Vincent Starrett

• Born: October 26, 1886
• Birthplace: Toronto, Ontario, Canada
• Died: January 4, 1974
• Place of death: Chicago, Illinois

Types of Plot: Amateur sleuth; private investigator

Principal Series: Jimmie Lavender, c. 1925-1944; Walter Ghost, 1929-1932; Riley Blackwood, 1935-1936

Contribution

To mystery enthusiasts, Vincent Starrett’s main claim to fame is not his own detective fiction. Starrett is known as the “biographer” of Sherlock Holmes. He was a founding member of the Baker Street Irregulars (named for the occasional helpers of Holmes), a member of the Sherlock Holmes Society of England, and the author of the highly acclaimed The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes (1933). In this volume, the author examines at leisure, and with a healthy dose of tongue in cheek, various aspects of the life and times of the great (and, so it seems, in the end only barely fictional) English detective and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Starrett’s own contributions to the mystery genre are thin and fall squarely into the category of Doyle imitations. He even went so far as to publish a novella featuring the Holmes-Watson team, The Unique Hamlet: A Hitherto Unchronicled Adventure of Mr. Sherlock Holmes (1920). Starrett’s own greatest gift as a mystery writer was a talent for decent plots.

Biography

Vincent Starrett was born as Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett in Toronto, Canada, on October 26, 1886, the first of four sons born to Robert Starrett and Margaret (née Deniston Young) Starrett. The family moved to Chicago in search of better fortunes when Vincent was only four. Before the move, the boy had already become fascinated with books. This bibliophilism had been fostered in a bookstore managed by his maternal grandfather, John Young. Frequent visits to his native Canada kept the boy in contact with both his beloved grandfather and the books of which Starrett eventually came to be a collector.

Young Starrett attended public schools in Chicago until, at the age of seventeen, he dropped out of his final year of high school. After an aborted trip to the headwaters of the Amazon and brief experience in various menial jobs, he set out for London as a deckhand on a cattle boat. Rescued from starvation by the Salvation Army, he managed eventually to get back to Chicago and settle down to a life of journalism. His dream had been to be a serious writer; practicality suggested the steady income for working for a newspaper. Starrett worked as a cub reporter at the Chicago newspaper Inter-Ocean for a year before moving on to the Chicago Daily News. Here he became the star crime writer and made some important literary friends, such as Ben Hecht and Carl Sandburg, who were also young striving writers at the time.

In 1909, Starrett was married to Lillian Hartsig, a striking redhead with a talent for the piano and a bent for sociability. Starrett’s biographer, Peter A. Ruber, suggests that the marriage was not a very successful one because Lillian did not share Vincent’s literary and intellectual tastes. Whatever the truth is, the marriage lasted for fifteen years, until 1924.

During his years at the Chicago Daily News, Starrett covered the Mexican-American War for a year, and he began an extracurricular career writing articles about his favorite writers. In 1917, he decided that he was ready to embark on a literary career of his own and left the newspaper. While writing poetry that he had to pay to have published (in a volume uniting the works of five aspiring poets), Starrett made a scant living writing stories for various magazines, including mystery pulps. Economy soon forced him back into journalism. He did another five-year stint coediting the Chicago suburban weekly The Austinite.

In 1920, two books by Starrett were published: The Unique Hamlet: A Hitherto Unchronicled Adventure of Mr. Sherlock Holmes, a Sherlock Holmes spoof, and Ambrose Bierce. In 1924 followed a first collection of short stories, Coffins for Two, a mixture of mysteries and black-humor tales. Starrett’s first mystery novel was Murder on “B” Deck, which was published in 1929. This book was initially planned as a Jimmie Lavender mystery, but problems in the execution led to the elimination of Lavender and the introduction of Walter Ghost. The novel, written in two months, was immediately accepted for publication and was successful, both commercially and critically. This led to a second Ghost-Mollock book, Dead Man Inside (1931), which was also moderately successful. Starrett was now established as a mystery writer.

The apogee of Starrett’s career was the publication of The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes in 1933. This book brought him international fame and such notices as this one from the New York Herald-Tribune: “One seems to hear experts on either side of the Atlantic smacking their lips at each sniff at the table of contents.”

Starrett received the Mystery Writers of America’s Grand Master Award in 1958 and was elected president of that organization in 1961. He died in Chicago in 1974, at the age of eighty-seven.

Analysis

Although Vincent Starrett wrote prolifically in the mystery genre, he spent much of his life wishing that he could afford to do otherwise. He produced hundreds of stories for pulp magazines simply to support himself. His great loves were literary biography and poetry, areas in which he was not very successful. He did, however, have a real admiration for Doyle and his fictional creation Sherlock Holmes and wrote all of his successful mystery fiction in the style of Doyle, featuring Holmes and Watson imitations.

