Source: University of North Alabama. See here for a more detailed biography and general bibliography.

Theodore Sigismund Stribling was born March 4, 1881, in Clifton, Tennessee. His parents were Christopher Columbus Stribling and Amelia Waits Stribling. While Stribling was raised in Clifton, many of the summers of his youth were spent with his maternal grandparents on their farm in Gravelly Springs, Alabama. From these visits with the Waits, Stribling would later draw to create some of the settings and characters for his future novels.

He began his primary education at the Clifton Masonic Academy in 1890. Three years later at the age of twelve, the future award winning author wrote and sold his first story for five dollars. The ghost story titled "The House of Haunted Shadows" was published in a Florence grocery store pamphlet and freely distributed. In 1898, Stribling attended Huntingdon Southern Normal University in Huntingdon, Tennessee. He left the campus the following spring of 1899.

He attended the University of Alabama School of Law and was admitted to the bar. He began writing stories in 1908, and completed his first novel, The Cruise of the Dry Dock in 1919. He married Louella Kloss in 1919 and wrote his only detective story, Clues of the Caribbees in 1929, featuring Professor Henry Poggioli. This was followed by a dozen or so short stories.

Stribling died in Florida in 1965. His tombstone in Clifton reads: 'Through this dust these hills once spoke'.

Some of the Poggioli stories have recently been reissued by Crippen & Landru as Dr Poggioli, Criminologist.

Mike Grost on TS Stribling

Stribling is a mainstream writer who has made a small but interesting contribution to detective fiction. Stribling's detective short stories (he wrote no mystery novels) fall into three chronological groups, and are just a small percentage of a writing career mainly devoted to mainstream literary fiction. Stribling's work suffers from unevenness. His earliest and most famous mystery book, Clues of the Caribbees (1925-1926), is his weakest, offering little more than some interesting travel writing and a final story ("A Passage to Benares") with a startling finale. These early stories first appeared in Adventure, a pulp magazine specializing in tales set round the globe; some of what it published were mystery stories, many were not. Each story in Adventure had its usually exotic location listed right in the table of contents. Stribling was a regular contributor to the magazine during the mid 1920's. Its contents had little similarity in tone or style to the hard-boiled fiction then appearing in Black Mask. Stribling's autobiography Laughing Stock (1982) describes his entertaining encounters with the editorial staff of Adventure. It also records his friendship with mystery writers J.S. Fletcher, and Harry Stephen Keeler, the two last people I would ever have expected him to know.

Much better than Clues of the Caribbees are the tales he wrote in the early 1930's, now collected in [Dr. Poggioli: Criminologist], and the final, larger group of stories written after 1945, partly collected in [Best Dr. Poggioli Detective Stories]. These last tales appeared when the elderly Stribling had lost all markets for his writing except Ellery Queen's Mystery Magazine, and a few other mystery magazines. (There are apparently several unpublished mainstream novels dating from this period.) Even these later works are by no means uniform in quality.

Mystery Techniques

A common theme of Stribling's work is the intrusion of politics, in the broad sense, into strange schemes of murder or fraud. Many of the characters in his stories seem ready to engage in activities that at first seem nonsensical, but which gradually reveal a hidden logic. These enterprises often involve small town politics, the racial divisions of the Deep South of Stribling's era, or big business. These schemes allow Stribling to achieve two ends. One is the creation of paradoxical mystery plots. The other is social satire of contemporary institutions. Social satire was in fact the main goal of much of Stribling's mainstream fiction.

These paradoxical schemes are not found in any other mystery writer, and help make Stribling's stories unique. Stribling's work falls within the tradition of the fair play mystery puzzle plot, but is otherwise hard to place. He does not seem to be closely aligned with any other writer. Although his lead character, Dr. Poggioli, is a psychologist, psychology per se does not seem to play a major role in his work, and he certainly has little in common with say, Helen McCloy and her psychologist detective Basil Willing. Nor does Stribling embrace the plotlessness that is considered chic among some mainstream writers. His detective fiction, at least, is highly plotted. And, although Stribling's tone is continuously tongue in cheek, humorous and satirical, he has nothing in common with the Atwood Taylor-Edmund Crispin-Craig Rice school of detective farceurs.

Stribling's work has similarities to Agatha Christie. Their detectives Henry Poggioli and Hercule Poirot have similar names: both have unusual last names, and both follow the pattern He- Po-. Poirot emphasizes "psychology" in his stories as a basis for his insights, and Poggioli is a psychologist. The relationship of friendly rivalry between Poirot and Captain Hastings is matched by that of Poggioli and his narrator. A Poirot tale like "The Adventure of 'The Western Star'" (from Poirot Investigates) seems quite similar to a typical Poggioli story. The first half of the tale consists of deductions, first by Poirot, then by Hastings; a typical Poggioli story involves relentless logical deductions by his detective. The style of the dialogues in Christie's story anticipates that of Stribling's fiction. A sense of satire pervades Christie's writings, which are filled with humor; these are also prominent characteristics of Stribling's work.

Stribling's use of clues is unusual, too. He liberally and carefully laces his work with clues to the strange schemes lurking behind the scenes, clues that are recalled and explained by his detective at the finale. But I have often found these clues to be wholly inadequate to actually deduce the hidden schemes of the story. They are interesting, and add to the reader's pleasure, but do not quite add up to fully fair play. All the same, the explanations of the clues often adds to the paradoxical nature of the stories, making everything seem even stranger than it already is. Stribling clearly relished the paradoxical and the strange.

In addition, Poggioli's character, techniques and even level of skill as a detective seem to change from story to story. He is one of the least consistently characterized of all detectives in fiction. What this loses in giving the reader a consistent base with which to approach Stribling's fiction, it gains by allowing a multitude of experimental techniques. The story "The Shadow" (1934) is especially odd in this way.

While Stribling's stories are almost entirely pure mysteries, where Poggioli solves mysterious situations, their mysteries are not all about murder. In "The Cablegram" (1932) and "The Man in the Shade" (1957) Poggioli takes on smuggling mysteries. These tales are full of bizarre comedy, as are many of Stribling's stories. The highly complex plots and intricate chains of deductions in Stribling's later tales make them seem quite long, whereas they are actually only around 15 pages or less.

Politics

One of the most admirable aspects of Stribling's work, both mainstream and mysterious, is his treatment of black life. Long before the Civil Rights movement got underway, Stribling was turning his satirical scalpel on prejudice and the obstacles faced by blacks. "Bullets" (1932) is outstanding in this regard.

"Bullets" seems to be Stribling's first really good detective story, his breakthrough work. The earlier tales in Clues of the Caribbees are long and meandering; they lack the intricate plotting, concise writing and sparkling paradoxes of Stribling's work following "Bullets". The same is true of the long and not very interesting paranormal story "Shadowed" (1930).

In the 1920's Stribling also contributed to early science fiction pulps. "A Passage to Benares" has elements of the fantastic, as does a strange non-mystery story Stribling contributed to Adventure shortly after "Benares" called "Christ in Chicago" (1926), a tale which attacks the then rising eugenics movement. As one character in the tale puts it, "A civilization can be measured by how many of the poor and the weak it can support". Since eugenics played a major role in the rise of Nazism during this era, Stribling's tale can be seen to have been prophetic.

Bibliography

Clues of the Caribbees (1929)

Best Dr Poggioli Detective Stories (1975)

Dr Poggioli, Criminologist (2005)