Wed 14 Feb 2007
Author IRIS BARRY: You Be the Detective
Posted by Steve under Authors , Crime Fiction IV[5] Comments
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)
* 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)]
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:
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.)
-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 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
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:
One the books about film people that Al mentions that Iris Barry #1 wrote is:
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.
February 7th, 2008 at 4:51 pm
I am the author of a manuscript on the life and work of Iris Barry (1895-1969), the pioneering film critic and founder of the film department at the Museum of Modern Art. Many libraries (including the Library of Congress) conflate the works of three Iris Barrys. My subject wrote “Here is Thy Victory,” “Let’s Go to the Pictures,” “Portrait of Lady Mary,” “D.W. Giffith: American Film Master,” and other works. There is also, as you note the Iris Barry who wrote mysteries (I, too, have been to the University of Oregon Library), as well as another, I believe a Canadian, who wrote about archeology.
February 7th, 2008 at 8:09 pm
Bob:
I’m not sure I knew there was a third Iris Barry, but somehow it’s not surprising!
Best
—Steve
July 26th, 2008 at 5:16 am
Hi guys
Now I’m all confused.
I used to know Robin Barry (now deceased) the son of Iris Barry, the film critic, and Wyndham Lewis. I met Robin around 1980 and clearly remember reading in the papers the obituaries of his mother, so she must have died after 1980. Robin was born in 1918, so it is likely that his mother was the one born in 1895 and not the one born in 1903. Any thoughts?
March 16th, 2009 at 4:32 pm
One website states that Wyndham Lewis, the painter/writer, and Iris Barry, the film critic, had two children btween 1918 and 1921. She was also a curator at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC.
August 30th, 2020 at 11:43 pm
I am a fan of Iris barry The Mandura Mystery and Seven Guests of Fear. I have also read the House of Deadly Night but that is not in the same league as far complexity and writing goes. Also both of those books were published by Hale where the others were by another publisher. Another point is that in both of those books (Manduara and Guests of Fear) the protagonist is a male whether in those other books it is a female. I think those books were written by two different authors.