months:
“Such Vicious Minds” by Daniel Klein (St. Martin’s) — A 30-year-old Elvis Presley investigates the slaying of a photographer for which Col. Tom Parker has been unjustly accused.
“Chaucer and the House of Fame” by Phillipa Morgan (Carroll & Graf) — Geoffrey Chaucer, the author of “Canterbury Tales,” sent to France on a diplomatic mission in 1370, must solve the murder of a nobleman who once held the poet prisoner.
“The Tale of Hill Top Farm” by Susan Wittig Albert (Berkley) — Beatrix Potter, creator of Peter Rabbit and Benjamin Bunny, newly settled in a quaint English village in the early 1900s, tries with the help of her animal friends to determine who made off with an important local painting. “If it’s a good mystery, it doesn’t matter who the detective is. But it’s fun to think Ben Franklin did this,” says John R. Cline, medical librarian at Hines Veterans Hospital in Maywood, who gobbles up a half dozen mysteries a week.
Cline says he enjoyed all seven of Robert Lee Hall’s books in which Franklin, on a mission to London, does detective work on the side.
He also has dipped into the two series — one by Bruce Alexander and the other by Deryn Lake — that have John Fielding, the blind brother of novelist Henry Fielding and a London magistrate in the mid-18th Century, tracking down killers. And he has read at least one Mark Twain mystery.
“It’s where I get my history,” Cline says. He’s not alone.
Historical mysteries of all sorts have swelled in popularity in recent years, carrying along on their tide those that feature real-life figures from the past solving crimes. Like mysteries set in a foreign country or with the detecting done by someone with an odd occupation, historical whodunits with their period settings and glimpses into earlier ways of life give readers an added level of enjoyment beyond the puzzle and its solution.
“Mystery readers, especially around here, really want to learn something,” says Judy Duhl, owner of Scotland Yard Books in north suburban Winnetka. “That’s why, if they’re reading a historical mystery, they feel they’re not just reading bon-bons.”
At Centuries & Sleuths, a history and mystery book store in near west suburban Forest Park, owner Augie Aleksy says many mystery readers never paid much attention to their history lessons in school. Historical mysteries, he says, give them “a way to catch up, a way of getting a quick fix.”
The books also can spark an interest in the true-life history of a period or a person, as Aleksy himself can attest.
Recently, one of the book clubs at the store read “The Dante Club” by Matthew Pearl (Random House) in which three Boston Brahmins — poets Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and James Russell Lowell and essayist Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes — get caught up in the search for a killer while completing their translation of Dante’s “The Divine Comedy.”
The book, Aleksy says, “gives you so much atmosphere, and it inspires you to read real works by them. I went to the collection of great books I got from my Dad and started reading `The Divine Comedy,’ and it was their translation from 1865.”
Yet, there are mystery fans, such as Sue Feder of Towson, Md., who find it difficult to stomach the idea of a famous ruler, writer or entertainer taking time from a busy schedule to search for clues.
“Elvis? I’m sorry. I know too much about Elvis’ life to think that Elvis is going to be a detective,” says Feder who, for 14 years, edited print and later Internet journals on historical mysteries.
She does acknowledge that she enjoyed reading the Karen Harper mystery in which Bess Tudor, the princess who became Queen Elizabeth I, solves a couple of murders. But not the books that followed.
“For that novel, it worked. She was a young girl, feisty, held in virtual captivity,” Feder says. “After that, she’s queen. She’s got all eyes on her. How do you give her time to go out and do the investigation?”
Merle Jacob who retired in May after 13 years as the book buyer for the Chicago Public Library, is a former high school history teacher who, while no fan herself, sees the attraction of casting queens and poets as gumshoes.
“Yeah, everybody knows who Queen Elizabeth I is — that picture of a woman with a big, white collar around her neck. But this gives her more humanity,” Jacob says. “Granted, she’d never do this in her right mind, but why not have some fun with it? It just humanizes them. They’re not the stuffy history-book people.”
