This month, I'm honored to turn over my column to author, critic, scholar, and all-around swell person Angelic Rodgers. Angel has been one of my closest friends for more than twenty years, dating back to when we were both adjuncts at Auburn University. Of late she's been working on a project that I think will be of considerable interest to SleuthSayers readers, one that has a lot to tell us about the history of our genre--and in particular, one of the many women who made significant contributions to it, but are too often forgotten today. I've invited her to tell you about it, so take it away, Angel!
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| Angelic Rodgers |
Pulling
Threads: The Dalrymple Mystery and Editing the Dead in the Age of
AI
by Angelic
Rodgers
It’s not that I don’t read mysteries, because
I long have. As a kid, I watched Scooby-Doo every day after school. Once I
started reading chapter books, I gravitated toward Nancy Drew, Trixie Belden,
Encyclopedia Brown, and Cherry Ames. My sister, our friend Will, and I used to
play detective. I was the secretary of their detective agency, a classic
younger-sibling assignment. Through undergrad and grad school when I wanted to
read recreationally, I often opted for mystery series. Writers like Westlake,
Cornwell, Grafton, Highsmith, and Vin Packer offered me an escape from the work
of literary analysis.
But I never took up mystery as anything other
than recreational reading. That changed as I worked on preparing Octave Thanet’s
The Dalrymple Mystery for release in November. The Dalrymple Mystery
was originally serialized in The National Magazine from October 1913 to
March 1914. It also ran as The Unterrified Citizen in Joseph
Chapple’s Newsletter the year before. It is one of the writer’s few
magazine stories that was never released in book form. Many of her short
stories were collected and reprinted in bound volumes. Three of her novels, Expiation
(1890), The Lion’s Share (1907), and By Inheritance (1910),
for example, were first serialized.
The project fascinated me from multiple
angles—not only was Dalrymple never republished as a stand-alone, but it also was a
full-blown mystery. While some of her other novels included mystery elements,
Thanet has never (as far as I’m aware) been considered a mystery writer.
When Joseph Walker suggested I do a guest post
about my experience with editing and annotating Dalrymple, I wasn’t
sure. My first reaction was that I don’t write mystery, crime fiction, or
detective fiction. I’m a specialist in nineteenth century women’s fiction
typically described as “domestic” or “local color” by training, and my fiction
might be categorized as chick lit or lesfic.
I first came across the name Octave Thanet
while reading Lilian Faderman’s Surpassing the Love of Men. Faderman identifies
her as a lesbian writer who lived part of the year with her partner in a small
town in Arkansas. Faderman also pointed out that Thanet was one of the
highest-paid and most successful writers for a thirty-year span.
Faderman’s brief mention set me on a quest to
find out who Thanet was. Her real name is Alice French. Born in 1850 (the year
of The Scarlet Letter) to a well-connected family, Alice took a pen name
for her first short story, “Hugo’s Waiting,” which appeared in 1871 under the
name “Frances Essex.” Such androgynous pen names, of course, were common for female
writers at the time. By 1878, when her “Communists and Capitalists: A Sketch
from Life” appeared in Lippincott’s, she had switched to the pen name
she would use for fiction until her death in January of 1934. “Octave Thanet”
was supposedly chosen from the word “Thanet” that Alice saw on a train car once
and from the name of her Abbott Academy roommate Octavia Putnam.
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| The young Alice French |
Despite my area of specialty being examining
literary works by three-named American women writing between 1865 and 1914 who
might or might not have been what we categorize as queer women today, I’d never
heard of Alice French or Octave Thanet. Her contemporaries certainly had,
though. Theodore Roosevelt was one of her biggest fans, and they wrote letters
to each other. He reportedly traveled with a copy of her Stories of a Western
Town (1893) in the “pigskin library” that he took on African safari
(according to McMichael). He visited her at Thanford, the Arkansas plantation
where she and her companion Jane “Jenny” Allen Crawford spent part of the year.
