In my recent post on C. B. Dignam, I pointed out that it was not even known whether Dignam was male or female. Going on from there, I asked for a list of female mystery writers who hid their gender by using initials in their byline or by deliberately choosing a “male-sounding” pen name.

Commenting on that post, Bill Crider suggested Paul Kruger as a relatively recent example. On the Golden Age of Detection yahoo group, Nick Fuller posted the following:

Thanks, Nick. I think you’ve come up with all that I’ve thought of myself, along with a couple more, although I cannot find anything to suggest that Speedy Death was ever published as by G. M. Mitchell. Can you confirm this?

Strangely enough, you failed to mention an author you discussed in an earlier posting on another subject — Guy Cullingford, pseudonym of Constance Lindsay Dowdy, according to one website.

This comes as a surprise to me. I did not know that Cullingford was female until now, or if I did, I’d forgotten it. In Crime Fiction IV, Al Hubin says that Cullingford was a pen name of C. Lindsay Taylor, which upon further investigation is a shortened version of (Alice) C(onstance) LINDSAY TAYLOR (1907-2000). Dowdy must have been her married name?

     [UPDATE 01/03/07. Al Hubin did some investigatory work and discovered that Dowdy was her maiden name. See comment 3 below.]

In any case, she wrote one book as by C. Lindsay Taylor (Murder with Relish, Skeffington, 1948) and ten as by Cullingford between 1952 and 1991. Only five of them seem to have been published in the US.

The question I posed was of female mystery authors writing as men. I confess that vice-versa hadn’t occurred to me. There must be others besides Keating as Hervey, but other than cases involving male authors who wrote gothic romances under female names, as many did in the 1960s and 70s, this is a question I’ll have to think about some more.

—

The next posting on the same Yahoo group was from Jeffrey Marks, who confirmed exactly what I suspected. There’s a totally obvious candidate for inclusion that hadn’t even occurred to me:

And assuredly there are more, but have we named all of the obvious ones so far? Probably not.

—

Getting back to C. B. Dignam briefly, who unknowingly brought this whole matter on, Google is *fast*. The day after my original post, I thought to double-check to see if there was anything on-line about him or her, and the only relevant blog or website that came up was … mine.

[UPDATE] 03-29-10. An email note from Sheila Mitchell, who was married to H. R. F. Keating, is both relevant and interesting. She says:

“This related to pseudonyms that women have used but you also instance that Harry wrote his Miss Unwin Victorian books under the ambiguous pseudonym of Evelyn Hervey and suggested that this may have some connection with Agatha Christie. Should you be interested it has no connection at all with Christie. He chose Hervey because that was a family name and Evelyn as you rightly say because of its ambiguity. Also interesting that publishers refuse to allow established authors their ambiguity and almost always reveal that of course this is so-and-so writing under the pseudonym X.”

John Bishop, a noted playwright and screenwriter, died December 20 at the age of 77. His entry in Crime Fiction IV, by Allen J. Hubin, is as follows:

“The Musical Comedy Murders of 1940,” a sendup of vintage murder-mystery comedies which Mr. Bishop both wrote and directed, appeared on Broadway in 1987.

Besides Drop Zone, an action-thriller which starred Wesley Snipes, Mr. Bishop also wrote the screenplay for The Package, a 1989 crime-drama with Gene Hackman. He later did rewrites on several other films, including Sliver, Beverly Hills Cop III, and Clear and Present Danger.

What follows arose from an inquiry by Paul Di Filippo on the FictionMags Yahoo group, based on a mystery novel found in a recent catalog from Peter Stern —

— Another Lesser-Known Writer in the crime field, one C. B. Dignam, commands top-dollar ($300) for his/her 1926 novel BLACK VELVET.

I am unable to google anything on Dignam. Anyone know info about this forgotten writer?

● Another member of the group, Denny Lien, a librarian at the University of Minnesota came up with the following information —

— Hubin lists only this and one other detective novel by the author, does not expand the pseudonyms or give dates etc., so presumably unknown and perhaps pseudonymous..

No holdings for the book in WorldCat. COPAC shows it at the British Library and the National Library of Scotland:

and gives the same holdings for his/her only other novel:

I assume the “Sundial Mystery Library” was likely a lending library specialist or some such, resulting in few surviving copies.

● I sent both query and response to Al Hubin, who had this to add —

— I once owned copies of both Dignam’s books, but have no further information. According to freebmd.org, Dignam was a fairly common British surname, so it could be an author’s real name. But that list has no one with the initials C. B., though it’s possible that one of the listed persons with a first name beginning with C had a middle name which wasn’t given (or that one of a few entries without first/middle names and just given as “male” or “female” could be our author). I’ll inquire of others in case they know anything about C. B.

● But at the moment, this is where the matter stands. From their titles, both books sound like “thrillers” to me. I cannot think of very many female mystery writers who felt the need to disguise their sex by using initials or a “male-sounding” pseudonym, so my feeling is that C. B. Dignam was male.

And yet, Mary Violet Heberden, to point out a single counterexample (and all I need is one), and for whatever reason, felt the need to write her more than thirty spy/private eye novels in the 1940s and 50s as either M. V. Heberden or Charles L. Leonard. (The link will lead you to my review of Sinister Shelter, which Heberden wrote under the latter name, a private eye novel which has Paul Kilgerrin doing some post-war work in South America for the US government.)

In any case, here is another question: How many other female mystery writers can you think of who have disguised themselves in print as male? Leave a comment, if you would, or email me directly.

And FYI: There are currently three copies of BLACK VELVET for sale on the Internet, ranging in price from $14.00 to $53.50, including postage.