When/if/how to stop researching a book
There are, and probably always will be, pieces missing from the puzzle
This week’s newsletter is a very welcome contribution from my friend, the editor, writer, and bibliophile Rebecca Rego Barry, until recently the editor of Fine Books & Collections magazine.
My new book, The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells: Investigations into a Forgotten Mystery Author, comes out next month. The book has already been printed, and I have sample copies on my desk. Yet I’m still researching. Having worked on the book for nearly four years, I can’t quite let it go.
Maybe all writers feel this way, but, in this case, it is also wrapped up in the book’s premise. It’s the first-ever biography of Carolyn Wells, who wrote 180+ books during her career – some bestsellers, others made into silent films – and then completely fell off the literary map. She died in 1942 and, almost immediately, the erasure began. Her books fell out of print, and her name was largely ignored as the new wave of crime novelists (Christie, Allingham, Sayers) began to dominate the market.
In part, the neglect had to do with the fact that she did not appoint a literary executor to attend to reprinting and ‘legacy-making.’ Nor was her authorial archive preserved, so telling her story involved sleuthing about. I tracked down bits and pieces from institutional libraries/archives, private collections, and digital databases, and then fit them together like a puzzle.
Of course there are, and probably always will be, pieces missing from that puzzle. A couple of months ago, I received by email some digital images of correspondence between Carolyn and President and Mrs. Herbert Hoover. I knew they had been acquainted. Carolyn had, after all, dedicated her novel, The Tapestry Room Murder (1928), to the President. But I hadn’t realized that theirs was a friendship held over years. A minor point, but one I wish I could have shared in my book.
Weeks later, a friend of my agent messaged me via Facebook to let me know about a cache of letters at a small college library in Massachusetts that I might want to check out. The letters were largely written by Carolyn to her longtime friend, Harriet. I finally visited this past week and it brought mixed emotions - joy in reading the letters, which are much more personal in nature than most of her correspondence, and sorrow in knowing that the poignant details gleaned from these pages will not enliven my narrative. At least not in the first edition. I suppose I can be hopeful for a second revised?
It may be that I’ll never stop researching Carolyn, until, at least, another book project begins to tug at my time.