Wed 15 Apr 2009
Inquiry: Who was EMMA MURDOCH VAN DEVENTER?
Posted by Steve under Authors , Bibliographies, Lists & Checklists , Inquiries[20] Comments
This will take a bit of an explanation, so bear with me.
Around the turn of last century, a relatively well-known mystery writer named Lawrence L. Lynch had quite a few books published. Some of them were reprinted later as by Emma Murdoch Van Deventer, and as John Herrington says, “At some time someone was able to match Lynch to Van Deventer [as to being the real name of the author], the connection being lost in the mists of time.”
The only problem is, no one has been able to find a real person having Van Deventer’s name, including John, and he’s been looking. He says, in part, “There are a few Emma Van Deventers on Ancestry.com, but Murdoch does not feature as part of any of these names.”
I’ll reprint all of Lynch’s entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, just for completeness, but the actual request is, if you know or can come up with any information about either Lawrence L. Lynch or Emma Murdoch Vandeventer, please leave a comment or drop me a line.
LYNCH, LAWRENCE L. Pseudonym of Emma Murdoch Van Deventer. [Note: There seem to be no books that appeared under the latter’s name only.] Except for two which apparently were never published in the US, these are the US titles only. All but one were reprinted in the UK by Ward Lock, including those as by Van Deventer, indicated by EMVD.
Shadowed by Three (n.) Donnelly 1879 [Neil Bathurst; Frank Ferrars]
The Diamond Coterie (n.) Connelley 1884 [Neil Bathurst]
Madeline Payne, the Detective’s Daughter (n.) Loyd 1884 [Madeline Payne] EMVD
Dangerous Ground; or, The Rival Detectives (n.) Loyd 1885 [Van Vernet]
Out of a Labyrinth (n.) Loyd 1885 [Neil Bathurst]
A Mountain Mystery; or, The Outlaws of the Rockies (n.) Loyd 1886 [Van Vernet; U.S. West]
The Lost Witness; or, The Mystery of Leah Paget (n.) Laird 1890 [New York City, NY]
Moina; or, Against the Mighty (n.) Laird 1891 [Madeline Payne]
A Slender Clue; or, The Mystery of Mardi Gras (n.) Laird 1891 EMVD
A Dead Man’s Step (n.) Rand McNally 1893 EMVD
Against Odds (n.) Rand McNally 1894 [Carl Masters; Chicago, IL] EMVD
No Proof (n.) Rand McNally 1895 [Chicago, IL] EMVD
The Last Stroke (n.) Laird 1896 [Frank Ferrars; Illinois]
The Unseen Hand (n.) Laird 1898 EMVD
High Stakes (n.) Laird 1899
Under Fate’s Wheel (n.) Laird 1901 EMVD
The Woman Who Dared (n.) Laird 1902
The Danger Line (n.) Ward 1903 [New York City, NY]
A Woman’s Tragedy; or, The Detective’s Task (n.) Ward 1904 [Carl Masters; Wyoming]
The Doverfields’ Diamonds (n.) Laird 1906 EMVD
Man and Master (n.) Laird 1908 [Carl Masters]
A Sealed Verdict (n.) Long 1910 [Chicago, IL] No UK edition.
A Blind Lead (n.) Laird 1912 EMVD
Notes: Titles with links can be found as etexts online. [See the comments for a list of five more.]
April 16th, 2009 at 5:29 pm
At least five other titles by Lawrence L Lynch can be downloaded from http://www.archive.org
Regards,
Ron Smyth
April 16th, 2009 at 6:43 pm
Thanks, Ron.
Here’s a direct link to a page of Lynch titles:
http://www.archive.org/search.php?query=lawrence%20l.%20lynch
The five are:
Shadowed by Three
Out of a Labyrinth
Against Odds
Dangerous Ground
The Last Stroke
April 16th, 2009 at 10:14 pm
The Diamond Coterie and Madeline Payne, The Detectives Daughter are available as free ebooks to download from manybooks.com. I’ve only read Coterie, but it’s a fairly good novel of the period depending on your taste for late 19th century detective tales. Lynch (Van Deventer) would seem to be one of those unfairly forgotten authors without a single classic work to keep the name alive. It’s not unusual really. Richard Marsh was a bestselling writer whose novel The Beetle is often compared to Dracula, and no one remembers Fergus Hume, the Australian writer, other than for his Mystery of a Hansom Cab (though in Hume’s case the forgetfulness is largely justified)and a few of his shorts.