The first mystery author to raid the history books for her sleuth was probably Lillian de la Torre, a Colorado Springs-based writer who in 1946 published her first book of short stories featuring 18th Century conversationalist and man of letters Samuel Johnson. It was called “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector.”
In 1960, “The Great Detectives,” a collection of stories by Theodore Mathieson with such figures as Florence Nightingale, Hernando Cortez and Leonardo da Vinci in the role of crime-solver, hit the bookstores. Mathieson followed a year later with “The Devil and Ben Franklin” in which a young Ben, accused of being a warlock, has to get to the bottom of a murder and disappearance.
It wasn’t until 1984, however, that the idea of putting historical figures in the detective role started to pick up speed. That was the year when George Baxt, a longtime Hollywood screenwriter, published the first of a series of 12 mysteries featuring movie stars and other celebrities. It was also when Elliott Roosevelt launched his 20-book run with his mother Eleanor as a White House-based amateur private eye.
Each of Baxt’s books cast a different star or duo, such as Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers, in the investigating role, beginning with writer Dorothy Parker, the doyenne of the Algonquin Round Table.
“I loved that book, and I thought he got her, and I thought he got George Kaufman,” says Jane Dentinger, the senior editor of the Mystery Guild book club. “And the wit of the writing matched the Algonquin Round Table wit.”
Roosevelt’s books, despite their longevity, have gotten less positive reviews — at least, from some critics.
“They’re dreadful. But horrendously popular,” says Jacob. “I gagged on them.”
The success of the series, Jacob believes, was rooted in the popularity of Eleanor Roosevelt, the first lady many Americans remembered from the formative years of their lives. In addition, John Cunningham, associate publisher at St. Martin’s Press, which published the series, suggests that the mysteries got a boost from the book tours and other promotional work by Elliott Roosevelt, a celebrity himself.
Ironically, the series is widely believed to have been ghostwritten by William Harrington, a prolific writer of mysteries under his own name, including six Columbo novels, a supposition that was given greater credence when the books kept coming for more than a decade after Elliott Roosevelt’s death in 1990.
Earlier this summer, Daniel Klein traveled from his Massachusetts home to the two-day-long Michigan Elvisfest in Ypsilanti. While more than a dozen tribute artists performed the songs of The King, Klein stood at a small table under an awning and hawked his Elvis Presley mysteries.
“People came up to me to buy my book, and some of them — I feel funny about this — they wanted to be photographed with me,” Klein says. “They told me, `You’re my favorite writer.’ Heck, I’m not my favorite writer. Elvis has iconic, almost reverential, significance to a lot of people. So I was sort of his apostle.”
Klein, never a big fan of Elvis’ music, got the idea for the mysteries after reading the two-volume biography of Presley by Peter Guralnick. “He turned out to be a more interesting guy than I’d ever guessed, and much more intelligent,” Klein says.
And one other thing: Asked once what career he’d have liked if he hadn’t been a singer, Elvis answered, “Police detective.”
It’s safe to assume that field was never on the career radar for the private eye in Margaret Doody’s 4th Century B.C. novels — Aristotle.
Even so, the idea that one of the giants of Western philosophy would spend time solving crimes isn’t all that farfetched, insists Doody. “Because of his scientific bent, he observes phenomena. He delights in phenomena. He loves details.”
Doody, a University of Notre Dame expert on Jane Austen and 18th Century British literature, wrote her first Aristotle mystery in the late 1970s and is working on her fifth. Aristotle, she says, “has such a sane, rational, human voice that’s very attractive, and he’s someone with an adventurous mind. [Writing the mysteries] means I can spend time in his company.”
But why not use her academic expertise and write about Jane Austen?
“You can’t take on the voice of a great genius,” Doody says. “You can’t write in the style of Jane Austen. Don’t kid yourself.”
Actually, someone has made the attempt — Stephanie Barron who, since 1996, has published seven mysteries from Austen’s point of view. Doody says she tried one of them, but couldn’t finish. “The style didn’t match the subject.”