She was well-regarded by contemporaries like W.D. Howells, Susan Glaspell,
Sarah Orne Jewett, and other literary figures we are familiar with today.
How is it possible such a successful writer,
who lived a chunk of her life in the same state where I grew up, wasn’t covered
in any of my undergraduate or graduate seminars?
I became determined to learn more about her.
What was it like living and writing as a queer woman in Arkansas at the turn of
the century? Also, how could this woman-loving, cabinet-building, cross-genre
best-selling author who carried a flask and a pistol everywhere she went be
against women’s rights?
Alice French, it turns out, was a complex
woman.
Her writing as Octave Thanet is most often categorized
as local-color writing that sold well but is not considered valuable or of
interest to modern readers. The idea that what was popular in the past is mere
pulp today likely rings bells for fans of crime fiction, as well. I probably
don’t need to convince crime writers that there’s gold in those pulps and dime
novels just waiting to be mined.
George McMichael’s biography, Journey to Obscurity: The Life of Octave Thanet, isn’t truly a critical biography.
Crafted from his dissertation, the book largely focuses on the business side of
her life as the public persona of “Octave Thanet.” He glosses over the really
interesting stuff. After reading the work, I felt I knew more about her
family’s socio-economic status and how they came to live in Davenport, Iowa,
but many of the details of who Alice French was, what she thought, and how she
lived a rich, full life are absent. He set out only to write about Octave
Thanet’s life, not Alice French’s.
But Octave Thanet was merely one facet of
French’s identity.
McMichael’s biography left me with plenty of
threads to pull.
One of the threads I decided to pull first: to
locate the “unpublished and unlocated works” listed at the end of the book.
McMichael’s discussion of Thanet’s actual writing is surface-level plot summary
with details about where she submitted and the result (royalties, advances).
Given the era the slim volume was written in and that it was originally
McMichael’s dissertation, this surface-level analysis is not surprising.
Like any good detective, though, I started
looking for connections and unturned stones.
While The Dalrymple Mystery isn’t
designated as an unlocated or unpublished text, a story titled “The Mystery of
the Red Hand” appears on the list. This led me on to McMichael’s index, where I
found “The Red Hand.” McMichael mentions a short mystery story titled “The Red
Hand” in 1909 and that the story was rejected by publishers twice. When
checking for other mysteries mentioned, I found The Unterrified Citizen.
McMichael does note that text was retitled and published as The Dalrymple
Mystery. I suspect it is likely “The Red Hand” and “The Red Hand Mystery”
evolved into the text published serially in The National Magazine as The
Dalrymple Mystery from October 1913 to March 1914.
Of Thanet’s foray into detective fiction,
McMichael only states that in 1909, when she attempted to sell “The Red Hand
Mystery” to magazines, she was simply trying to cash in on the trend started by
Arthur Conan Doyle, Anna Katherine Green, and others.
That didn’t lead me to expect much of the
work.
The process of compiling the text was fairly
simple once I located it in a scanned volume of The National Magazine. Internet Archive has a treasure trove of periodicals digitized, and recovery (as
long as the volumes are complete) is a matter of searching the massive PDFs for
the installments. I’m a Mac user, so Preview makes whittling the massive
digital file down into the serial installments relatively easy. Then, I used the
Adobe Acrobat PDF to Word tool to get the manuscript in text form. With a bit
more cleanup to get rid of text carried over from half pages Thanet’s work
shared with other contributors, I was ready to begin the real editing work.
I approached the work first as cleanup and
fixing all of the scanning and conversion errors, and I kind of expected that to be the most
time-consuming aspect of the project. I didn’t expect the work to have much
value or interest, as Thanet is not known for her mystery writing, and McMichael
had nothing to say about it beyond that it was serialized.
I should have known better—Dalrymple features
numerous threads to pull.
Anyone who has studied American literature
between 1850 and 1920 may be familiar with Hawthorne’s 1855 lament about the
“damned mob of scribbling women” who were outselling him. Mark Twain likewise
struggled with sales and control over his content to the point that he became
an early adopter of self-publishing in 1884 when he established Charles L.
