 Anna Katharine Green, Library of Congress by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix Edgar Alan Poe is credited with creating the modern detective mystery in 1841 when his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” was published in Graham’s Magazine. It wasn’t long before American women began penning mysteries as well. According to a 2011 survey published by the mystery writer organization Sisters in Crime, women purchase 68 percent of mystery novels. Plus, women write many of these novels and have been doing so since Victorian times. Women Detective Collection The University of North Carolina at Greensboro is home to the Robbie Emily Dunn Collection of American Detective Fiction, which encompasses 200 writers, 85 percent of whom were women. It contains a copy of the 1867 novel The Dead Letter by Seeley Regester, a pseudonym for Metta Victoria Fuller Victor. Perhaps the most amazing aspect of this publication was that Victor raised nine children yet still found time to write. Unfortunately, UNCG describes The Dead Letter as deadly boring. But a woman became the most famous American mystery writer of her age 11 years later. In 1878, Anna Katharine Green wrote a detective story so popular, that it became “the first bona fide American bestseller,” according to Mystery Scene magazine, which refers to Green as the “mother” of American mystery. Green was the daughter of an attorney and drew on what she learned from her father in writing The Leavenworth Case: A Lawyer’s Story. UNC notes that the novel contained the first literary use of ballistics testimony. Similar to the fictional mystery writer, J.B. Fletcher, of the "Murder, She Wrote" television series, UNCG says, Green “was often asked to help solve real crimes.” For many years, Mystery Scene notes, Yale University law classes used The Leavenworth Case to demonstrate “the perils of trusting circumstantial evidence.” Nowadays, Green is mostly unknown; but The Leavenworth Case can be found online at the Gutenberg Project for readers who want to delve into the mysteries of the detective genre’s development. Revealing a short list of favorites This article is what you call a “hub” story, the spokes of which are the mini reviews of mysteries by some of my favorite women writers. They are posted in alphabetical order by author on the Adult Mix page, but many may be of interest to teen readers. All of these authors are well worth acquaintance if you enjoy strong plotting, in-depth characterization and settings so real that you feel you are there. These are writers who will take you away from wherever, whatever and whoever is bothering you. Some are relatively new to my nightstand while others are long-time, recurrent visitors. I crossed paths with all, by serendipity, at the public library. • Margaret Coel — The Spider's Web • Irene Fleming — The Edge of Ruin • Shamini Flint — A Most Peculiar Maylaysian Mystery • Tana French — Faithful Place • Sue Grafton — V Is for Vengeance • Elly Griffiths — The Crossing Places • Lene Kaaberbol and Agnette Friis — The Boy in the Suitcase • Rett MacPherson — The Blood Ballad • Sara Paretsky — Breakdown  Photo from Scribner by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix The Glass Castle: A Memoir, by Jeannette Walls, Scribner, 2005, ISBN0-7432-4753-1 Available at Powell's Books Half Broke Horses: A True Life Novel, by Jeannette Walls, Scribner, 2009, ISBN 978-1-4165-8628-9 Available at Powell's Books Jeanette Walls is the kind of author who makes it difficult to go to sleep at night. It’s hard to turn off the light and set aside the stories about her hardscrabble, far-from-everyday family. First came The Glass Castle in 2005, a memoir about her impoverished childhood that demonstrates how parents can be dangerously negligent yet brilliantly nurturing at the same time. Nomadic family life Extreme resilience and inventiveness helped Walls and her siblings survive their college-educated parents’ nomadic lifestyle and erratic attempts to earn a living. Hunger, lack of indoor heating and running water, dirty clothing and homelessness were regular problems. Walls has said it took her 20 years to work up the courage to share the story of her childhood, because she feared that friends and journalism colleagues would ostracize the girl who grew up with a garbage pit in her Appalachian backyard. But The Glass Castle has been a runaway success with staying power on many bestseller lists, including a steady spot on USA Today’s Top-150 list since October 2009. Readers told Walls that they were particularly fascinated and puzzled by her mother, Rose Mary Walls, who so wanted to be an artist that she wouldn’t get out of bed in the morning to go to work even if there was no food in the house. Half Broke Horses So Walls dug deeper into family memories, trying to write a book about her unconventional mother, with whom she has a loving, supportive relationship despite childhood difficulties. She struggled. So Rose Mary suggested writing instead about her mother, the raucous, resourceful westerner, Lily Casey Smith. A rip-snorting ride of a memoir was born in 2009 and titled Half Broke Horses, A True Life Novel. The book isn't classified as non-fiction, because Walls told Lily’s story in first person and had to draw most of the information from family stories instead of interviews with her grandmother. Lily died when the author was 8 years old. But in a Barnes and Noble interview, Walls says, “Lily was one of those people who, once you met her, she was seared on your brain…. Everything about Lily was loud: her voice, her clothes, her piano playing. She cussed like a sailor, danced so as to shake the rafters, and was always pulling out her gun or pulling out her false teeth.” Southwestern adventures Half Broke Horses begins with Lily’s youthful adventures in the Southwest, ranging from rescuing siblings during a flash