Vincent Starrett

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Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett (born October 26, 1886 in Toronto / Ontario , † January 5, 1974 in Chicago / Illinois ) was a Canadian - American journalist , essayist , writer and bibliophile .

Life

Vincent Starrett was the eldest of four sons of Robert Polk Starrett and Margaret Deniston Starrett (nee Young) . The family left Toronto and moved to Chicago in the late 1890s . Vincent Starrett attended John Marshall High School there , left it two months before graduation and began his journalistic work as a junior reporter at Chicago Inter Ocean in 1906 . Two years later, Starrett joined the Chicago Daily News as a crime reporter , for which he later also worked as a columnist. In 1914 he went to the Washington office as a political correspondent. The local editorial staff sent him to Mexico as a war correspondent to report on Pancho Villas' fight against the dictatorship of Porfirio Díaz . In 1917 he left the newspaper to devote himself full-time to writing and published his first work, The Mystery of Sam Houston , that same year . By 1930 he wrote many stories for Pulp magazines and wrote book reviews for the Chicago Tribune for around 30 years, much of which appeared in his book Books Alive in 1940.

Sherlock Holmes (right) and Dr. Watson, illustration by Sidney Paget for the novel The Hound of the Baskervilles

In 1912 Starrett had the opportunity to interview Sir Arthur Conan Doyle , with whom he wanted to talk about his most important protagonist, Sherlock Holmes . From that time on, Starrett was an unqualified admirer of Doyle and Holmes. In 1920 he published his successful Sherlock Holmes pastiche The Unique Hamlet: A Hitherto Unchronicled Adventure of Mr. Sherlock Holmes . His most famous work became the imaginary biography Holmes The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes , which appeared in 1933.

In December 1934, Christopher Morely, together with Vincent Starrett and other supporters of Doyle and Holmes, founded the Baker Street Irregulars (BSI), which are still known today and which expanded with dozens of their associations, so-called Sherlockian Scion Societies . Starrett founded the third branch of the BSI in Chicago in 1943 together with Charles Collins of the Chicago Tribune , the director of the Newberry Library in Chicago Stanley Pargellis and Horace Bridges . They named their association after Doyle's third novel The Hound of the Baskervilles (Eng. The dog of the Baskervilles ) .

Vincent Starrett died penniless in 1974. It was not until his 100th birthday, on October 26, 1986, that friends donated a memorial stone for his grave in the Graceland cemetery in Chicago. German translations of his works are not available.

Awards / honors

David Lehman , author and teacher at The New School in New York , founder and editor-in-chief of the anthology series The Best American Poetry , compiled a list of the most important works that influenced the development of crime fiction, which was divided into various categories and 159 titles. Vincent Starrett can be found there with his imaginary biography The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in the Resource Books category .

In Ellery Queen's “Queen's Quorum” of the 106 most important collections of short stories in the crime genre, Starrett immortalized himself for 1920 with his story The Unique Hamlet: A Hitherto Unchronicled Adventure of Mr. Sherlock Holmes .

The well-known reviewer, English professor and two-time winner of the Edgar Allan Poe Awards - Category Best Literary Criticism of the Mystery Writers of America (MWA) James Sandoe , published 217 of the most important works of the crime genre between 1841 in his "Honor Roll of Crime Fiction" and 1945. Starret can be found there three times: in 1928 as editor for the anthology Fourteen Great Detective Stories , in 1936 for his novel Midnight and Percy Jones and also as editor for the anthology World's Great Spy Stories in 1944.

