Out of Mind, But Online

Earlier this month, while penning a post about what would’ve been the 145th birthday of “inverted detective story” innovator R. Austin Freeman, I realized that a number of Freeman’s mystery tales from the early 20th century are available--in their entirety--from the wonderful Project Gutenberg site. Then, just the other day, I came across a review in Mystery*File of The Bittermeads Mystery (1922), by E.R. Punshon--somebody I’d never even heard of, much less read. (The author of a Web site devoted to Punshon’s work and memory acknowledges that his subject is “one of the most shamefully neglected writers of detective fiction.”) That critique, composed by Mary Read--the co-author, with Eric Mayer, of the John the Eunuch mysteries--concludes with a note about Read and Mayer being “in the process of compiling an online directory of all freely available e-texts of mystery fiction published during the Golden Age of Detection.”

Naturally, I clicked right over to this new Maywrite Library site. There, I found dozens of links to classic mystery and detective stories--by both American and British authors--that, with the passage of time, have fallen into the public domain, and are available at no cost on the Web. Included among these literary riches are Fergus Hume’s The Mystery of a Hansom Cab, Charles Dickens’ The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Jacques Futrelle’s famous “Thinking Machine” stories, Marie Belloc Lowndes’ The Lodger, and G.K. Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday. Some of these particular offerings are damnably difficult to find in print anymore.

Intrigued, I dash off an e-note to Mary Read, asking for some background on The Maywrite Library and inquiring as to her intentions with this site. She responded within a very short while:

The Maywrite Library came about in this wise. As a longtime devotee of Golden Age and earlier mysteries, I noticed Gutenberg and other sites offer no end of e-texts of same. Some titles are virtually unheard of (no pun intended) these days, for example Punshon, while others are known far and wide. So it was great fun finding hidden gems and rereading old favourites. It then occurred to me perhaps other fans of these novels might find a page listing e-texts handy, since some titles are buried in sites and less easy to find, particularly if the authors’ names are lesser known. So I began keeping notes of URLs of novels and adding them to the list as they were located. There must be hundreds of them online, and that’s even before we get to Edgar Wallace! The temptation is to read them as they are noticed, and in fact your e-mail arrived while I was in the middle of the Malcolm Sage collection mentioned on the library page.

What does it entail? Keeping an eye out for vintage e-texts and the occasional search for same by name or title. As for how far the library will go ... we’ll just keep adding those we find or hear about, so your guess is as good as mine. We only hope that folk find as much enjoyment as we do from these sometimes forgotten gems, although of course this list cannot be comprehensive given the number of appropriate titles lurking about in the ether.

Of course, not everyone enjoys reading lengthy works on a computer screen. But you can always print out stories you’d like to enjoy later on. And if you know of other e-texts that aren’t mentioned already on the Maywrite Library page, send a note to Read at maywrite@epix.net. We’ll check back site sometime soon, just to see how this project progresses.