Lillian De La Torre

• Born: March 15, 1902
• Birthplace: New York, New York
• Died: September 13, 1993
• Place of death: Colorado Springs, Colorado

Type of Plot: Amateur sleuth

Principal Series: Dr. Sam Johnson, 1946-1987

Contribution

Using real crimes and criminals as the basis of fiction is a well-established literary device, as works such as the anonymous The Tragedy of Mr. Arden of Feversham (1592), Henry Fielding’s The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great (1743, 1754), and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” demonstrate. No one, however, had considered using a historical figure to solve these crimes before Lillian de la Torre recruited Samuel Johnson as a private investigator. Combining her extensive knowledge of eighteenth century British literature and history with the conventions of the classic detective story, de la Torre produced more than thirty enjoyable short stories. Nevertheless, her purpose went beyond mere entertainment; as a self-described “histo-detector,” she solved mysteries that puzzled contemporaries and eluded historians. Although most of her serious histo-detecting was reserved for nonfictional, book-length works, some of her short stories also reveal how actual crimes might have been committed.

Biography

The daughter of José Rollin de la Torre Bueno and Lillian Reinhardt Bueno, Lillian de la Torre was born in New York City on March 15, 1902. After receiving her associate’s degree from the College of New Rochelle in 1921, she began teaching high school in New York (1923-1934). At the same time, she pursued graduate studies, specializing in the eighteenth century, and earned master’s degrees from Columbia University and Radcliffe College.

After her marriage to George S. McCue in 1932, de la Torre moved to Colorado Springs, Colorado, where her husband began a twenty-seven-year tenure in the English department of Colorado College. De la Torre also taught for a few years at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs before becoming a full-time histo-detector. Her first published story, “Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector,” later retitled “The Great Seal of England,” is based on the actual disappearance of the seal from Lord Chancellor Edward Thurlow’s house on March 23, 1784; de la Torre’s solution appeared in Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine for November, 1943, and most of her subsequent accounts of Sam Johnson’s investigations into the real and imagined crimes of eighteenth century England have first been printed in that periodical. Occasionally, her interest has led to more extensive treatment: Elizabeth Is Missing (1945), her first book, suggests what happened to Elizabeth Canning, a servant who disappeared for four weeks in January, 1753. The Heir of Douglas (1952) attempts to determine the rightful claimant to the vast Douglas estates and so resolve a case that bedeviled the Scottish courts for seven years in the 1760’s, and The Truth About Belle Gunness (1955) examines the fate of this notorious murderess, who disappeared in 1908.

De la Torre’s interest in amateur theatricals led first to performances as “Mama” in I Remember Mama and “Mrs. Cady” in Beggar on Horseback, then to plays that extended the scope of her histo-detection to figures such as Lizzie Borden. A pair of biographies (on the Jacobite Flora Macdonald and the actress Sarah Siddons), two cookbooks, a volume of poetry, and various articles round out a career that has earned for her widespread recognition. She received awards from Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine (1953) and the Colorado Authors’ League (1953-1957), was nominated in the best fact crime category by the Mystery Writers of America in 1956 for “The Truth About Belle Gunness,” and served as president of that organization (1979). She also received the Medal of Distinction in the Fine Arts from the Colorado Springs Chamber of Commerce (1980).

Analysis

On the dust jacket of Elizabeth Is Missing, Lillian de la Torre commented, “I have been a student of the eighteenth century for seventeen years, and a detective-story fan for longer than that. It was inevitable that the lines would cross.” Yet the conjunction occurred by accident. Even as a child she had been fascinated with mystery and detective fiction. Her father, himself a fan of the genre, owned a rich collection that included the works ofÉmile Gaboriau, Jacques Futrelle, and Arthur Conan Doyle; at the age of nine, de la Torre began devouring these and similar works, and she never stopped. Her husband was far less enthusiastic. As she recalled in a lecture in 1973, “’Boo!’ he would say. ’Detectives! What a bunch! Cute brides! Bald Belgians! Quaint old ladies! Roly-poly Chinamen! Next thing you know there’ll be a police dog.’” De la Torre defended her reading preferences, arguing that mysteries could be legitimate literary art if the main characters were “solid and three-dimensional, like—like Dr. Samuel Johnson and James Boswell in Boswell’s great biography.”