flood to journeying through the desert alone on horseback for a month on the way to her first teaching job. It ends as she and her rancher husband ride out the Great Depression through creativity, severe frugality and a pre-dawn-to-dark schedule of hard work. Along the way, Lily and Big Jim raise two rambunctious children who perfectly fit the old cowboy lyric of “Don’t fence me in.” By chance, I read Half Broke Horses before venturing into The Glass Castle. So Grandma Lily’s story informed my outlook on Walls’ scary yet exhilarating childhood. It also cast light on why, unlike Lily, Rose Mary — whose learning disabilities are apparent in Half Broke Horses — dealt poorly with the boundaries of work life as a teacher. It was a profession she was forced into by her pragmatic mother. But Rosemary was a Bohemian from the get-go and nothing got in her way, especially once she met Rex Walls, an air force pilot, whose drinking and daring behavior covered up the secrets of his crippling, Appalachian childhood. Surviving the Skedaddle Extreme flexibility was necessary for the Walls family to survive what the bright but alcoholic Rex referred to as the “skedaddle” — abandoning one tiny town for another whenever bills or other problems piled up. Despite deprivation, the Walls children experienced an abundance of rich experiences along the way. When he was sober, Rex tutored them in geology, physics and inventiveness. Rose Mary taught them to view all difficulties as an “incredibly fun adventure.” She fed their imagination with piles of books from the public library. Sometimes the whole family would lounge around reading. The Walls children inherited their parents’ ability to dream that they might someday earn a living doing something they enjoyed. Except for the youngest, most fragile one, they also inherited the steel spine and practicality of Grandma Lily, memories of whom no doubt inspired them as teenagers when they ran like the dickens away from the poverty and mean circumstances of their childhood.  The railroad brought change to Appleton City. Photo by Eric Biffle by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix Remember the classic children’s picture book The Little Engine that Could, which came to represent the American ideals of optimism and persistence? In the book, a railroad train needs to get over a mountain, but all the big locomotives are too busy to help. So a little engine takes on the job and succeeds by tugging, chugging, and chanting “I think I can, I think I can.” A can-do library and community As current economic woes threaten the existence of free public libraries nationwide, an “I think I can” attitude is more necessary than ever to keep doors and collections open. This is a story about a little library that has been saying “I think I can” since it first opened in 1871. Surrounded by corn fields and with a tiny population of about 1,300 residents, Appleton City—about an hour’s drive northwest of Springfield and originally known as Arlington—would seem to be an unlikely place to have maintained a public library for so long. But Appleton City’s library is the fourth oldest in the state. In the late 1860s, things were looking up for the tiny community of Arlington, because the Tebo and Neosho Railroad was coming through and building a depot. Saying 'yes' to change Also, East Coast publisher W.H. Appleton, perhaps hoping to spread the fame and sales of D. Appleton & Company, promised the community $300 to build a library and $500 in books if it would change its name to Appleton City. The town said yes. So the two-room, white pine W.H. Appleton Library was born in 1871.                   It’s unclear exactly which books the publisher donated, but perhaps the early residents of Appleton City had the opportunity to read first editions of Charles Darwin’s Voyage of the Beagle and Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, both published by D. Appleton & Company. In a 1970 publication celebrating the town’s centennial, local historian May Florence Robinson Flaherty wrote about the ups and downs of the library’s first 100 years. Friends of the library Appleton City’s experience probably parallels that of many American communities that struggled to make ends meet while trying to blossom culturally from the 1800s into the twentieth century. It is a good example of the necessity of stable funding and support by “friends of the library” organizations. To keep a library going, you have to keep it growing. Unfortunately, Flaherty wrote, Appleton City didn’t continue adding books to its collection, so residents were tired of the library by the mid-1920s. For about two years, the library closed in lieu of flashier attractions. Flaherty noted that Appleton City’s annual fair was growing and the city “coveted the space where the library stood” for its Ferris wheel and merry-go-round. So in 1923, the city sold the building for $20 to a man who needed a house and agreed to move it. Raising a ruckus for reading Fortunately, Flaherty wrote, Mrs. Cora Chapin demonstrated the power of one by raising a ruckus. Remembering how much the library had meant to her in childhood and fearing it was gone forever, Chapin “began agitating for an organization” to create a replacement. This was the birth of the Appleton City Library Association, which went on to organize fundraisers, beginning with a town musical. Flaherty wrote that “almost all the young people in town took part; their mothers made costumes, the Boy Scouts made a stage and enclosed it and the seating area with greens; the men of the town hauled and set up seats. More than $130 was cleared at 25 cents admission.” The library continued to be supported by “entertainments, bridge parties, rummage sales” and door-to-door fundraising, Flaherty said, until the city voted in 1945 to fund it through taxes. Surviving by making do Appleton City's library has