Murder in the Bookshop. Carolyn Wells

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

      Introduction

      I. THE CRIME IN THE BOOKSHOP

      II. RAMSAY’S WORD IS DOUBTED

III. GUY DEMANDS HIS RIGHTS

IV. FLEMING STONE TAKES THE CASE

V. INQUIRIES

       VI. STONE AND HIS SUSPECTS

       VII. A LIST OF SUSPECTS

       VIII. THE PASTED LETTER AND ANOTHER

       IX. THE OTHER

       X. THE DEATH OF THE SCION

       XI. ALLI RESPONDS TO THE LETTER

       XII. WHERE DID ALLI GO?

       XIII. RAMSAY GETS BUSY

       XIV. BENSON BUSY TOO

       XV. STONE STARTS ON HIS QUEST

       XVI. THE AWFUL BIG MAN

       XVII. HELD BY THE ENEMY

       XVIII. AFTER ALL

       THE SHAKESPEARE TITLE-PAGE MYSTERY

       The Detective Story Club

       About the Publisher

       INTRODUCTION

      THE resurgence of popular interest in vintage mystery fiction of the twentieth century has led to the revival of a steadily mounting number of crime writers whose works, though often extremely popular in their day, had long lain out of print and been mostly forgotten outside of occasional, cursory references in studies by genre specialists. One such renascent author is American Carolyn Wells, who once was characterized, in a 1968 magazine article by John Dickson Carr, past master of the locked-room mystery, as one of mystery fiction’s ‘lost ladies now well lost’. Today, a half-century after Carr penned those sad words, vintage mystery fans again are finding their way to the detective fiction of Carolyn Wells, and the former ‘lost lady’, now happily redeemed, is enjoying renewed popularity. This is a remarkable reversal of fortune which would, no doubt, have immensely amused the author, a woman known for her wryly humorous outlook on the myriad blows and buffets of life.

      Born on 18 June 1862 in the town of Rahway, New Jersey to parents whom she termed ‘the very ultramarine of Blue Presybyterians’, Carolyn Wells, though comfortably circumstanced in a material sense, received at an early age some sharp slaps from the hand of Fate. Two of Carolyn’s four siblings died in childhood, one from the same scarlet fever contagion that had struck her as well, leaving the future author’s hearing progressively impaired over time. For the rest of her life she had to wear hearing aids to make speech partially audible. ‘[Deafness] doesn’t bother me so much,’ Wells later wrote forthrightly, ‘but it is a hardship, and though I bear it smilingly it is an insincere smile.’

      After graduating as valedictorian from Rahway High School, Carolyn Wells remained at the family home with her parents and her surviving sister, though she took classes with noted Shakespearean scholar William James Rolfe in Cambridge, Massachusetts and for years found a prized personal outlet in her service as head librarian at the Rahway Public Library. Wells departed the family nest for good at the age of 55 when in 1918 she wed Hadwin Houghton, a 62-year-old widower and cousin of a co-founder of the publishing firm of Houghton, Mifflin. The couple took up residence in Manhattan at the newly erected Hotel des Artistes, an elegant and exclusive apartment building overlooking Central Park that was later home for a time to such luminaries as Rudolf Valentino, Norman Rockwell and Noël Coward; but their connubial bliss was short-lived, Houghton passing away in 1919. ‘I had him with me but a few years,’ Wells fondly recalled of her beloved spouse, ‘and those were so crammed with joyful interest that they are now my most blessed memory.’ As a widow Wells remained in New York, residing with her housekeeper-companion and a cook at the same apartment at the Hotel des Artistes until her own death nearly a quarter-century later, in 1942.

      Carolyn Wells made her entrée into the literary world through her interest in the nonsense literature of English authors