E. Lee Waddell (1905-1975) was an American writer.

Eleanor Lee Waddell was the youngest daughter of Rev. John M. Waddell (1864-1953) and Nellie L. Waddell. Very little is known about her life. In fact, more details can be found about her father. John Milligan Waddell was born January 1, 1864 in West Virginia. He graduated from Princeton University in 1886 and earned a D.D. in 1892. He held positions as a Presbyterian minister in his native West Virginia and in Pennsylvania, where his fifth and youngest child, Eleanor, was born (following two older daughters and two older sons) on October 13, 1905. In the 1920s, the family moved to California and settled in Marin County.

Eleanor was trained as a teacher and later worked as a high school secretary in Mill Valley, California, which served her well in the writing of her one and only mystery novel, Murder at Drake's Anchorage, published in 1949. Written under the gender-neutral form of her name "E. Lee Waddell," the novel is concerned with a scandal that is brewing at Drake's Anchorage, a posh private school for boys situated on the Marin County coast. The headmaster, Alrik Lind, has been accused of improper behavior by some of the boys and a group of parents is demanding answers. Lind abruptly leaves the school at the beginning of the spring term, casting the school and faculty into disarray. The school's long-time secretary, Miss Breckenridge, is then fired for listening at keyholes. When her body is later discovered in the woods not far from campus, the investigation graduates from impropriety to murder. This novel contains a somewhat confusing narrative, with a varied cast of characters who start to blend into one another (inexplicably, many of them have Scandinavian names, leading to even further confusion). However, the Marin headlands are vividly described. The novel also contains an amusing reference to the fabled Drake's Plate of Brass (now housed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley), which has since been proven to have been an elaborate hoax perpetrated members of E Clampus Vitus (the "Clampers"), a fraternity of California history enthusiasts who were fond of practical jokes.

In 1949, Princeton Alumni Weekly, in a column on the "Daughters of '86," had this to say: "A budding writer of mystery stories is Eleanor Lee Waddell. Eleanor was in war work in Okinawa doing a specially creditable job of filing data. She flew the Pacific from Frisco. When that work was finished, she returned to America to take a secretarial course and meanwhile is giving some study to story writing, with encouraging success." She never married and died in Paradise, California (Butte County) on June 22, 1975.

References:

Princeton Alumni Weekly, 49, no. 16 (Feb. 4, 1949): 12.

Bibliography

Murder at Drake's Anchorage (1949)