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:

E. X. Ferrars is the obvious one; she deliberately went for initials which sounded masculine. Then there’re E. C. R. Lorac, G. M. Mitchell (as the American publishers called the author of Speedy Death), and P. D. James.

Several women authors also used male pseudonyms: Maxwell March (Margery Allingham), Anthony Gilbert (Lucy Malleson), Malcolm Torrie and Stephen Hockaby (Mitchell) and Gordon Daviot (Josephine Tey / Elizabeth Mackintosh). On the other hand, H. R. F. Keating used the ambiguous (and Christie-inspired?) pseudonym of Evelyn Hervey for his historical detective stories about a Victorian governess.

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.

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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:

Don’t forget Craig Rice, who actually used part of her real name ((Georgiana Ann Randolph Craig)), but then also used Michael Venning as well.

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

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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.”