Black Cat Weekly #95

Chapter 8

Hulbert Footner (1879–1944) was a Canadian-born American writer best known for his adventure and detective fiction. He was born in Canada but grew up in New York City, where he attended elementary school. Beyond that, he was entirely self-educated. He began writing poetry and non-fiction in the early days of the 20th century, publishing essays about topics such as canoe trips on the Hudson River. Like most writers, he explored various jobs and genres of fiction, including newspaper reporting, journalism, and acting (which allowed him to tour the United States in a production of Sherlock Holmes). His early novels were adventures set in the Canadian Northwest, which he had helped explore by canoe and document for publication while working as a reporter in his newspaper days.

His friend Christopher Morley, also a writer of books and poetry, steered him away from northwestern stories into crime stories and romance. It was here that Footner achieved his greatest success with the creation of the beautiful and brilliant Madame Rosika Storey. The Madame Storey mysteries were well-suited for the Roaring 1920s and appeared in leading pulp magazines of the time every year from 1922 through 1935. When reissued as books, the series consisted of the following titles:

The Under Dogs

Madame Storey

The Velvet Hand

The Doctor Who Held Hands

Easy to Kill

The Casual Murderer

The Almost Perfect Murder

Dangerous Cargo

The k********g of Madame Storey

This success allowed him to travel, and his family spent a year in Europe from 1932 to 1933. However, his earnings fell during the Great Depression, which eventually had a grim effect on the family’s time in Europe. It led to Footner having a heart attack during the winter of 1933 while on the Côte d’Azur. He recovered, though, and his subsequent production of novels, non-fiction books, and even a play was prolific, although he would never again travel far from New York.

His book sales declined as the depression deepened in the 1930s. To try to regain his place in the mystery field, he introduced a new detective, Amos Lee Mappin, a successful middle-aged mystery writer whose investigations tended to occur in New York’s café society. He published Mappin stories until his death in 1944, alternating at times with Madame Storey.

“Putting Crime Over,” a Madame Storey novella, originally appeared in the classic pulp fiction magazine Argosy All-Story Weekly, November 20, 1926. It ran complete in one issue, although it didn’t make the cover. (Edgar Franklin’s romance, “Roll Your Own,” got that honor.) Although a rapidly rising talent, Footner’s greatest success as a writer still lay in the future.

“Argosy All-Story Weekly “ )