Dedications
This book goes out to. . . .
As I write, this very odd period of self-isolation has been going on now for few months. I decided it was time to tackle something I’ve wanted to do for years: trace all of the dedications in more than 30 of Starrett’s books. Why spend many hours on the first few words of a book that most readers race past?
Here’s why: I think of a dedication as a word photo. It offers a snapshot of who or what was important to the author at the time the book was written. Some of these dedications carry hidden meanings, some are inconsequential and still others slide off into the obscure corners that I love (I’m looking at you Dr. Latimer). I hope you will find something worthwhile here too.
A note before I start: Not every dedication photo is reproduced here, but I’ve posted quite a few, especially those with deeper meaning.
Books: In Praise of Stevenson, 1919.
Dedication: To Walter M. Hill, A Prince of Bookfellows.
This book came one year before Hill would publish “The Unique Hamlet,” which has become the most sought after and expensive of all of Starrett’s publications. Hill had already published a few other Starrett items by 1919, so the still largely unknown writer paid tribute to his publisher, whose bookshop was a frequent haunt for many bookmen. Hill was a member of the Chicago Bookfellows, as was Starrett.
Book: Ambrose Bierce, 1920.
Dedication: To W.C. Morrow. Ambrose Bierce’s friend and mine.
Morrow corresponded with Starrett about his friend Ambrose Bierce and helped provide material about the quixotic writer whose disappearance brought Starrett his first international story. This appreciation is the first of two volumes Starrett would produce about Bierce.
Book: Rhymes for Collectors, 1921.
Dedication: To My Wife: One of the characters in this book.
Starrett was married to Lillian Hartsig at the time, but the marriage would not last. The reference is to a poem published here about buying a book at “prices my wife would think a sin.”
Book: Ebony Flame, 1922.
Dedication: To the W.G.A./L.M.S./B.J.S.
This one took me a few minutes, but in a flash it came to me: It is a dedication to two beloved family members. He called them the W.G.A, which I think stands for the World’s Greatest Aunts: Lilian M. Starrett and Bella J. Starrett. Lilian and Bella nurtured the boy Starrett’s interests in books and introduced him to Sherlock Holmes. Surely that was worth a dedication. Or two.
Book: Banners in the Dawn, 1923
Dedication: To Thomas Kennedy.
A remarkable ode to friendship, Starrett’s dedication is really a sonnet to fellow poet Thomas Kennedy, whose star as a poet would outshine Starrett’s in their lifetimes.
In his tribute, Starett imagines a day when some youth finds their works and “turning the pages of our antique thought” will be moved to say “ ‘How splendid was their friendship in that day!’ ”
What an admirable idea.
Book: Buried Caesars, 1923
Dedication: To the shining memory of another ‘Buried Caesar,’ Robert Polk Starrett, My Father: September 19, 1863- November 24, 1918.
The next of a series of family dedications, Starrett memorializes his beloved, fun-loving father.
It’s worth noting that while he certainly had the opportunity, Starrett never dedicated a book to his mother.
Book: Flame and Dust, 1924.
Dedication: To R.L.G.
Another book of poetry and another dedication in initials, but this one is obvious: Richard Le Gallienne. Starrett idolized the man and in a poem compared La Gallienne to a knight of yore, “Riding to tourney on a yellow steed, always your face is turned toward the gleam!” The two shared a passion for Robert Louis Stevenson, poetry and books. Le Gallienne also had, ahem, other passions.
Book: Coffins for Two, 1924.
Dedication: To __________ Reckless raconteurs may lie valiantly, but their volumes frequently flatter.
This is the only dedication that’s left blank. It’s not an unknown practice, but why it was done in this case is unclear. Also the sentence which follows the blank space appears to be by Starrett. I can’t find a reference to it elsewhere, but would be delighted if someone else pointed it out.
Book: Fifteen More Poems, 1927.
Dedication: To Charles Parsons
NOT a copy of Fifteen More Poems, but my copy of Et Cetera, published in 1924 and inscribed to Charles Parsons, “newest of friends in old-time friendship.”