Whether the decision to pursue this idea was the inevitable consequence of lifelong interests or the fortuitous outcome of a domestic dispute, the result was a happy one. That most famous of detective duos, Sherlock Holmes and Dr. John Watson, were themselves modeled on the historical Johnson and Boswell, the one a brilliant and eccentric analyst, the other a devoted but often dull-witted recorder. Holmes even refers to Watson as his Boswell. Returning to the originals of this fictional pair was sensible, given de la Torre’s knowledge of and interest in their era.

The 1940’s were particularly propitious for this undertaking, as Yale University began publishing Boswell’s recently discovered manuscripts, thus placing the biographer and his subject in the news. Moreover, the eighteenth century offered a perfect period for detective fiction. The first expert witness appeared in court in 1698. In 1770, footprints in the snow were first matched with the shoes that made them. The first detected use of prussic acid as poison came thirteen years later. The novelist Henry Fielding and his blind half brother, Sir John Fielding, organized a rudimentary police force, the Bow Street Runners, with the means of detecting crimes and their perpetrators.

Samuel Johnson was caught up in these developments. According to Boswell, he spent an entire winter listening to Saunders Welch, Sir John Fielding’s assistant, examine suspects. Occasionally, he was more than a spectator. When James Macpherson claimed to have discovered ancient Gaelic verses by Ossian, Johnson correctly declared them forgeries, just as he later recognized that the supposed fifteenth century works of Thomas Rowley were the product of the young Thomas Chatterton. In 1762, he helped investigate the case of the “Cock-Lane Ghost”: According to William Parsons, who lived in Cock Lane, Smithfield, Fanny Lynes’s ghost was trying to reveal, through Parsons’s eleven-year-old daughter, that she had been poisoned by her brother-in-law. In 1762, in “Account of the Detection of the Imposture in Cock-Lane,” Johnson exposed the fraud.

De la Torre used such episodes for her stories. “The Manifestations in Mincing Lane,” for example, is based on the Cock-Lane Ghost; “The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript” deals with literary forgery. In some instances the mysteries are real: The Great Seal of England actually did disappear from the Lord Chancellor’s house; Elizabeth Canning did vanish for four weeks (“The Disappearing Servant Wench”), the Duchess of Kingston was tried for bigamy (“Milady Bigamy”), William Henry Ireland did manufacture a number of Shakespearean manuscripts.

“The Monboddo Ape Boy” and “Prince Charlie’s Ruby”

Other tales build on Johnson’s experiences and opinions. James Burnett, Lord Monboddo, anticipated Charles Darwin’s belief that humans had undergone a process of evolution. Although Johnson disliked both Darwin the man and his theories, Boswell arranged for the two to meet in Scotland. In “The Monboddo Ape Boy,” de la Torre creates a pair of confidence men who try to exploit Monboddo’s interest in feral children as evidence supporting his assumptions about evolution, and she then shows Johnson foiling the plot during his visit. “Prince Charlie’s Ruby” uses Johnson’s excursion to the Isle of Skye to see Flora Macdonald, the Jacobite heroine who hid Bonny Prince Charlie after the debacle of Culloden, as the basis of an adventure much like that of Holmes and the six busts of Napoleon Bonaparte.

