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Footner, Hulbert

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years ago

William Hulbert Footner (1879-1944) was born in Hamilton, Canada, and emigrated to New York when he was nineteen. He wanted to be an actor, and his first work was a play in which he was given a small part himself. After several bit parts, many rejections, and a few notices by critics — mostly negative in content — he decided to become an journalist and author. He worked on the Morning Albertan for a year expanding telegram dispatches into front-page stories. His first freelance article, which appeared in Field and Stream, was about a canoe trip he took up the Hudson River to Albany. In 1905, he explored the upper Peace River country in Alberta, Canada, writing articles about his experiences for several New York and Canadian newspapers. He returned to Alberta in 1909 with a companion and explored the source of the Hay River in the Northwest Territories in a canvas boat. He married Gladys Marsh in 1916.

Footner wrote a number of adventure stories based on those experiences including the book, The Huntress, which a Hollywood studio adapted into a successful movie. During the early 1920s Hulbert Footner started writing detective stories and acquired a faithful following in America, the United Kingdom, and other countries. His most startling innovation at that early date was to make his investigator a woman: Madame Storey, Private Investigator is available as an ebook from eBookMall.

His international success allowed Footner to indulge his passion for travel and for the next twenty years, off and on, he would leave his home, Charles Gift in Calvert County, Maryland, and with his family enjoy the pleasure of living in London, New York, Italy, and the French Riviera. Near the close of his career, he wrote a number of books about Maryland and Maryland people, including Rivers of the Eastern Shore. He lived in Maryland in Charlesgift, one of the oldest houses in America.

Death of a Celebrity is available for download from Project Gutenberg.

Mike Grost on Hulbert Footner

Hulbert Footner's tales of Madame Rosika Storey have a period charm. They tend not to be overwhelmingly brilliant as puzzle plots. Footner's tales, from the 1920's and 30's seem oddly old-fashioned for their era. His detective technique would have seemed familiar to Émile Gaboriau in the 1860's: footprints, rooms searched for hidden clues, an obvious suspect and a hidden suspect, mild sorts of financial skullduggery lurking in the background. Footner was good at describing every sort of romantic attraction. He was alert to the emotional feelings of his characters. His characters are oddly, rawly sexual for their eras: one is especially startled by the gigolos in "Wolves of Monte Carlo", but Footner liked to include really handsome, seductive young men in many of his tales. Footner is perhaps a bit influenced by the Jazz Age tradition of F. Scott Fitzgerald, and its emphasis on both romance and sexuality. Madame Rosika in Madame Storey is somewhat unusual as a great detective of the era who happens to be a woman. She works as a paid professional, uses her brains, is universally respected for her skill, and basically plays the same role in her world that Hercule Poirot does in his. It is a very non-sexist portrait. Footner's stories are not much reprinted today: they have mainly shown up in anthologies devoted to female detectives, such as Ellery Queen's and Michelle Slung's. Footner's career is a bit hard to place: Madame Storey seems to have been accepted as a Golden Age detective, with her work collected in books, but her cases also appeared in pulp magazines throughout the Depression: maybe other markets were tighter then. Footner suggests that the usual rigid dichotomy between pulp fiction/Golden Age detective stories was in fact something of a semipermeable membrane.

Footner's other series detective is Amos Lee Mappin, a successful, middle aged mystery writer whose crimes tend to occur in New York's cafe society. Mappin is unusual in that his Watson (at least in some of his tales) is a young woman, his secretary Fanny Parran. She is one of the few female Watsons in fiction, an example of how female oriented Footner's fiction is. Mappin stars in The Murder That Had Everything (1939), which is something of a guilty pleasure. This good naturedly trashy tale of wealthy society women and the young male fortune hunters who prey on them is a lot more entertaining than it has a right to be. Its early sections are its best (Chapters 1 - 7); the trip to Chicago (Chapter 11 and the start of Chapter 12) is also fun. Unfortunately, the fizz of the early sections is not sustained, and one certainly does not want to paint it as any more than a curiosity. Much of the detection here is in the Gaboriau tradition, of discovering clues left at a crime scene, and using them to reconstruct the events of the murder. There is a good deal of architectural interest in the apartment occupied by the victim in The Murder That Had Everything (Chapters 5 - 6); creative buildings were a Golden Age specialty. Also architectural:. there is also a nice piece of detection (end of Chapter 4 and Chapter 5), where the hero tracks down the location of the victim's apartment.

The book shows affinities with the Van Dine school, at least superficially, in its genius amateur detective, its New York City upper crust setting, and its detailed Golden Age style storytelling of a murder investigation. Mappin made his first appearance in The Mystery of the Folded Paper (1930), at the height of S.S. Van Dine's popularity. Footner had already been publishing for over a decade then. Footner was born in 1879, long before Van Dine or most of his followers, and there are signs that Footner was perhaps an established author adapting to new currents in detective fiction.

The House With the Blue Door (1942) is another fairly entertaining Mappin mystery. Once again, we have a wealthy society woman, who gets involved with a good looking young man, an ex-convict, who like many such Footner hunks, was involved in con games and swindles. The description of the con games in Chapter 1 is especially lively. It also drops the other shoe, in showing the impact of such good looking men on other men. This story has more low life characters than The Murder That Had Everything, with many of the ex-con's former criminal associates prominent in the plot. The tone is also darker, and more tragic.

Christopher Morley was a friend of Footner's, and wrote an evocative reminiscence of him as an introduction to his last mystery, Orchids to Murder (1945). Both Morley and Footner are hard to classify authors in the history of mystery fiction.