Parsons has an interesting history. Born in New York and educated at Yale before the Great War, he worked for the railroad and went hunting for silver in California before enlisting. Married and widowed at an early age, he and his daughter lived in Europe until World War II, where he collected the works of Machen and James Branch Cabell, two of Starrett’s favorite writers and the reason for the correspondence between the two men.
An isolationist, he fought America’s involvement in the war. He later opposed the Marshall Plan and United Nations, became a disciple of Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his investigations of un-American activities and campaigned for the impeachment of President Dwight Eisenhower. Parsons’ papers were donated to Yale and they include letters to Starrett, who was notoriously non-political. It would be interesting to read the letters.
Someday, perhaps.
Book: Seaports in the Moon, 1928.
Dedication: To Ray Latimer
Seven years before, Starrett dedicated a slim volume of poetry to his first wife. Now comes a dedication to the woman who would one day be the second Mrs. Vincent Starrett.
Seaports is a delightful book, and remembered largely among fantasy historians for its whimsical blend of historic and literary characters, long before Nick Meyer did it so well in The Seven-Per-Cent Solution.
The series of short chapters tells the story of water from the Fountain of Youth and its impact on the lives of those who own or want it. Particularly effective is the chapter dedicated to Poe, which has been excerpted and published as a stand-alone tale. In later life, Starrett lamented that Seaports was not better known. I agree.
Book: Ambrose Bierce: A Bibliography, 1929
Dedication: To Helen Bierce
Nine years after his first book dedicated to Bierce, Starrett returned with a bibliography. In his earlier work, he acknowledged the aid of Bierce’s daughter, Helen, in preparing that work. Here he dedicates the work entirely to her. Helen Bierce was notoriously touchy about her father and his reputation. Starrett, who greatly admired the man and his work, seems to have stayed on Helen’s good side. No doubt having the little volume dedicated to her helped.
Book: Penny Wise and Book Foolish, 1929.
Dedication: To M.J. Latimer, M.D., My doctor & my friend
I’ve been able to turn up just a few snatches about Dr. Latimer, who appears to be no relation to Ray Latimer, Starrett’s second wife. I know he had a practice at 3153 Fullerton Ave., in Chicago and died on July 17, 1965, unmarried and without children.
But there’s a curious news article involving Dr. Latimer from the Feb. 13, 1923, Chicago Tribune that sounds like it came straight out of “The Adventure of the Creeping Man.”
“His Monkey is Worthless for Gland Renewal,” is the headline on the tale of one Charles W. Martin, 66, wealthy owner of Martin & Co. Manufacturers. Mr. Martin, who planned to live to be 101, was going to use the glands of a monkey as his fountain of youth.
Unfortunately, the little monkey became ill and when the story came out, “medical experts” said the monkey would have been useless for the rejuvenation plans.
“What the manufacturer needs for the gland transplantation he plans some day to have is a man’s size anthropoid ape—a gorilla, gibbon, chimpanzee or orang,” the story asserts with great authority.
(Apparently, in the case of monkey glands, size does matter.)
None other than Dr. M.J. Latimer, Starrett’s doctor and friend, is quoted as saying that Martin “wants an anthropoid ape, one of those big fellows who are nearly human.”
Perhaps he should have contacted Prof. Presbury about langur glands.
Book: Murder on “B” Deck, 1929.
Dedication: To My Brothers Stanley, Harold, Robert with the author’s love
The first of Starrett’s mystery novels is dedicated to his brothers, who hover at the edges of his memoir, Born in a Bookshop. Vincent says little about this brothers, but it’s clear he felt an attachment to them and wanted them to know it with this simple but heartfelt dedication.
Book: The Blue Door, 1930.
Dedication: To Edwin Baird, editor and friend
Edwin Baird is best known as the editor of Weird Tales who turned away a submission by H.P. Lovecraft, but the truth is that he nurtured many writers, including Starrett. When Real Detective Tales was still publishing fiction, several of Starrett’s Jimmie Lavender stories showed up there. And one of the first chapters that would later be published in The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes was printed here too. “He was the friend and encourager, sometimes the last resort, of nearly all the young men of the ‘20s whose talent lay in the field of mystery and melodrama,” Starrett recalled in 1955 when Baird died at the age of 69.
