Carolyn Wells - Collected Works of Carolyn Wells

The Collected Works of

CAROLYN WELLS

(1862-1942)

Contents

Delphi Classics 2019

Version 1

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The Collected Works of

CAROLYN WELLS

By Delphi Classics, 2019

Collected Works of Carolyn Wells

First published in the United Kingdom in 2019 by Delphi Classics.

Delphi Classics, 2019.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form other than that in which it is published.

ISBN: 978 1 78877 986 9

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Wells was born in Rahway, New Jersey in June 1862

The Rahway River, New Jersey

Although Carolyn Wells had been a voracious reader since early childhood and possessed a great aptitude for learning, she was sceptical about formal teaching institutions. She refused to go to university because, as she notes in her autobiography, the experience of primary and secondary education had impressed upon her that there was more waste motion in school routine than in anything else I knew of. Despite her aversion to college, she did take summer school classes and was fortunate enough to afford a private tutor to teach her a variety of subjects, including science, languages and history. She did not consider herself very well educated, but she did believe that she was fairly knowledgeable.

In her fifties, she was still residing in her familys large home in Rahway with her sister, Ida Eloise, who like Carolyn was unmarried. Their brother, Walter, was an intelligent and successful electrical engineer who became the vice president of the Edison Electric Illuminating Company of Brooklyn. The familys wealth and upper-middle class social status provided financial security to Wells at the start of her career and allowed her time to write and develop her ideas. Over the course of her lifetime, she would make a considerable sum of money from her books, particularly from her mystery novels which proved highly lucrative for her.

The Clue was first published in 1909 by J. B. Lippincott Company in America. Wells had commenced her career working as a librarian at the Rahway Library Association in New Jersey, when she wrote short pieces of fiction, childrens works and poetry. Her first book, At the Sign of the Sphinx, was published in 1896; it was the beginning of a prolific writing career that spanned nearly forty years and included over one hundred and seventy works. In her early years as an author, Wells mostly wrote childrens books, humorous tales and poetry, but at some point after 1897, she heard Anna Katharine Greens mystery novel, That Affair Next Door , being read aloud and was instantly fascinated with detective fiction.

The Clue is the first in the authors long-running Fleming Stone series, which she wrote over a period of more than three decades and includes more than sixty books. The protagonist in the series is a detective, Fleming Stone, who is a reserved, scholarly, well-mannered man who is often called upon to tackle mysteries which have proven too difficult for those in law enforcement to solve. In The Clue , we are thrust into the mystery of the murder of a young heiress, Madeleine Van Norman, who is about to inherit her fortune. The night before she is due to marry Schuyler Carleton, her attractive yet cold fianc, she retires to her bedroom to contemplate the marriage and is found murdered in the morning. Everyone present at the house is a suspect and Stone must solve the case, which hinges on the finding of a vital clue.

As with many of the Fleming Stone novels, the detective does not appear in the narrative until the final section, as Wells carefully establishes the setting and the range of suspects for the reader to analyse in detail. We do this through the character of Robert Fessenden, a friend of the suspected fianc, who is a New York lawyer with a penchant for detective work. Fessendens part-skilful, part-naive investigative skills are employed by the author to feed information to the reader and to deceive us at other times with a succession of red herring suspects.

A 1918 edition of the novel

Wells as a young lady