While Allen Hubin has closed the book, so to speak, at the year 2000 for his encyclopedic bibliography of the mystery field, now in its Fourth Edition, Crime Fiction IV: A Comprehensive Bibliography, 1749-2000, additions and corrections continue to be made. You can follow the progress of this Addenda by checking in every so often at the website I?m maintaining for it at www.crimefictioniv.com. At the present time there are 10 installments of the Addenda, and material is quickly accumulating for Part #11.

   These additions and corrections can come from almost any source. As new reference works become available, they?re scoured to see if they have additional information that’s relevant. New websites pop up every day, and when mystery-related, their information must be checked out.

   But sometimes it?s a matter of someone browsing through the present edition, looking at a particular author’s entry, finding it interesting for one reason or another, and deciding to check him or her out.

   Here?s the entry for a relatively obscure author in the current CFIV, with the books listed chronologically. I haven’t double-checked to be sure, but I?m relatively confident that this is the way it has looked for at least several editions. You be the detective.

      BARRY, IRIS (1895-1969)

* -The Last Enemy (n.) Bobbs 1929
* Here Is Thy Victory (n.) Mathews 1930; See: The Last Enemy (Bobbs 1929).
* The Mandura Mystery (n.) Hale 1966
* The House of Deadly Night (n.) Belmont 1970 [Oregon]
* Seven Guests of Fear (n.) Hale 1970
* The Unprotected (n.) Berkley 1973
* The Darkness at Mantia (n.) Berkley 1974 [Washington (state)]

Last Enemy

   Once your attention is focused on this list of Ms. Barry’s books, you should see what John Herrington saw. Sometimes a mystery writer will have a second career, so to speak, later in life, but to have four of the five books in this second spurt of books not appear until after your death, well, at least it warrants some investigation.

   I’ll let Al continue the story. Here’s what happened after John asked him about this apparent anomaly in the career of Iris Barry:

    “I did some digging and found that the University of Oregon Library had some of her papers. I contacted the Library and they provided a list of titles for which they had manuscripts (a few apparently never published), which did not include that early (1929) book. So I suspected that there were two Iris Barry’s at work, and when I found that one (with different dates from CFIV) had died in Oregon, it looked like I might have a hit. So I e-mailed the library near her reported death and for $15 they were willing to hunt for an obituary and send me a photocopy. Thus were my suspicions confirmed, with the results shown in [Part 10 of the Addenda]. (I was confident enough that I put the information in #10 even before the obit came). By the way, as I recall, the first Iris Barry also wrote some other books (about film people).”

   Here’s how the revised entries for the two authors now look. Note that in tracking down the details, one additional book now also appears in the second Iris Barry?s listing.

      BARRY, IRIS. 1895-1969. Ref: CA. (Corrected entry.)

Here Is Thy Victory; see The Last Enemy
-The Last Enemy. Bobbs, 1929. British title: Here Is Thy Victory. Mathews, 1930

      BARRY, IRIS (THORPE). 1903-1983. (Titles moved here from above author entry.)

The Darkness at Mantia. Berkley, 1974 [Washington]
The House of Deadly Night. Belmont, 1970 [Oregon]
The Mandura Mystery. Hale, 1966
Nurse Dawn’s Discovery. Monarch, 1964
Seven Guests of Fear. Hale, 1970
The Unprotected. Berkley, 1973; Remploy, 1974

Nurse

   Here’s a description of The Last Enemy, written by Iris Barry #1. You can see why it’s indicated as having only marginal crime content. My impression is that it’s almost science-fictional in nature:

    “Mr. Griffiths, the old registrar of Hallam, England notices that no natural deaths are being reported in his county. Similar reports drift in from other counties as it becomes certain that people are no longer dying naturally anywhere in the whole South of England. Murder and suicide are on the increase as elderly people begin to feel uncomfortable for without deaths where are property inheritances? Births are still occuring normally and visions of food shortages will be the result where before they had always depended upon death to keep life in balance.”

   One the books about film people that Al mentions that Iris Barry #1 wrote is:

   D.W. Griffith: American Film Master. The Museum of Modern Art, New York, 1940. Pictorial Paper-covered Boards. No. 1 in the Museum of Modern Art Film Library Series, in an edition of 8000 copies.

   On the other hand, the books of Iris Barry #2 were written as novels of “romantic suspense” if not as gothic romances, the heyday for which was exactly the period in which they appeared. Two of them are in my Gothics collection, in fact, catalogued online at https://mysteryfile.com/Gothics.html.