Carolyn Wells was an American author and poet (born in Rahway, New Jersey, the daughter of William E. and Anna Wells.She died at the Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City in 1942.She had been married to Hadwin Houghton, the heir of the Houghton-Mifflin publishing empire founded by Bernard Houghton. Wells also had an impressive collection of volumes of poetry by others. She bequeathed her collection of Walt Whitman poetry, said to be one of the most important of its kind for its completeness and rarity, to the Library of Congress (New York Times, Apr. 16, 1942).After finishing school she worked as a librarian for the Rahway Library Association. Her first book, At the Sign of the Sphinx (1896), was a collection of charades. Her next publications were The Jingle Book and The Story of Betty (1899), followed by a book of verse entitled Idle Idyls (1900). After 1900, Wells wrote numerous novels and collections of poetry.Carolyn Wells wrote a total of more than 170 books. During the first ten years of her career, she concentrated on poetry, humor, and children's books. According to her autobiography, The Rest of My Life (1937), around 1910 she heard one of Anna Katherine Green's mystery novels being read aloud and was immediately captivated by the unravelling of the puzzle. From that point onward, she devoted herself to the mystery genre
"The Mystery of the Sycamore" is an early type of detective story, falling somewhere between Conan Doyle's genius Sherlock Holmes and Hammett's tough-guy Sam Spade. It contains elements of the Gothic (the tale of the phantom bugler, which is used by the murderer as a cover) and the...
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