Works

Novels

  • 1928 Seaports in the Moon
  • 1929 Murder on "B" deck
  • 1931 Dead Man Inside
  • 1932 The End of Mr. Garment
  • 1934 Recipe for Murder
  • 1935 The Great Hotel Murder
  • 1936 Midnight and Percy Jones
  • 1937 The Laughing Buddha

Novellas / short stories / essays / anthologies

  • 1918 estrays
  • 1919 The Escape of Alice: A Christmas Fantasy
  • 1920 The Unique Hamlet: A Hitherto Unchronicled Adventure of Mr. Sherlock Holmes
  • 1920 Footsteps of Fear . In: Black Mask , April 1920
  • 1922 Ebony Flame
  • 1923 Buried Caesars. Essays in Literary Appreciation
  • 1924 Coffins For Two
  • 1927 The Other Woman . In: Real Detective Tales & Mystery Stories , April / May 1927
  • 1927 The Eleventh Juror . In: Real Detective Tales & Mystery Stories , August 1927
  • 1928 Fourteen Great Detective Stories
  • 1930 The Blue Door: Murder, Mystery, Detection
  • 1930 All about Mother Goose
  • 1932 Enter Mr. Sherlock Holmes . In: The Atlantic monthly , July 1932
  • 1935 Snow for Christmas
  • 1935 The Great Hotel Murder
  • 1938 Persons from Porlock and Other Interruptions
  • 1943 Murder at the Opera . In: Ellery Queen (Ed.): The Female of the Species; the Great Women Detectives and Criminals
  • 1943 Autolycus in Limbo
  • 1944 The Adventures of the Acephalous Agronomist
  • 1944 The Casebook of Jimmie Lavender
  • 1944 The Dog That Spoke French
  • 1945 World's Great Spy Stories
  • 1947 Books and Bipeds
  • 1949 Eighteen Steps . In: Horror and Honicide . Checkerbooks 5, 1949
  • 1965 The Tattooed Man . In: Vincent Starrett (Ed.): The Quick and the Dad

Biographies / Bibliographies

  • 1917 The Mystery of Sam Houston
  • 1918 Arthur Make: A Novelist of Ecstasy and Sin
  • 1919 In Praise of Stevenson
  • 1920 Ambrose Bierce
  • 1921 The Mystery Stories of JS Fletcher
  • 1923 Stephen Crane
  • 1924 The Inn of Aberhuern: A Stevensonian Research
  • 1927 One Who Knew Poe
  • 1928 The Great God Mencken
  • 1933 The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

Others

  • 1940 221B: Studies in Sherlock Holmes
  • 1940 Books Alive
  • 1942 Bookman's Holiday
  • 195? The Great All-Star Animal League Ball Game

Movie

  • 1927 Wanted: A Coward , directed by Roy Clements; Script and story: Vincent Starrett
  • 1935 The Great Hotel Murder , based on the novel Recipe for Murder . Director: Eugene Forde (German Murder in the Grand Hotel)

Web links

Notes / evidence

  1. ↑ The Chicago Daily News in the Encyclopædia Britannica (accessed February 10, 2012)
  2. ↑ cf. gadetection (accessed February 10, 2012)
  3. ↑ History of the BSI (English, accessed on February 10, 2012)
  4. ↑ Official website
  5. ↑ cf. David Lehman: The Perfect Murder: A Study in Detection . The Free Press, New York 1989
  6. ↑ cf. Ellery Queen: Queen's quorum: a history of the detective-crime short story as revealed by the 106 most important books published in this field since 1845 . Little, Brown & Co., Boston 1951
  7. ↑ published in: Howard Haycraft (Ed.): The Art of the mystery story: a collection of critical essays . Carroll & Graf Publishers, New York 1992
  8. ↑ 1946 also as Murder in Beijing
  9. ↑ imaginary biography about Sherlock Holmes
  10. ↑ Starrett's 25-year columns in the Chicago Tribune
  11. ^ Children's book, illustrated by Kurt Wiese
  12. ↑ cf. IMDb
  13. ↑ cf. IMDb
personal data
SURNAME Starrett, Vincent
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Starrett, Charles Vincent Emerson (full name)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Canadian-American journalist, essayist, writer, and bibliophile
DATE OF BIRTH October 26, 1886
PLACE OF BIRTH Toronto
DATE OF DEATH 5th January 1974
Place of death Chicago