Eden Phillipots wrote well into the 1950’s, and penned two genuine classics, My Adventure on the Flying Scotsman, and The Red Remaynes, as well being at least partialy responsible for Agatha Christie’s career, having encouraged her to keep writing when she had yet to make her first sale. Both under his own name and as Harrington Hext he penned detective stories and ‘shockers’ of some merit and was also a noted regional writer in his native England. Today he is mostly forgotten though mentioned in some histories. Lynch/Van Deventer seems to be yet another forgotten scribe lost to time, though perhaps not deservedly so. For that matter Lee Thayer wrote endless books about private investigator Peter Clancy, and is barely afforded a mention in even the most detailed histories of the genre.
Popularity, sales, even series characters are no guarantee of long term success. As late as the 1960’s Leslie Ford and Mignon G. Eberhardt were commonly seen on paperback racks. Writers like George Bagby, Hilary Waugh, and Aaron Marc Stein were all successful mid-level writers who are forgotten by all but a few readers today. It isn’t always fair, or even justified, and sometimes it defies logic, but who and what survives is a mystery even Sherlock Holmes would be stressed to solve.
April 17th, 2009 at 12:24 am
At the University of Rhode Island site under the entry for Professor Dorothy F. Donnelly there is a mention that she is writing a biography of turn of the century writer Emma Murdock Van Deventer, as I have reproduced below, with a link to the article. From what I have found in Haycraft and Penzler’s Encyclopedia of Mystery most of her books were published in Chicago and the UK and the British editions are fairly collectable because of the cover art. Haycraft mentions her in relation to Anna Katherine Green, but says little and dismisses the whole period in large part.
The Diamond Coterie, the only one I have read by her, is mostly of interest for the period and not as a detective story, being novelistic and melodramatic, an inferior take on Stevenson’s New Arabaian Nights and The Dynamyters or Lang’s The Disentanglers rather than an actual mystery novel interested in detection.
Mike Grost at http://mikegrost.com/casebook.htm#Lynch
reviews one of the Lynch books, Against the Odds,set at the Chicago Worlds Fair, but has little good to say about it.
From the University of Rhode Island Site:
http://www.uri.edu/artsci/eng/english_NEW/Faculty/Donnelly.html
Donnelly’s current projects include a biography of Emma Murdock Van Deventer, a late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century novelist whose works appeared in the U.S. and Britain between 1870-1912. This project also includes writing introductions with critical commentary for each of the more than nineteen books written by Van Deventer to be reprinted over the next few years. Special attention will be paid to gender issues and to Van Deventer’s books as primary examples of material as well as popular culture.”
April 17th, 2009 at 12:09 pm
David
Thanks for the URI information. It looks like Professor Donnelly has exactly what John Herrington is looking for. What’s puzzling though is that one source I found describes Van Deventer as a “Chicago socialite,” yet a search of the Chicago newspapers of the era brings up not a single word about her.
More to be found and learned, it looks like.
As for your preceding comment, I’m always interested in what authors’ fame continues on after they’ve passed away and/or no longer writing.
Times change and the spotlight moves on, and as you say, it often defies logic. It happens in larger literary circles than ours, of course, and in all forms of popular entertainment and cultural memes in general.
Using big words (in this case a small one) makes it sound as though I know what I am talking about, right?
April 17th, 2009 at 12:13 pm
I don’t think Mike Grost will object to my printing a small segment of his review of Lynch’s Against the Odds. For more, follow the link in one of David Vineyard’s comments above.
“It is hard to place Lynch in any mystery story tradition, perhaps because her book is not actually a mystery. Its focus on the detectives as protagonists and point of view characters remind one a little bit of Gaboriau and the Casebook writers. However, the Casebook detectives are usually on a well defined case, often with a real mystery, whereas Lynch’s detectives are just wandering around and involved with amorphous doings at the fair.”
April 17th, 2009 at 12:47 pm
Steve,
Thanks for the quote!
I found “Against the Odds” to be terribly disappointing. The writing is colorless, dull and blows a chance to explore its fascinating subjects: the Chicago World’s Fair and the Secret Service. And there is no mystery.
I have no biographical information on Lynch at all. My web site repeats the alleged fact that she was really EMVD. But if this turns out to be a fallacy, will be eager to correct it!
The one-time popularity of Leslie Ford and Mignon G. Eberhardt is probably linked to the fact that in the Golden Age, they regularly appeared in the Saturday Evening Post and other slicks. These slicks were virtually a religion with American readers of the era. At one time, one out of every ten Americans read the Post! Writers who appeared there were granted huge prestige by US readers.
April 17th, 2009 at 9:43 pm
I agree that the popularity of the Post and some other slicks helped make their creations iconic, but at least in Eberhart’s case I would argue she delivered exactly what her readers wanted, a mix of mystery, suspense, and romance in the right measurements.
I’ve read a handful of her books over the years, and found House on the Roof andin The Passenger to Lisbon both entertaining for what they were intended to be. In the case of Leslie Ford I would be more willing to blame the Post for any lingering popularity.