Webster and Company. While male writers of the time–Hawthorne, Melville,
Twain–are well-known, the women who outsold them are often absent from reading
lists. This creates a false sense of those texts being unworthy of study. And,
I fell into that trap of thinking that because only one biography existed about
Alice French and her work as Thanet, there wouldn’t be much heavy lifting to
do.
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National blurb touting the story
|
Specifically, I assumed editing this text
would largely be a mechanical exercise of my editing skills. I expected to fly
through the edits and say some bland words about how this was a fun project. What I found was something far more exciting
and engaging—the world of domestic mysteries and detective fiction written by
women.
Alice French’s work goes far beyond
local-color writing about quaint old ladies with anxiety about marriage and
family. French was well-read on the news of the day, both locally and
nationally. Her nonfiction works include essays on Arkansas and on issues like
losing her leg to diabetes as well as topics like labor strikes, suffrage,
photography, the 1893 World’s Columbian Exhibition in Chicago, and the 1898
Trans- Mississippi and International Exhibition. She had a finger to the pulse
of America.
Her fiction, likewise, often focuses on
reform. One of her stories condemning the practice of convict leasing in
Arkansas, “Trusty, No. 49,” (1890) developed as a result of her interest in
court cases. She subscribed to a weekly paper so she could track court cases
that sounded interesting. She would then make the trip from Clover Bend to
Walnut Ridge and observe cases in court.
While there aren’t court scenes in The
Dalrymple Mystery, the story does involve crime and two older women, the
Dalrymple sisters, who are witness to a mystery and its resolution. The
Dalrymple sisters awaken on an ordinary morning to find a corpse in their
library. By the time the police arrive, the body has vanished and the game is
afoot. Upon searching the property, in an attempt to locate the body, they come
across a bloody handprint:
Plain
and ominous on the cement walk running past the porte cochére to the
side door was a big red hand, the dexter finger pointing to the words above,
“No. l,” daubed in the same blood red. There were faint footprints, but so
trampled that it was not easy to distinguish them, and all about were
flecks and splotches of blood.
With a tiny bit of help from the police, the
Dalrymple sisters and their friends—a female newspaper reporter, two teen boys,
and a physician critical of the justice system—set out to uncover the victim’s
identity, as well as that of the murderer.
Without revealing a lot of spoilers, I can
tell you I pulled a lot of tiny and some very large threads from a text I
expected to just clean up and reprint. Some of these threads ranged from minor
things like clocked stockings to major crime syndicate issues like the early
mafia’s Black Hand extortion schemes. Colonial Revival architecture, early
electric cars, kimonos as fashion in the nineteenth century, and Sheraton
dining room furniture are just a few of the other threads I followed.
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| Thanet in later years |
Thanet also left a clue about early American
mystery novelists—Anna Katherine Green, in particular.
Green has been discussed on this blog before,
notably in Louise A. Willis’ “Three Firsts” in December of 2013 and in Leigh Lunden’s “Women in Mystery History” in March of 2014.
In Chapter Ten of The Dalrymple Mystery,
she drops names: “Radcliffe was a devoted reader of Gaboriau, Doyle, Anna
Katherine Green and all the newer workers of detective marvels in fiction.” I
knew Doyle’s name, of course, but Anna Katherine Green’s name was new to me, so
I knew that needed a note. First, I turned to McMichael’s biography to see if
he mentioned Doyle or Green. And he had–Doyle is mentioned four times, Anna
Katherine Green (as “Ann Katherine Greene”) once.
Contrary to McMichael’s claims that Thanet was
merely trend hopping and never completed a successful mystery for Bobbs-Merril,
she did finish and successfully publish a mystery story. The Dalrymple
Mystery was not only completed, but it is rich with cultural and historical
references.
We just have to pull the threads.
