Suppose I asked you to name a girl detective in her teens, Titian-haired and beautiful, motherless but dearly loved by her lawyer father, a skillful driver who travels to places all over the map and solves mysteries with her chums. How many of you would answer “Patsy Carroll”? Yet the first Patsy Carroll book, Patsy Carroll at Wilderness Lodge (1917), pre-dates Nancy Drew’s debut in The Secret of the Old Clock (1930) by thirteen years. The number of common elements in the Patsy Carroll and …
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Laura Keen, the Queen of Detectives
This story, which appeared in The New York Detective Library in 1892 (I won’t say “first appeared” because these stories were frequently published in several venues), is a prime example of the dime novel and a prime exhibition of the qualities that made these novels so popular. Therefore, its girl detective is a model of the young women who feature in this genre — a girl detective on steroids, if you will. To give you a flavor of these novels, let me describe the first page. In the opening …
Was FOUR ELEMENTS OF MURDER based on a real case?
Four Elements of Murder Update Most of the Cat Caliban books focus on an issue, and the focal issue in Four Elements of Murder, first published in 1995, is toxic waste incineration. This book is based on an actual case, with names changed and the setting shifted about eight miles south and across the Kentucky-Tennessee state line. From the late 1960s, LWD (Liquid Waste Disposal) had operated a toxic waste incinerator in Calvert City. This area was a popular tourist area that had also attracted …
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Does Cincinnati’s abandoned subway really exist?
Cincinnati's Abandoned Subway One of the scenes in One for the Money, the first book in the Cat Caliban series, is set in an abandoned subway tunnel. In the late 19th century, Cincinnati was among the top ten most populous American cities, comparable to Chicago and New York in economic importance, and it suffered from the problems that growth created. In 1888, the advent of the streetcar marked the city’s first major attempt to confront the issue of mass transit. Meanwhile, dividing downtown …
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Nellie, the Girl Detective
I'm including here Detective Edenhope’s 1894 dime novel Nellie, the Girl Detective not because it is a thrilling read, but because it includes so many of the tropes and themes prevalent in early girl detective stories. Despite the sensationalism of its content, the prose is plodding and the dialogue advances the story by baby steps, reminding readers, as do the one- and two-sentence paragraphs, that dime novels were uniform in length, so an author with a 20-page idea who wanted to sell a story …