Book: Dead Man Inside, 1931.
Dedication: To Scott Cunningham: Who watched it grow
I wasn’t able to come up with much about Cunningham, except for his series of newspapers stories profiling the life of humorist Will Rogers.
He also produced A Bibliography of the writings of Carl Van Vechten in 1924 for the Centaur Book Shop in Philadelphia. The year before, Starrett had written a similar work on Stephen Crane for the same publisher.
Perhaps that is how he and Starrett crossed paths.
Cunningham owned several Starrett works, including an inscribed copy of “The Unique Hamlet,” now at the University of Texas.
Book: The End of Mr. Garment, 1932.
Dedication: To Sylvia and Stirling Parkinson in appreciation of much that is pleasant to remember.
Stirling Parkinson worked for the Chicago Tribune as a financial reporter and was manager of the Tribune syndicate. Parkinson also served on the Mexican border in 1916, when Starrett was covering the revolution in that country for the Tribune. The Parkinsons had a summer home in Connecticut and Starrett stayed and wrote there in the middle 1920s.
Book: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1933.
Dedication: To William Gillette, Frederic Dorr Steele and Gray Chandler Briggs, in gratitude
I’ve written at length about this book elsewhere and so will only say that Starrett considered each of them men as his friends and brothers in Sherlockian idolatry.
Book: Midnight and Percy Jones, 1936.
Dedication: To Charles Honce with gratitude for his grand idea
Charles Honce has been discussed at length here and will make another appearance later this year. The Associated Press raconteur says: “The ‘grand idea’ was to have a murder victim buried under the pavement at the busiest street corner in Chicago by men disguised as track workers or gas pipe diggers or something. When I handed Mr. Starrett the idea over a lunch table at the Algonquin, he said, in effect: ‘Keep it under your hat. Those things get around in the trade.’ ”
Book: Persons from Porlock, 1938.
Dedication: To Christopher Morley, who does it so much better.
There is a little book to be written about the friendship between Starrett and Morley and I can’t wait for Steven Rothman to retire as The Baker Street Journal editor so he can write it.
Or write half while I kibbitz on the other half.
Book: Oriental Encounters, 1938.
Dedication: To the thirty-one editors who enjoyed one or both of these papers in manuscript, but regretted their inability to accept them for publication, this small volume is cheerily dedicated.
Cheerily? Not hardly. This dedication is a knife that he jabbed into the weak spines of all those editors who claimed to love his stories, but didn’t have the nerve to publish them.
Why? Both were remnants of his time in Peking, with one describing the lives of the remaining eunuchs, and the other essay describing the night-time collections by the city’s “honey wagon” drivers.
Tasteless? Maybe. Scandalous? Well it was the 1930s.
But still, the editors could surely have found someplace to publish these delightful essays.
Book: The Great Hotel Murder, 1939.
Dedication: I dedicate this adventure to my friends the drama critics of Chicago—for that matter, everywhere.
As a young newspaper reporter, Starrett hobnobbed with the theater critics of Chicago, reveling in their acerbic assessments of theater and the young motion picture business. Starrett made his last series detective, Riley Blackwood, a theater critic.
Book: Books Alive, 1940.
Dedication: To My Friends, The booksellers of America
Not much to decode here. He’s written a book about books and dedicated it booksellers. Next.
Book: Bookman’s Holiday, 1942.
Dedication: To Georgia E. Bennett, Fellow-traveler on a road of intangible inclinations who first led my feet in this path.
If you are lucky, you will have a high school teacher who helps you find your talent. Georgia E. Bennett was that woman for Starrett. “I had great good luck with one teacher. Her name, and I wish I might put it in caps, was Georgia E. Bennett, and I was in her English classes from first to last.”
How happy he must have been to dedicate a book to her.
How pleased she must have been that her famous pupil remembered her and was so thoughtful.
Book: Autolycus in Limbo, 1943.