One of the most interesting threads I pulled
in annotating Dalrymple is William J. Flynn’s 1919 book The Barrel Mystery. Considered one of
the first true crime books in the United States, the work focuses on the Black
Hand and its role in a series of murders in 1903. Thanet would have read the
1903 newspaper coverage of the murder of Benedetto Madonio, whose body was
found stuffed in a barrel on a Manhattan street in The New York Times
and other outlets. Even though her story appeared before Flynn’s book, she was
harvesting story ideas in real time from the same newspaper articles that
covered his investigation.
I never could have imagined that a forgotten
serial by Octave Thanet would lead me to a foundational true crime account of
forgery and Mafia killings.
Not only were women writing serial mysteries
and selling to magazines (Dalrymple was never published as a stand-alone
novel in Thanet’s time), but many of the writers we do know from the time were
writing thrillers and mysteries. Louisa May Alcott is a prime example. Even
though it’s been decades since Stern & Rostenberg discovered Alcott’s
“blood and thunder” thrillers published under her pen name of A.M. Barnard, the
work Alcott is most known for is Little Women. Alcott, though, was far
more cutting-edge, and her V.V. or Plots and Counterplots, an 1865
parody of Poe’s detective character C. Auguste Dupin, is now considered an
important part of American mystery history. For more discussion of their work,
see “Rostenberg & Stern: An Appreciation.”
Text recovery and analysis like that done by
Stern and Rostenberg is important work. The impulse to find and fully
appreciate works by women in the late nineteenth/early twentieth century is
what drove my work as a graduate student and early scholar. It’s what motivated
me in 2004 to learn who Alice French was and to try and understand how Octave
Thanet has been dismissed as just another quaint female author despite her
clear interest in politics, crime news, penal system reform, and court cases.
We live in a horrifying age of fast fiction
and digital literary schemes. In the post-Kindle era, public domain reprints
have flooded the retail market. I’m often confused by people paying top dollar
for texts that are ripped from Gutenberg or Internet Archive and reproduced
with little to no editing, no annotations, and no introductory essays with
context. From the beginning of KDP eBook publishing, simply repackaging public
domain texts with eye-catching covers has been touted as a way to financial freedom.
Basic preservation is also important work. We
should be doing basic conservation and digitization of texts. And, I totally
applaud the work of Standard eBooks. We should
support the curation, editing, and formatting of works from the past. But we
need to go further.
In the early days of working on Dalrymple
I kept telling myself that I was merely flexing my editing and annotation
muscles. I had gotten lost in the sea of technology as king. I had to remember
the basics. It’s easy to get lost in the speed that digitization and AI
scraping have created. But in doing so we drown in the shallows. After all, the
book market is flooded with reprints. Now, we can just feed public domain texts
to AI bots and have it spit out books in the style of Octave Thanet or Anna
Katherine Green.
We’ve lost our ability to pull threads and
reveal the patterns underneath the surface. We get lost in the “look what I
found” moment and forget to answer why what we found matters.
Now when I think about this edition of The
Dalrymple Mystery, I think about work of recovery and exploration, rather
than simply producing reprints with pretty covers. While university press
editions like Duke’s 2003 The Dead Letter and The Figure Eight attempt to reintroduce foundational works to modern readers, those editions are
often not truly accessible. Specifically, those reprints often are not
palatable to a modern audience. While I
enjoy a pithy essay about domestic detective fiction that is heavily footnoted
and rooted in literary criticism I might be able to track down on J-Stor, a lot
of readers don’t. A university press imprint with a “critical introduction”
written in academese often signals “boring” to a reader.
Not everyone is willing to mine that
introduction for the one or two golden nuggets it might provide.
In addition, reprints from university and
scholarly presses are not affordable to laypersons or even graduate students or
contingent faculty. Some eBook editions, like Cambridge’s 2023 edition of
Ganor’s Susan Glaspell in Context, cost $126 for the Kindle edition and
$120 in hardcover. Even the original edition from University Press of Michigan
sells for $33 in eBook, $35 in paperback, and $85 in hardback. The Duke reprint
of Meta Victoria Fuller Victor’s novels is more affordable right now, but they
still ring up at over $17 for eBook, $33 for paperback, and over $90 for
hardbacks.
