The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells
The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells
by Rebecca Rego Barry
Pub Date 13 Feb 2024
Post Hill Press
Biographies & Memoirs| Nonfiction \(Adult\)
Netgalley and Post Hills Press sent me a copy of The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells to review:
The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells is the first biography of one of the “lost ladies” of detective fiction. She wrote more than 80 mysteries and hundreds of other things.
Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) wrote country house and locked-room mysteries for a decade before Agatha Christie. In the 1920s, when she was churning out three or more books annually, she was dubbed “about the biggest thing in mystery novels in the US.”During the 1920s, she was dubbed “about the biggest thing in mystery novels in the country.”
In addition to that, Wells wrote a bunch of children’s books and young adult novels, a bunch of great anthologies, and countless stories, prose, and poetry for magazines like Thrilling Detective, Life, The Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s, and The New Yorker, among others. Over 180 books were written by Wells. There were some that got adapted into silent films and some that became bestsellers. Despite that, she’s all but forgotten a century later. Why? How?