Dedication: To Lilian and Bella Starrett, All love and gratitude
Ebony Flame, one of Starrett’s earliest books of poetry was dedicated to his two aunts using initials only. Twenty-one years later he came back and spelled it all out. It’s only right, since his aunts introduced him to Sherlock Holmes and Autolycus introduced the sonnet “221B” to the world.
Book: The Case Book of Jimmie Lavender, 1944.
Dedication: Dedicated To Harry E. Maule, friendly editor, who published the first “Lavender” stories; to Ellery Queen who revived them; to Jimmy Lavender, great pitcher for the old Chicago Cubs, who loaned his attractive name; and Dr. John H. Watson, formerly of Baker Street, London, who wrote the original prescription.
At 58, Starrett had largely given up writing fiction, so this anthology of Jimmie Lavender short stories was a nostalgic journey for the author. He pays tribute to two editors: Maule, who published the earliest Lavender tales in Short Stories magazine; and Queen, who reprinted some of them in the early issues of EQMM. The pitcher with the similar name (Jimmy vs Jimmie) was a childhood favorite of Starrett’s. And Starrett always acknowledged his Lavender adventures were a contemporary Chicago take on the Holmes stories.
Book: Murder in Peking, 1946.
Dedication: This story is affectionately dedicated to all good friends of my Peking days, specifically to Yi Ying, Helen Burton, Ida Pruitt, Kay Toddy, Lucille Swan, Dorothy St. Clair, Eleanor and Owen Lattimore, Peg and Edgar Snow, Dorothea and Frank Smothers, Zina and Frank Oliver, May Newhall, John Hope-Johnstone, Malcolm MacDonald, Lin Yutang and Chen Shu-yi.
More than a decade after returning from Peking, Starrett had his final major mystery novel published, this time a roman a clef featuring many of the folks in his dedication. Of all those mentioned, perhaps the most influential at the time was Lin Yutang, whose popular writings earned him readership in both China and the United States.
Book: Books and Bipeds, 1947.
Dedication: To my friends and colleagues, the editors and reviewers of the Chicago Sunday Tribune Magazine of Books
Starrett’s “Books Alive” column was a mainstay of the Chicago Tribune, and this compilation from his column reads like a highlights reel of the column’s first few years. Starrett was always at home among the brotherhood of newspaper reporters, just as he was in old bookshops.
Book: Book Column, 1958.
Dedication: To my friends & fellow bibliophiles, the members of The Caxton Club
To have a compilation published by The Caxton Club was an honor for the old bookman. Starrett was an autodidact, and often felt out of place among the wealthier bibliophiles of his era. This book acknowledged his lifetime of book idolatry.
Book: Best Loved Books of the Twentieth Century, 1955.
Dedication: To Wendell W. Goodpasture: For ‘Auld Lang Syne’
In its day, Kroch’s & Brentano’s, was the largest bookseller in Chicago and for years, Wendell W. Goodpasture ran the stores and was its lead buyer. Like Starrett, Goodpasture had only a high school education, but he was passionate about making books available to readers at every end of the spectrum. It was Goodpasture who suggested that Starrett write a series of essays on the best loved books of the century, only half gone by, and Starrett eagerly jumped in. First published every Sunday in the Tribune, they were gathered together for a little paperback that has held up well over the decades.
Book: The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, 1960 “revised and enlarged” edition.
Dedication: In Memoriam, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Gillette, Frederic Dorr Steele, Gray Chandler Briggs, H.W. Bell, Alexander Woolcott, Elmer Davis, Christopher Morley.
Not a dedication per se, but a thank you to all those who influenced Starrett’s enjoyment of Sherlock Holmes and had died.
Book: Late, Later and Possibly Last, 1973
Dedication: This book is for: Sherlock Holmes, the B.S.I & all of the scion societies dedicated to his immortality
The last book published during Starrett’s life, this slim volume bound in black is a farewell nod to those readers who have kept his name and reputation alive in the ensuing decades.
That’s as good a place to end as any.
If you made it this far, congratulations.
And many thanks.
I hope you and yours are well.