Attention to History

Still other stories develop from eighteenth century life and customs. “The Tontine Curse” imagines multiple murders committed to collect on a form of life insurance. At the birth of their children, a group of parents would each invest a sum in the funds, the principal and interest to go to the last surviving member of the group. Both the Hosyer tontine and Johnson’s involvement in such a case are fictional, but the practice is authentic and invited homicidal thoughts, if not actions. De la Torre’s knowledge of eighteenth century stagecraft informs “The Banquo Trap” and “The Resurrection Men.” The latter, published in The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector (1984), also reflects the practice of grave robbing to supply cadavers for autopsies, and “The Blackamoor Unchain’d,” from the same collection, considers the plight of slaves in England during the age of Johnson.

To help create the atmosphere of the period, de la Torre adopts the spellings and phrases of the day: “cloathes,” “pye,” “enthusiastick,” “topick,” “scheaming,” “eight-and-twenty days.” She uses only words that were extant in the eighteenth century, a practice requiring much checking in the Oxford English Dictionary. The real-life Johnson never used a simple word when he could find a hard one, so de la Torre has her character use “mendacious invention” for “lie,” “aerostatick globe” for “balloon.” Although she reveals an ear and eye for eighteenth century diction and orthography in her re-creation of speech, she makes her language even more authentic by inserting dialogues taken directly from Boswell’s The Life of Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. (1791) and other sources and by introducing similar period pieces. “The Disappearing Servant Wench,” for example, opens by quoting the actual broadside announcing that Elizabeth Canning had vanished. The story also contains excerpts from testimony in the case and contemporary pamphlets relating to it. To heighten verisimilitude, Elizabeth Is Missing and Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector (1946) are set in modified Caslon, a popular eighteenth century typeface; the title pages present a mixture of italic and roman characters—another characteristic of the period—and, like so many title pages of the time, hers offer a veritable summary of the book’s contents.

Like the language and the main characters, the settings are authentic. Mrs. Winwood’s boudoir in “The Triple-Lock’d Room” is furnished in Chinese Chippendale, all the vogue in 1775 when the adventure supposedly occurs, and on her marquetry table lies a book printed in black-letter, or Gothic, type, suggesting the beginning of the revival of interest in things medieval. Sally Hosyer (“The Tontine Curse”) sleeps with her sister in a canopy bed; both the sharing of sleeping accommodations and the tester are typical of the age.

“The Viotti Stradivarius”

The stories thus offer entertainment as period pieces, but they also adhere to the rules of modern mysteries, observing Emily Dickinson’s injunction: “The truth must dazzle gradually.” “The Viotti Stradivarius” first creates the setting of the crime, a soiree at the home of the noted eighteenth century musicologist and friend of Johnson, Dr. Charles Burney. Present are the Bettses, father and son, violin makers; Polly Tresilian, Burney’s pupil, with her jeweler father and his apprentice, Chinnery; the Italian prodigy Giovanni Battista Viotti; Prince Orloff of Russia and his two Cossack guards; Charles Burney and his novelist daughter, Fanny; and Boswell and Johnson. During the evening, Orloff’s diamond, worth 200,000 rubles, and Viotti’s priceless violin disappear, and Johnson must deduce the identity of the thief or thieves. Tresilian and Chinnery are logical suspects because of their profession, as are the Bettses because of theirs. Because Viotti is a stranger to the company and refuses to play, he might be a thief masquerading as the virtuoso. Orloff himself might have substituted a piece of glass for the diamond to collect insurance. By dismissing some possibilities as illogical and testing other hypotheses, Johnson finds the missing objects and the culprit.

“Murder Lock’d In”

“Murder Lock’d In,” the opening story in The Return of Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, uses another classic device, the homicide—in this case triple homicide—within a locked room. Aware that she is writing for a twentieth century audience familiar with the use of string to lock doors from the outside, de la Torre dismisses this option; when the watchman, Jona Mudge, tries to show how this trick works, it fails. Johnson must then determine how the murderer did effect his (or her) entrance and exit; relying on Holmes’s dictum, “when one has eliminated all impossibilities, then what remains, however improbable, must be the truth,” he finds the killer. Yet he maintains the suspense by accusing someone he knows is innocent to trick the guilty party into confessing.

