The Book, Cat, & Cat Book Lovers Almanac

of historical trivia regarding books, cats, and other animals. Actually this blog has evolved so that it is described better as a blog about cats in history and culture. And we take as a theme the advice of Aldous Huxley: If you want to be a writer, get some cats. Don't forget to see the archived articles linked at the bottom of the page.

December 1, 2014

December 1, 1893

The detective novel, Murder a la Richelieu (1938) was written by Anita Blackmon, (December 1, 1893 to February 23, 1943). It begins:

“Had I suspected the orgy of bloodshed upon which we were about to embark, I should then and there, in spite of my bulk and an arthritic knee, have taken shrieking to my heels.”

We thus learn the author has a sense of humor, for not only is the heroine, Adelaide Adams, a charming variation on women detectives, but there was by the 1930s a phrase for a certain kind of detective fiction, wherein the narrator rambles a bit, and it is the "Had I But Known", detective genre. In the words of Ogden Nash (1940):

"Don't Guess, Let Me Tell You" 

(Personally I don't care whether a detective story writer was educated in night school or day school
So long as they don't belong to the H.I.B.K. school).


Anita Blackmon was born in Augusta, Arkansas and after a comfortable girlhood, taught school until 1920, when she married Harry Pugh Smith. They lived in St. Louis, though her stories often were set in Arkansas, and sometimes Little Rock. She used her maiden name to publish many short stories in the 1920s and novels too, that seem to be forgotten today. But noteworthy, if also forgotten, are her detective novels featuring " a peppery middle-aged southern spinster named Adelaide Adams (and nicknamed “the old battle-ax”)."

....Blackmon’s follow-up [to Murder a la Richelieu]...., There Is No Return,[1939] finds Adelaide coming to the rescue of a friend, Ella Trotter, embroiled in mysterious goings-on involving spiritual possession at a backwoods Ozarks hotel, the Lebeau Inn .

And we learn from the same source that:

Murder a la Richelieu was published as well in England (as The Hotel Richelieu Murders), France (as On assassine au Richelieu) and Germany (as Adelaide lasst nicht locker), while There Is No Return was published in England also (under the rather more lurid title The Riddle of the Dead Cats).

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