It’s not hard to see why folks aren’t buying
those versions that provide some background and context for public domain
texts. And, even though projects like Standard eBooks do a great job at
providing beautiful digital reprints for free, they don’t tend to provide any
context or analysis.
Proofreading and repackaging is only the first
step. If we’re going to combat the literacy crisis, we have to go further—we
have to provide affordable reprints with enough context and analysis to make
readers’ fingers itch to the point they start their own thread pulling.
After all, true text recovery is detective
work when done well. Once you start pulling threads, the text opens up and
sends you on a million side quests. We live in an age where we can have a bot
go out and put feelers across the internet looking for information. Despite the
virtue signaling we see online about AI, we’re inundated with AI flyers,
cartoon versions of photographs, deepfake videos, and even AI-authored novels.
Tons of texts (some contemporary and some public domain) are likely entered
into LLMs daily by giants like Anthropic and by individuals, looking to cash in
somehow by training AI to output “books” that will make them rich.
We can’t leave this kind of work to the bots.
Bots have been trained on materials like McMichael’s biography that dismiss or
ignore the connections.
To fully engage with the texts, we must pull
at the threads. Only then can we bridge the gap between the digitized versions
of texts we can find in public domain sites like Gutenberg and the high-priced
reprints put out by academic presses.
In the beginning I worried my efforts to
annotate and publish The Dalrymple Mystery would matter to anyone else.
I told myself the process was the thing and kept going. And, I’m so glad to
report that the process led me back to my roots as a literary detective.
Angelic Rodgers is currently exploring the
Lake Chapala area of Mexico when she’s not chasing down obscure and largely
forgotten tidbits of writing by women in America. She is an editor, writer, and
founder of The Octave Thanet Project. Her edition of The Dalrymple Mystery
is set to release in mid-November from Thanet House Press. The cover for the
upcoming reprint is seen here. This cover is from a lino-cut Angel's sister, Renee Rodgers,
designed for the book. They researched cover designers of the time and after
discovering Margaret Armstrong was in vogue (and designed covers for some of
Octave Thanet’s works), Renee moved forward with a design inspired by Armstrong’s
style. And, yes, that is the same sister mentioned in the piece.
In addition to her work on Thanet, she also
writes fiction and creative nonfiction. You can find her most recent updates on
her Substack and on her website at http://www.angelicrodgers.com.
AND NOW BACK TO JOE:
Thanks, Angel! Readers, once The Dalrymple Mystery is available for purchase, I'll include a reminder in my following column. I'm sure I'm not alone in wanting to see this important piece of our history,
IN OTHER NEWS . . .
Another of the anthologies that was orphaned when Down & Out Books was shuttered has returned to shelves, this time with a
very snazzy new cover!
Sleuths Just Wanna Have Fun: Private Eyes in the Material World, edited by Michael Bracken, collects tales of PIs at work in the 1980s. My story, "The Right Size of Favor," about a threatened shakedown of the Hands Across America charity event, was selected by fellow SleuthSayer Rob Lopresti as his "
best mystery story I read this week" in May of last year, and was also chosen for the upcoming volume
Best Private Eye Stories of the Year. Many thanks to Crimson Gate Books for getting this dynamite collection back out into the world!
I'm also in love with the cover for
Hooked on Urban Legends--and Murder!, the new anthology from Wildside Press, edited by Donna Andrews, Barb Goffman, and Marcia Talley. Crime stories based on urban legends--it's a fantastic idea for an anthology, and I can tell you the writers here really came through on the assignment. My entry, "The Things We Remember," kicks off the book with a tale about the grisly legends on one college campus--and the even more grisly origins of one of them. Fun fact: the story mentions several campus legends, all of which (save the central one the story revolves around) are actual stories told on campuses where I studied or worked.
Thanks again to Angel. See you all next month!