Modern, too, is de la Torre’s sympathy with the criminal. The killer in “Murder Lock’d In” is sent to Bedlam rather than the gallows. “Milady Bigamy” reverses the court’s decision and finds the duchess innocent; the thief in “The Viotti Stradivarius” is never exposed; Johnson pleads for the forger in “The Missing Shakespeare Manuscript.” Johnson himself was compassionate, maintaining a household of homeless, impoverished people, and he worked diligently to save the life of the convicted forger William Dodd. Whether Johnson would have been pleased with the insanity defense (not in fact introduced until the next century) is uncertain.

“The Tontine Curse”

More disturbing aesthetically are the limits of the short story, which task even Agatha Christie. Nineteen deaths in about as many pages in “The Tontine Curse” seem excessive and implausible, even though de la Torre kills off groups of children at a time. Suspicion barely has time to build before it is removed when Johnson must quickly sort through a large number of suspects, and there is little time to mislead the reader with red herrings. No one checks on whether Prince Orloff owns the diamond he says he has lost or whether he recently insured it at Lloyd’s. Has he recently suffered financial setbacks that might make the theft of the diamond convenient? “The Viotti Stradivarius” hints at Hindu thieves but does little with them for want of space. Even in book-length mysteries, most of the characters remain shadowy; in short stories, they lack the personality that would make them logical or illogical suspects.

De la Torre was therefore most effective when she challenged the reader to discover not who committed a crime but rather where an object has been concealed (as in “Prince Charlie’s Ruby”) or how a crime has been committed despite careful observation, as in “The Frantic Rebel” or “The Triple-Lock’d Room.” Nevertheless as Johnson observed of dictionaries and watches, “the worst is better than none,” and de la Torre’s best, unlike these other two objects, “go quite true.” De la Torre’s mysteries provide an excursion into another era. Reading them before a fire with a glass of Johnson’s much-loved “poonch” in hand, one may journey back in time. In her writings, the eighteenth century lives, with its elegance, culture, and crime, its Chippendale chairs and open sewers. Perhaps the chief charm of her work, however, lies in discovering not how different the past and its people are but how little the world and human nature have changed.

Principal Series Characters:

• Sam Johnson , detective, is based on the eighteenth century writer and lexicographer of that name. Ungainly, shortsighted, and marked by scrofula, but physically and mentally vital, he outwits the malefactors who cross his path.
• James Boswell , “with a swart complection, a long nose, and black hair tied back in the latest mode,” records the adventures of Johnson. A lawyer by profession, Boswell exhibits in these stories the same mixture of naïveté, vanity, and curiosity that he displayed in life.

Bibliography

Browne, Ray B., and Lawrence A. Kreiser, Jr., eds. The Detective as Historian: History and Art in Historical Crime Fiction. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 2000. Anthology devoted to analysis of the representation of history and the history of representation within historical crime fiction. Provides perspective on de la Torre.

Hoch, Edward D. “A Mirror to Our Crimes.” The Armchair Detective 12 (Summer, 1979): 282-283. Comments on the use and portrayal of real crimes in detective fiction; sheds light on de la Torre’s works.

Johnsen, Rosemary Erickson. Contemporary Feminist Historical Crime Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006. Provides a useful overview of the genre, as well as a detailed analysis of de la Torre’s literary descendants.

Peters, Ellis. Foreword to Historical Whodunits, edited by Mike Ashley. New York: Barnes & Noble, 1997. The author of the Cadfael mysteries provides commentary on the genre of the historical whodunit and on de la Torre’s place in that genre.

Purcell, James Mark. “Lillian de la Torre, Preliminary Bibliography: Blood on the Periwigs.” Mystery Readers Newsletter 4 (July/August, 1971): 25-27. Bibliography of the author’s works through 1971.