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 …
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Violet Strange, the Debutante Detective
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 …
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New York Nell
In New York Nell, The Boy-Girl Detective: or, Old Blakesly’s Money (1880), by Edward L. Wheeler, the title character Nell Niblo swaggers onto the scene in the character of a newsboy selling papers on a street car in Philadelphia. We see her through the eyes of Redmond Blakesly, a bit of a rube who can be excused for his surprise at beholding this cross-dressed urchin at a time when cross-dressing was illegal. He strikes up an acquaintance with her to learn her story. She tells him she’s from New …
Mid-Ohio Indie Authors Book Fair
I enjoyed meeting all the readers who attended the Mid-Ohio Indie Authors Book Fair this year. …
How did the Manned Spacecraft Center end up in Houston?
The event that launches the plot of Bayou City Burning is a scouting trip to Houston by two men affiliated with NASA and charged with assessing the city as the future site of NASA’s manned space flight command center. They arrive in advance of President Kennedy’s historic speech announcing the moon mission, and well in advance of NASA’s official announcement that it is searching for a site for a new mission control center. Their presence is the result of behind-the-scenes political maneuvering …
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