Starrett wrote highly stylized prose, prose that did not even suggest reality. His is a special-purpose prose that creates a special-purpose universe: one in which interesting mysteries can be presented and resolved in a direct—and ever so slightly ironic—way. The characters who inhabit his stories and plots are not living, breathing people; they are fictional people who wear the costumes needed to present an interesting criminal puzzle. The deaths are theater deaths—slightly amusing and unreal. The reader half expects the victims to climb out of the coffins and graves after the denouement to take a bow with the rest of the cast.

“Out There in the Dark”

Starrett is also a very efficient writer. He gets to the point (murder, theft) quickly. The plot is never slowed down by description and psychological intricacies. There are no psychological gradations in the Starrett universe; there are simply good people and bad people. The good are either detectives or victims, the bad are crooks. There are wily crooks and dull-witted crooks, but, basically, a crook is a crook. Such Lavender stories as “Out There in the Dark” and “The Woman in Black” are typical: Good people are threatened and sometimes killed by bad people, yet the reader is not encouraged to feel any real compassion for the murder victim. The servant with the broken skull in “Out There in the Dark” is merely a necessary plot-pawn, not a human being whose life is brutally abrogated. The star is the detective, and the emphasis is on his intellectual contortions to earn the right to receive applause in the end for a job well done.

The focus of Starrett’s novels and stories is on plot—and only plot. There is very little characterization. Often, characters are not even described; their appearance and emotions do not matter, for their sole purpose is to carry the plotline, like tin soldiers who fall in the line of duty or move mechanically as the plot dictates. The effect is often entertaining, but never captivating. For the reader, it is difficult to become involved—except as he would in a mathematical problem. Starrett’s stories can seem a bit sparse, a bit schematic. Yet Starrett is a deft creator of plots, very satisfying plots of the kind that evolve slowly, adding piece after piece after tiny piece of information until the picture is complete.

The End of Mr. Garment and The Unique Hamlet

Most of Starrett’s works are set close to home. In The End of Mr. Garment (1932), a novelist is murdered en route to a meeting with a group of his peers. In The Unique Hamlet, Holmes and Watson are unearthed (although it must be acknowledged that Starrett never thought that they died, as is clear to anyone who has read his Holmes biography) to solve a mystery involving a lost Hamlet quarto (dated 1602) with a personal dedication by “Wm. Shakespeare.” In this work the dramatis personae are book collectors, like Starrett himself, and he pokes good-humored fun at the practitioners of his own beloved hobby. Several of the Lavender stories involve journalists and book collectors. Starrett’s detectives are all bibliophiles or literary scholars, and their foils are mystery writers (such as Dunstan Mollock) or recorders of their detective friend’s accomplishments (such as Gilly). One has a sense that the author wrote his tales with a wry smile.

From the above, it will be clear that Starrett did not have a social vision, at least not one he cared to express in his mystery fiction. The universe emerging from Starrett’s tales is one without a social milieu. Real life never intrudes into the plots.

A comparison of Starrett and his beloved Doyle, which seems natural and obvious, shows the former to be a pale imitation of the latter. Doyle’s stories are tantalizingly, sometimes vibrantly full of social reality, a social reality that seeps into the separate universe of Holmes and Watson whenever the door is opened to let in a client. Outside that cozy little nest of male bonding and eccentric tranquillity is a London teeming with people, milling around in the mud and the fog. These people are grouped in social classes, they hate, love, and fight, and they have real blood pumping through (and sometimes out of) their veins. When their problems become unmanageable, when the social rules can no longer contain them, they come to Sherlock Holmes and ask him to solve the problem, restore order, and set the world aright again.

Such is not Starrett’s universe. By comparison it is sterile. His nests of male bonding are not pockets of peace that a world in turmoil can come to in an emergency: They are the reason the rest of the world exists. The people and their actions only have the function of presenting the necessary problems for the brilliant detective to solve. The result is that what seemed natural and not in need of explanation in Doyle—the two men who share a suite of rooms—becomes somewhat preposterous in Starrett. One wonders why Jimmie Lavender and Gilly share an apartment. One wonders if there is any reason other than that Holmes and Watson did.

“The Woman in Black”

A key aspect of mystery fiction is the opposition between right and wrong, between society and individual, between law and the lawbreaker. In Starrett’s fiction, however, this opposition is never compelling; he merely pays lip service to morality, law, and the restoration of the world to an acceptable order. There are “happy” endings, to be sure—the crime is solved—but the point is not justice, or punishment of the guilty; it is to show off the brainpower of the detective. Starrett’s endings are perfunctory, schematic, unimaginative. In the short story “The Woman in Black,” for example, the attractive young couple are happy in the end, the villain is beaten up, and the detective moves on to the next case. This is the formula of the oldest tales: young lovers united, the bad guy given a whipping. Starrett’s justice is personal and private, not a social matter.

