Roger Scarlett

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Roger Scarlett was the pen name of Dorothy Blair (1903–1976) and Evelyn Page (1902–1977),[1][2] who were life partners and in the early 1930s wrote five golden age mystery novels together.[3] They are believed to be the "first same-sex couple to write mysteries."[4]

About the authors[edit]

Evelyn Page was born to a prominent Philadelphia family and graduated from Bryn Mawr in 1923.[5] She worked as an aircraft inspector during World War II and was a sergeant in the Women's Army Corps.[6] Page later went into academia, becoming an assistant professor of English at Smith College, Northampton (1949–1956), where Sylvia Plath was one of her students,[7] and afterwards was assistant professor at Connecticut College, New London (1956–1964).[8] She also wrote two books under her own name: The Chestnut Tree (1964), a novel, and American Genesis: Pre-Colonial writing in the North (1973), an academic study on travel narratives in North America before 1700. In the 1930s she was a book columnist for The Washington Post.[1]

Dorothy Blair was born in Bozeman, Montana, where her father was a local doctor. She graduated from Vassar in 1924.[5] Both Blair and Page worked as editors in the 1920s at Houghton Mifflin, where they met each other.[5] After living together in Boston, they moved to Abington, Connecticut, where they lived in a stone farmhouse from the 1800s.[5]

The Roger Scarlett novels[edit]

In all of the five Roger Scarlett novels, the main detective who solves the case is Inspector Norton Kane, a member of the Boston police department. The novels are whodunits in the tradition of S.S. Van Dine and Ellery Queen.[3] Although the novels had soon been translated into other languages (e.g. French[9] and Japanese[3]), they went out of print for decades. In 2017, Coachwhip Publications collected all of the novels in three volumes; in 2022, one novel was included in Penzler Publishers' "American Mystery Classics" series.

The novels are noted for their "meticulously detailed maps and puzzling plots."[10] In the First Degree was named one of murder mysteries of the month in 1932 by Time Magazine[11] while The Bookman called The Back Bay Murders "cleverly written."[12] In addition, Cat's Paw has been called "another gem in the American Mystery Classics series" by Publishers Weekly[13] while Booklist called the novel "a classic closed-circle mystery."[10]

In 2007, a translation of In the First Degree was named to the Honkaku Mystery Best 10 in Japan.

Plagiarism of The Back Bay Murders[edit]

One of the Roger Scarlett novels, The Back Bay Murders, was plagiarized by Don Basil in his mystery Cat and Feather.[14] Basil's novel was released in 1931 by Grosset & Dunlap in the United Kingdom and republished by Henry Holt and Company in the United States.[14] The only changes Basil made were to swap the setting of Boston in The Back Bay Murders to a London suburb, change the character names,[14] and alter the American spellings of words for English ones.[15]

After becoming aware of the plagiarism, Henry Holt and Company withdrew Basil's novel from publication.[14] According to Ned Guymon, a collector of detective fiction, this was "probably the most glaring piece of plagiarism ever to exist."[15]

It was later learned that Don Basil was a pseudonym of Morris/Maurice Balk, a career criminal from England.[16][17]

Bibliography[edit]

  • The Beacon Hill Murders
    • First Edition: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1930
    • Included in "The Roger Scarlett Mysteries, Vol. 1", Coachwhip Publications 2017, ISBN 978-1616464219
  • The Back Bay Murders
    • First Edition: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1930
    • Included in "The Roger Scarlett Mysteries, Vol. 1", Coachwhip Publications 2017, ISBN 978-1616464219
  • Cat's Paw
    • First Edition: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1931
    • Included in "The Roger Scarlett Mysteries, Vol. 2", Coachwhip Publications 2017, ISBN 978-1616464226
    • "American Mystery Classics" edition, Penzler Publishers 2022, ISBN 978-1613162835, with an introduction by Curtis Evans
  • Murder among the Angells
    • First Edition: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1932
    • Included in "The Roger Scarlett Mysteries, Vol. 2", Coachwhip Publications 2017, ISBN 978-1616464226
  • In the First Degree
    • First Edition: Doubleday, Doran & Co. 1933
    • Included in "The Roger Scarlett Mysteries, Vol. 3", Coachwhip Publications 2017, ISBN 978-1616464233

References[edit]

  1. ^ a b "Michael Dirda's wondrous holiday book recommendations" by Michael Dirda, The Washington Post, December 11, 2017.
  2. ^ Faces of Anonymity Anonymous and Pseudonymous Publication, 1600–2000 edited by R. Griffin, Palgrave Macmillan US, 2016, page 194
  3. ^ a b c Evans, Curtis (2022). Introduction. Cat's Paw. By Scarlett, Roger. Penzler Publishing.
  4. ^ "Remembrances of Crimes Past" by Lenny Picker, Publishers Weekly, 3/14/2022, Vol. 269, Issue 11.
  5. ^ a b c d "The Murder Mansions of Mr. Scarlett: The Classic Golden Age Detective Novels of Roger Scarlett (Dorothy Blair and Evelyn Page)" The Passing Tramp, September 29, 2017.
  6. ^ "Page, Evelyn, 1902 – (Roger Scarlett, a joint pseudonym)" Contemporary Authors, Volumes 5–8, Gale Research, 1963, page 857.
  7. ^ Kukil, Karen V. (2019). "The Genesis of 'Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom.'". The Hudson Review. 72 (1): 29–37. Retrieved 2023-02-03.
  8. ^ Duin, Nancy E., ed. (1976). "Page, Evelyn". The writers directory 1976–1978. St. James Press. p. 812. Retrieved 2023-02-03.
  9. ^ "Bibliotheque Nationale de France Catalogue général". Retrieved 2023-02-03.
  10. ^ a b "Cat's Paw" by Jane Murphy, Booklist, 2/15/2022, Vol. 118, Issue 12.
  11. ^ "Books," Time Magazine, November 28, 1932 page 52.
  12. ^ The Bookman, Volume LXXII Number 1, September 1930, page XXIV.
  13. ^ "Cat's Paw," Publishers Weekly, 12/13/2021, Vol. 269, Issue 1.
  14. ^ a b c d "Customers' Choice," The Publishers' Weekly, October 3, 1931, page 1580.
  15. ^ a b "The Uneasy Chair," The Armchair Detective Volume 11, Number 1, January 1978, page 2.
  16. ^ "Addenda to the 2015 Revised Edition," Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography 1749–2000 by Allen J. Hubin, Locus Magazine, 2015, accessed 2/10/2023.
  17. ^ "Evans, Curtis. Preacher, Plagiarizer, Crime Writer and Confidence Trickster: The Kaleidoscopic Criminal Career of Maurice E. Balk (1900?–1981)," The Passing Tramp, November 22, 2017, accessed 2/10/2023. Also published at CrimeReads

External links[edit]

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