`Because my first career was as an actor, I would rather make up a character,” says Dentinger, the Mystery Guild editor and a mystery writer herself.
Besides, she adds, there’s a danger when a writer uses an actual historical figure as the investigator: “This is a real person and many people have strong images of who that person is. I’m an Elizabeth I freak, and, if I’m reading something and read a line that doesn’t sound like she’d say it, you lose me.”
Nonetheless, mystery writers are increasingly taking that risk. So far, six authors have published books or series with Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, as the gumshoe. Edgar Allan Poe, credited as one of the inventors of the detective novel, has been the investigator-of-choice of four writers, while four others have used the magician Harry Houdini.
More than 30 writers have been employed fictionally as amateur private eyes, including many who made their names with mysteries, such as Agatha Christie, Erle Stanley Gardner and Wilkie Collins, author of “The Moonstone,” perhaps the earliest detective novel.
In fact, so many authors are employing figures from the past as their detectives that Jon Breen, a California-based mystery novelist and historian of the genre, worries that the approach may be growing stale.
Breen, who has reviewed mysteries for Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine since the 1970s, says, “Twenty years ago, the mystery with the historical figure is the one I would have turned to first as really unusual. But now it’s getting to the point where it is so commonplace and there’s such overkill.
“Has anyone done Abe Lincoln? You can bet that somebody will.”
– – –
Modus operandi of famous `sleuths’
Well, how do famous people from history operate as detectives? Here are some glimpses:
– Jane Austen, “Jane and the Stillroom Maid” by Stephanie Barron (Bantam, 2000): “I opened by eyes and allowed my gaze to travel over the form sprawled in the dust. A round hole in the center of the forehead, black with crusted blood, suggested first how the man had died . . . “
– Aristotle, “Poison in Athens” by Margaret Doody (Century, 2004): “And before Aristotle could do anything to prevent her, she raised herself up on tiptoe (though she was his height) and kissed him a butterfly kiss on the cheek and on the mouth.”
– Queen Elizabeth II, “Death at Buckingham Palace” by C.C. Benison (Bantam, 1996): “Here the Queen looked very grim indeed. Frown lines formed around her eyes and mouth like crushed parchment. The air crackled with anticipation. I knew of course what she was going to say, but I still felt this awful sense of foreboding.”
– Elvis Presley, “Such Vicious Minds” by Daniel Klein (St. Martin’s, 2004): “Charging at him with a drawn knife was the man who would be king . . . Elvis planted his feet, then raised his right hand, ready to administer a soto yoko chop to the boy’s outstretched hand.”
– – –
Up for grabs
These famous folks have tons of sleuthing potential:
– Jane Addams — Addams could do her sleuthing in the midst of running Hull House, her settlement house for new immigrants, and working for world peace. A bonus: The rough and tumble Chicago in the late 19th and early 20th Century is the setting.
– Frederick Douglass — Series could highlight the highly ambiguous status of free blacks in the pre- and post-Civil War periods.
– Stephen Douglas — Sure, the “Little Giant” came up short (so to speak) in his presidential race with Abe Lincoln. But he could make for a feisty, take-no-prisoners amateur detective along the lines of Mike Hammer.
– Cleopatra — She has a lot on her mind running Egypt and all, but she’s still able to find the time to solve crimes in the poor part of Alexandria (where, as a compassionate ruler, she goes to find out how her people really live).
– Mary Magdalene — OK, this may cross a line, but, after “The DaVinci Code,” perhaps the public is ready for a female religious leader (and, depending on the theologian you talk to, possibly an ex-prostitute) who ferrets out the criminal.
– Jimi Hendrix — He could investigate, for example, a drug overdose in another rock band and determine that it was really murder. And Hendrix’s own death? The mind boggles at the plotting possibilities. (Maybe even solving the case from heaven . . or wherever.)
– Kurt Cobain — See above.
– Susan B. Anthony — Anthony fights against slavery and booze and for women’s rights — and, as clever and intelligent as any man, tracks down killers.
— Patrick T. Reardon