Sometimes Starrett’s plots, like those of Doyle before him, verge on the amoral. The crime is solved, but the criminal is not brought to justice. In Doyle the dilemma is resolved satisfactorily: Holmes and his archenemy, the formidable Professor Moriarty, are each other’s raison d’être. Holmes cannot be happy in a universe that does not include the master of evil, Moriarty. The opposition becomes one between good and evil as human constants. Moriarty is the metaphor for all that is frail and evil in humanity—for the devil himself. The universe created by Doyle is a dualistic one, sharing with the Gnostic universe the idea that light and darkness, good and evil are eternal mutually dependent principles. In Doyle, the two forces merge to create a Hegelian synthesis: Below the level of eternal principles, a form of justice and morality can exist that pertains to the lives of ordinary people. In Starrett’s oeuvre the philosophical level is missing. When the two criminals who plan the crime in “Out There in the Dark” escape, never to be found or brought to justice, it seems simply amoral. The simple, stupid worker is caught and fried in the electric chair, while the upscale, educated, white-collar criminals get away.

The absence of justice is not necessarily a sign of an amoral author. It can be a sign of an author commenting negatively on a society that does not value justice highly or values it only selectively. In other words, the fictional criminal’s walking away from the crime unscathed could represent a form of social criticism. Starrett, however, is not interested in crime as a social phenomenon, nor in justice as a moral issue. He is interested in crime solely as an intellectual mind game.

In the late twentieth century, Starrett has been forgotten as a mystery writer. The reason could be a combination of the factors outlined above. Great mysteries that live on, those of Doyle and Ross Macdonald, for example, are more than plots in costume; they introduce real people worth caring about and are rich repositories of social history. Starrett was not original enough and did not create characters and situations that were significant enough to transcend their creator and his time. The mysteries he wrote are pleasing but forgettable.

Starrett’s one living legacy is the scholarly and entertaining The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, which, despite its excessive hero worship, remains interesting reading as a study of the life and creative processes behind a fictional character who has become part of the symbolic and conceptual universe of readers in the Western world.

Principal Series Characters:

• James E. “Jimmie” Lavender and his friend
• Charles “Gilly” Gilruth share many features with another (and much more famous) pair made up of private detective and friend: Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. Like Arthur Conan Doyle’s duo, Lavender and Gilly share a suite of rooms, and like Holmes, Lavender is a pipe smoker, extremely confident, generous, and given to logical deductions based on acute observations. A final similarity is that Gilly—like Watson before him—is, more or less, merely the detective’s unintelligent but stalwart foil.
• Walter Ghost is a New York bibliophile and polyhistor who speaks a dozen languages (“including the Scandinavian”). Ghost is not a detective (“Heaven forbid!”); he is simply good at figuring out mysteries. Otherwise, he is a “great human being, a man like Shakespeare, a grand guy.” He is also curiously ugly. Despite this promising introduction, Ghost emerges from the pages of the books of which he is the star as a bland logician.
• Dunstan Mollock , his friend and foil, is a mystery writer and the creator of the Lavender stories. He has been described as simply inept.
• Riley Blackwood represents Starrett’s last attempt at creating a new, American Sherlock Holmes. If Lavender and Ghost are vague, Blackwood is downright washed out.

Bibliography

Honce, Charles. A Vincent Starrett Library: The Astonishing Results of Twenty-three Years of Literary Activity. Mount Vernon, N.Y.: Golden Eagle Press, 1941. This bibliography of Starrett’s work is accompanied by a complementary essay by Starrett himself.

Murphy, Michael, ed. Starrett vs. Mahen: A Record of Discovery and Correspondence. St. Louis, Mo.: Autolycus Press, 1977. Collected letters between Starrett and fellow author Arthur Machen, revealing the personal approach of each man to the craft of writing.

Nieminski, John, and Jon L. Lellenberg, eds. “Dear Starrett—”, “Dear Briggs—”: A Compendium of Correspondence Between Vincent Starrett and Gray Chandler Briggs, 1930-1934, Together with Various Appendices, Notes, and Embellishments. New York: Fordham University Press, 1989. Collects letters between the two men, especially those focused on Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes stories and the Baker Street Irregulars.

Ruber, Peter. The Last Bookman: A Journey into the Life and Times of Vincent Starrett, Author, Journalist, Bibliophile. New York: Candlelight Press, 1968. Biography of the author, combined with tributes in various forms—both prose and poetic—by several of Starrett’s friends and colleagues.

Ruber, Peter, ed. Arkham’s Masters of Horror: A Sixtieth Anniversary Anthology Retrospective of the First Thirty Years of Arkham House. Sauk City, Wis.: Arkham House, 2000. Includes a horror tale by Starrett, as well as notes by Ruber on the historical importance of the tale.

Starrett, Vincent. Born in a Bookshop: Chapters from the Chicago Renascence. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1965. Autobiographical look at the author’s experience of his hometown; provides insight into the influence of Chicago on his life and writing.