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Augusta Huiell Seaman, A Founding Mother

May 1, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Closer kin to Nancy Drew and Judy Bolton than L. Frank Baum’s professional young Secret Service agent Josie O’Gorman were Augusta Huiell Seaman’s girl detectives. Seaman was a prolific writer who wrote more than forty books, most of them mysteries for girls. In 1915 at the time she published her first mystery, The Boarded-Up House, first as a serial in the children’s magazine St. Nicholas, publishers were only just beginning to recognize girl readers as a viable target market distinct from …

Belle Boyd, Ex-Pinkerton and Girl Detective

February 28, 2020 By D.B. Borton 2 Comments

In Allan Arnold’s Belle Boyd, The Girl Detective, a dime novel published in the New York Detective Library in 1891, our heroine is a gun-toting, cross-dressing, larger-than-life crimefighter, a former Pinkerton who is described by one miscreant as “the boss detective of Chicago and the West” (4). Full disclosure: this is a ham-fisted potboiler of a novel, complete with ghosts, demonstrating all of the racial stereotyping typical of the dime novels. But it’s useful for our purposes in its …

Visit to Houston

February 23, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

I will be visiting Houston's Murder by the Book, 2342 Bissonnet, on Saturday, April 4th, from 4:30 to 6. Appearing with me will be Kathryn Lane, author of the award-winning Nikki Garcia thrillers. In Kathryn's latest, REVENGE IN BARCELONA, Nikki Garcia, a private investigator, narrowly escapes life-threatening work in Mexico. With her fiancé, Eduardo Duarte, she travels to Spain only to suspect her assailant has followed them to Barcelona. After witnessing a seemingly unrelated terrorist …

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Josie O’Gorman, Secret Agent

February 4, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

Dorothy of Oz fame wasn’t the only adventurous girl hero created by L. Frank Baum. Often writing under pseudonyms, Baum loved to put girls and young women at the heart of a mystery. Writing as Edith Van Dyne, Baum published four novels in the Mary Louise series beginning in 1916; a fifth book was completed after Baum’s death by Emma Speed Sampson, who continued the series with three additional books. The series was intended to focus on the titular character, Mary Louise, but for many the true …

Violet Strange, the Debutante Detective

January 6, 2020 By D.B. Borton Leave a Comment

In her landmark 1979 book Murderess Ink, Dilys Winn identifies Anna Katharine Green as one of the “founding mothers” of detective fiction, and notes that up until the rediscovery of Seeley Regester’s The Dead Letter (1867), Green was credited with writing the first cozy detective novel, The Leavenworth Case (1878), which introduced many of the characters and plot devices with which we’re familiar today. In two subsequent novels featuring the same detective, Ebenezer Gryce, The Affair …