never had a new facility since its first building. Over the years, it was housed in city hall and then in a room over the fire department. For more than 40 years now, its home has been a simple storefront in an 1885 building on the town’s main street. While it contains plenty of current fiction, the library retains a charming 1950s atmosphere enhanced by shelves of old Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys mysteries as well as a well-worn set of Little House on the Prairie novels. (An interesting aside is that the last home in which Laura Ingalls Wilder lived is just down the road in the town of Mansfield.) The city now owns the original library again, but hasn’t yet decided how to use it. It stands in a small park next to the renovated railroad depot, which is used as a meeting facility. Heart of the community Although charming, Appleton City needs lots of main street restoration and development to attract more residents and businesses. In particular, there is no organized gathering place for teens, and there is only one restaurant. Consequently, the current library is the heart of the community. Dorothy Pierce, treasurer of the Appleton City Library Association, said, “The library’s just kind of important to this town. We don’t have too much going for us, but lots of people read.” The online, worldwide directory of library catalogs called Lib-Web-Cats estimates there are 25,000 books in the library’s collection and an annual circulation of about 7,600 volumes. That equals about six books a year per resident, which is admirable. Similar to a growing number of public libraries, Appleton City's library has chosen to charge modest user fees rather than decrease its already limited hours of service even more. For example, this summer, children paid $15 each to participate in the library’s summer reading program. Re-imagining library and community Pierce recently explained that the library was shut down for two and one-half worrisome weeks last February to complete a structural safety inspection. Luckily, she noted, it ended well, but not before the entire fourth grade class of the local elementary wrote a letter to the Appleton City Journal to support keeping the library open. “We need our library so we can escape into a world of books,” the students wrote. “The library helps everyone build an imagination. People depend on the library for research, history, and computers.” As if echoing the 1920s founders of the library’s booster association, the students showed a “We think we can” attitude by suggesting fundraisers to acquire a larger facility. Meanwhile, Appleton City’s revitalization committee continues to pursue its "vision project" for improving the city. It is, in part, following through on recommendations made by a group of Drury University architecture students that worked on a "Rediscover Appleton City" planning project with the community last fall. Pierce said the community recently gained a $15,000 federal grant for signage and is also planning a barbecue fundraiser. The photo gallery of Appleton City scenes near the beginning of this article is presented courtesy of the student team from Drury's Hammons School of Architecture in Springfield. If it hadn’t been for Drury, I would have never discovered the little library that could and that continues to do what libraries should do—improve people's lives. I think Appleton City and its library can revitalize; I think they can.  Photo courtesy of Random House by Alicia Rudnicki, Library Mix Unafraid of the Dark, by Rosemary L. Bray, Anchor Books, 1999, ISBN 0-385-49475-0 Available at Powell's Books Sometimes you stumble over something important at the library, because you weren't looking for it to begin with. That is what happened when I read Unafraid of the Dark, A Memoir by Rosemary L. Bray, a former editor of the New York Times Book Review. Bray's story illustrates the importance of public libraries in positively shaping lives and providing sanctuary for those who need respite from difficulties. Extreme poverty and a violent, alcoholic father deviled Bray's childhood from the mid-1950s through the early 1970s. Home was usually a place of fear for her, especially at night, when she would lie in the dark listening to her father berate and beat her mother. Escaping home at the library However, there were people and places that saved Bray. These included a clever, dedicated mother and the public library. The author notes that she and her siblings would hurry up and work hard to complete household chores in order to escape home for a bit. We all knew that when we finished doing what we had to do, we could cajole my mother into taking us to the library, with a trip to the playground afterward. The library was the part I was most interested in. Once the house was clean, the next step in their library day ritual was for Bray's mother to make sure that all her children were clean and dressed in "decent clothes" for their walk through Hyde Park to Chicago's T.B. Blackstone Library. But before they stepped out the door, Bray writes, Mama would "go to the second drawer of the dresser that sat in our kitchen....In the drawer was the old black felt pocketbook....a repository for the really important records of our household." These included the family's library cards. Libraries rescue us It was the library that helped Bray to explore the rich worlds of fairytales, mythology, biology, and history. A lonely egghead of a child, she found her friends in fiction rather than on the playground. This sad yet inspiring story about endurance and resilience is also a story about how libraries can help rescue us. Reprinted from the Older Archives of Library Mix | AuthorAlicia Rudnicki is a Colorado writer, editor, teacher, and avid reader. She has loved libraries deeply since she first stepped into one in early childhood. ArchivesFebruary 2012 CategoriesAll |
RSS Feed