Robert Chambers, the ‘shopgirl’s Sheherezade’, would be all but forgotten today if he hadn’t written the influential horror story “The King in Yellow” and created Mr. Keen Tracer of Lost Persons, and bestselling writers like Robert Hichens, Winston Churchill (the American novelist, not the British Prime Minister), E.M. Hull (The Sheik), Fanny Hurst, Faith Baldwin, Elinor Glyn, and others are forgotten, while writers such as William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim, and Sydney Horler are better remembered (not entirely fairly save in Horler’s case) for their flaws than for their successes.
Even good writers like Geoffrey Homes (Daniel Mainwaring), Jonathan Latimer, Stuart Palmer, Craig Rice, Richard Reeves, Kurt Steel, Raoul Whitfield, and Fred Nebel are in danger of being forgotten unjustly. It’s just the sad nature of the publishing world, but it’s a shame some good writers get lost in the shuffle.
And speaking of good writers, is there anyone other than me out there who thinks Kurt Steel’s hardboiled novels about private detective Hank Heyer are long overdue recognition? They were entertaining well written books more in the style of Hammett, Latimer, Homes, and Halliday than Chandler, and Heyer a likable hero. At least two of them were filmed with lean lanky Lynne Overman cast as stocky Hank Heyer. A good well written series that deseves to be better known.
April 18th, 2009 at 4:10 am
I admire Leslie Ford and Mignon G. Eberhart too. Was just trying to get at the mechanism that created their popularity, by mentioning the Post.
I’ve long struggled to revive interest in many of the mystery writers David mentions. My web site has articles on Fergus Hume, Lee Thayer, Leslie Ford, Mignon G. Eberhart, Robert Chambers, William Le Queux, E. Phillips Oppenheim, Stuart Palmer, Craig Rice, Richard Reeves, Raoul Whitfield, and Frederick Nebel. Hope to expand many of these articles with more coverage, if time permits. Mystery fiction is rich in highly imaginative writers. All of these created works that would expand readers’ imaginations.
May 12th, 2010 at 4:56 am
Hi
I have recently read ‘The Diaries of Ethel Turner’. She wrote ‘Seven Little Australians’ among numerous other titles. In her diary entry for 5 February 1892 she writes ‘Neglected everything to read a highly sensational book, ‘A Slender Clue’ to the bitter end. It was very exciting and really well written’. I am assuming it is the book by Van Deventer of which she speaks. Just thought this may be of interest as it is from the perspective of a well respected contemporary.
May 12th, 2010 at 12:01 pm
Thanks, Robyn. Very interesting indeed!
— Steve
July 18th, 2010 at 1:01 pm
Emma Murdock (not Murdoch) was the daughter of Charles and Emily (Howland) Murdock, residents of Oswego, Kendall Co., IL. Emma married Dr. A. E. Van Deventer July 12, 1887 in Oswego.
July 18th, 2010 at 2:09 pm
Thanks, Stephenie. I’ll make sure John Herrington and a few others are given the information.
— Steve
January 25th, 2011 at 12:47 pm
I have a copy of “Shadowed by Three” It’s a 1883 reprint by Donelley in Chicago. I’m trying to find a summary of the story to see if I want to read it.
April 9th, 2012 at 6:39 pm
I have now read “Shadowed by Three” and “The Diamond Coterie” by Lawrence Lynch. I’m sure they aren’t up there with the greatest of detective novels, but I did thoroughly enjoy reading them and was simply fascinated by the tangled webs the author was weaving–and then how she went about untangling them. It was also fun reading them in book form with a multitude of illustrations.
December 30th, 2014 at 6:12 pm
Emma Murdoch Van Deventer was a real woman who lived her entire life in Oswego IL. She has a memorial on Find A Grave.com, Memorial# 107550758, She died in 1914 and is buried in Riverside Cemetery, Montgomery IL.
January 7th, 2016 at 5:19 pm
I have been browsing the online Aurora (IL) Daily Express newspapers from 1885 which talk about Lawrence Lynch as a local author, so the person buried in Riverside Cemetery in Montgomery is probably our culprit.
February 22nd, 2019 at 11:36 am
Recent article here on Emily “Emma” Medora Murdock Lynch Van Deventer:
https://www.morrisherald-news.com/2019/01/03/reflections-mystery-shrouds-story-of-pioneering-oswego-novelist/ab43t8t/
February 22nd, 2019 at 11:37 am
And another:
https://historyonthefox.wordpress.com/2018/06/22/an-oswego-mystery-whatever-happened-to-lawrence-l-lynch/
January 3rd, 2021 at 4:20 pm
http://www.speedymystery.com/obscure-detective-story-authors.html
I have written extensively on Lynch/Van Deventer in the Obscure Authors page on my speedymystery.com site….scroll to the bottom of that page to read about her and her detective character Madeline Payne.