The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells Cover Reveal
The Vanishing of Carolyn Wells is the first biography of one of the 'lost ladies' of detective fiction who wrote more than eighty mysteries and hundreds of other works between the 1890s and the 1940s. It is written by former Fine Books & Collections editor Rebecca Rego Barry who has now revealed its front cover.
Carolyn Wells (1862–1942) was a leading exponent of country house and locked-room myster well before Agatha Christie's rise to fame, and was hugely popular in the 1920s. She also wrote popular children’s books and stories and poetry for magazines such as Thrilling Detective, Life, and The New Yorker. The book tells her story about how and why she has been all but erased from literary history.
It is published on February 13, 2024 with a Linktree for pre-ordering. Rebecca will be giving book talks and events in and around NYC and Boston in spring 2024.
Early praise has come from Otto Penzler, proprietor of The Mysterious Bookshop (“a remarkably compelling narrative about this astonishingly prolific author") and Leslie S. Klinger, editor, New Annotated Sherlock Holmes and series editor of the Library of Congress Crime Classics (“Wells’s large body of work deserves reappraisal. Thank you for bringing her back into the spotlight”).
