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Starrett, Vincent

Page history last edited by PBworks 17 years, 7 months ago
Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett (1886-1974) was a Canadian-born journalist and Sherlock Holmes enthusiast. He was educated in Chicago and became a reporter and war correspondent in WW1. He was an editor and writing teacher, and reviewed books for the Chicago Tribune for over thirty years. Starrett wrote many non-fiction books about Doyle and other writers, and produced a Holmes pastiche, The Unique Hamlet (1920) as well as several mystery novels and many short stories. His series characters were Riley Blackwood, Walter Ghost, Jimmie Lavender, and the combination of George Washington Troxell and Fred Dellabough.

 

Mike Grost on Vincent Starrett

 

Vincent Starrett's fiction has some similarities to Frederick Irving Anderson's. The social settings in a story like "Murder at the Opera" (1934) range from sophisticated high life in Chicago, centered around musicians, to rural regions. These are two principal areas of Anderson's fiction. There is an Anderson like feel to the vividly detailed, slightly satiric social descriptions in the tale, as well. Both Starrett and Anderson range freely between gangsters and high society in their fiction, and both move at a slow stately pace, enlivened by richly embroidered descriptions. In addition, this tale shows the police using sophisticated cleverness and guile to sneak up on a person they are arresting - another Anderson specialty. However, Starrett's work is closer to the whodunit, puzzle plot story than are most of Anderson's. The biggest similarity between the writers is the social content of the people and milieus they discuss.

 

Starrett's fiction also shows an influence from Doyle, not surprising in the editor of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, and other Holmes scholarship. His detectives perform lots of well done deduction from physical evidence. Sleuth Jimmie Lavender sees clients in his sitting room, and has a Watson like friend and narrator. However, Starrett's stories do not have a Doyle like feel to their plotting, unlike, say, George R. Sims or Valentine Williams. They use some of Doyle's detective techniques, but are quite different as works of storytelling.

 

Another of Starrett's series sleuths is bookstore owner and armchair detective George Washington Troxell, who solves problems brought to him by police reporter Frederick "Fred" Dellabough. Unlike most armchair detectives in fiction, Troxell is not infallible, and goes through many mistakes and wrong solutions before arriving at the ultimate truth. Each bad idea sends Dellabough out on more legwork. This is supposed to be humorous, but it seems somewhat frustrating to read about, and can make a tale like "Too Many Sleuths" (1927) (in the collection The Blue Door) seem routine. It is, however, probably more realistic to see a detective whose solutions are more iterative than instant. As a character, Troxell bears some resemblance to Christopher Morley's bookstore owner in The Haunted Bookshop (1919). The very fat Troxell, who rarely leaves his shop, or even his large chair, and the dynamic young police reporter Dellabough, who executes Troxell's ideas, and traipses all over Chicago, also seem like possible prototypes for Rex Stout's Nero Wolfe and Archie Goodwin. Stout also wrote a series of Wolfe works with "Too Many" in the title: Too Many Cooks (1938), Too Many Women (1947), "Too Many Detectives" (1956), Too Many Clients (1960). Troxell is sometimes insulting to Dellabough, who shrugs it off, just like Goodwin. Dellabough is also physically active, and sometimes gets involved in fist fights, also like Goodwin. Like Goodwin, he also gets good sleuthing ideas on his own, as well. In later years, the 1940's and after, Starrett and Stout became personal friends, with Starrett becoming one of Stout's most vociferous critical champions.

 

Sally Cardiff, the detective heroine of what is one of Starrett's best pieces, "Murder at the Opera", seems to be a Chicago sleuth. Both Jimmie Lavender and Troxell are based in Chicago, as was Starrett himself. (Troxell's bookstore is in Dearborn Street, near the bridge.) Their work often involves routine sleuthing and tracking of characters; often these characters are members of the underworld, in the pulp style. In the 1920's Starrett often appeared in Real Detective Tales, the same Chicago pulp that featured the early work of MacKinlay Kantor.

 

Starrett was a big admirer of Robert Louis Stevenson, and his New Arabian Nights stories (1878). Starrett's "The Blue Door" seems to be a deliberate imitation of Stevenson's work, featuring two young men who get involved in a mystery adventure on Chicago's North side. As in other of Starrett's tales, the detective work in the story is richer than the final solution of the puzzle plot. We are used to seeing 1920's Chicago treated in snappy gangster films; there is a jolt of cognitive dissonance in seeing the Chicago of gangsters, speakeasies, and public corruption used as the background of a Stevensonian adventure, or one of Jimmie Lavender's mock Sherlock Holmes pastiches. It is a very odd effect. The amateur detective in "The Blue Door" is a mystery writer, and one that seems to be modeled on Starrett himself. Soon, both Ellery Queen and Mignon G. Eberhart's Susan Dare will become mystery-writer sleuths, not to mention the mystery writer sleuth in G.D.H. Cole's The Brooklyn Murders (1923). The novella is one of Starrett's Real Detective Tales pieces, but it is uncertain what year it was published - probably the later 1920's.

 

Starrett also wrote what might be called horror fiction. These are not supernatural tales. These are murderous stories, which show that violence has unpleasant effects on people. "The Man in the Cask" (1927) is the most reprinted on these tales.

 

Bibliography

 

The Unique Hamlet (1920)

Coffins for Two (1924)

Murder on B Deck (1929)

The Blue Door (1930)

Dead Man Inside (1931)

The End of Mr Garment (1932)

The Great Hotel Murder (1935)

Midnight and Percy Jones (1938)

The Case Book of Jimmy Lavender (1944)

Murder in Peking (1947) aka Laughing Buddha

The Quick and the Dead (1965)

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