Into the Woods: Dean Street Press is Reprinting the Detective Fiction of Sara Woods (Eileen Mary Lana Hutton Bowen Judd), 1916-1985

Today I am most pleased to announce that Dean Street Press is reprinting the Antony Maitland detective fiction of Anglo-Canadian mystery writer Sara Woods (1916-1985), aka Eileen Mary Lana Hutton Bowen Judd.  

I.

As the decade of the 1960s approached, the work of the quartet of English Crime Queens most associated with the between-the-wars Golden Age of Detective Fiction, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L. Sayers, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh, still seemed to be going relatively strong.  

To be sure, one of these murder monarchs, Dorothy L. Sayers, was now dead, having expired in the last month of 1957 at the age of sixty-four.  A week before Christmas that year newspapers reported that, like a character out of one her own detective novels, she had been discovered by her gardener lying dead in the hall at the foot of her staircase at "her country home in Witham."  Sayers had just returned from a Christmas shopping excursion in London and had seemed perfectly well, according to her secretary.  The cause of death, however, was neither lethal letter opener nor curare nor a simple sharp shove in the back, but, rather, more prosaically if no less tragically, coronary thrombosis.  

At her death Sayers in fact had not published a new Lord Peter Wimsey detective novel for two decades, In the 1950s one American newspaper reviewer complained that in the years after World War Two, "Sayers' books simply disappeared from bookstalls.  They became practically collector's items, with your only chance of obtaining one a criminal chance, either by the use of blackmail or of theft."    

Two years before her death in 1955, however, American publisher Harper and Brothers began reprinting all of Sayers' Lord Peter mystery fiction in hardcover in an attractive uniform edition, a project which continued for a few years after her death.  By 1958, it was being reported that Wimsey's "old friends are being joined by hosts of new ones who are refreshing themselves with a whole series of detective stories without even the mention of a half-clad femme fatale or a trenchcoat sleuth with a cigarette addiction."  I don't believe that Sayers since has been out of print, either in the United States or United Kingdom, to this day.  

Meanwhile, Agatha Christie, Margery Allingham and Ngaio Marsh were still plying their fictional murder trade.  Allingham had slowed down, producing one of her Albert Campion mysteries only every three or four years. Hide My Eyes appeared in 1958, three years after The Estate of the Beckoning Lady, though five years elapsed before The China Governess made it into print in 1963.  

Christie and Marsh were more prolific.  Marsh managed a Roderick Alleyn detective novel every two or three years.  False Scent appeared in 1959, followed by Hand in Glove in 1962.  Old reliable herself, Agatha Christie, almost always had a new detective novel, a so-called "Christie for Christmas," ready for her readers, sometimes an Hercule Poirot (Cat among the Pigeons, 1959), sometimes a Miss Marple (4.50 from Paddington, 1957), sometimes something non series (Ordeal by Innocence, 1958). 

Yet, with that impish upstart Time observing no deference to royalty, the original crime queens were undeniably getting older, just like everyone else in their turn-of-the-century generation.  In 1960 Christie would turn seventy, Marsh sixty-five and Allingham fifty-six.  Allingham, the youngest of the group, would follow Sayers into life's surcease in 1966, dying at the age of sixty-two.  Her widower husband briefly continued the Campion series until his own untimely death, but two books in, in 1969. 

Christie lived on until 1976, but her crime writing began a decline in the Sixties, one which perceptibly accelerated by the end of the decade.  Of the last four mystery novels she wrote in the early Seventies, when she was being affected by memory loss, three of them, in my opinion, are nearly unreadable, though some adoring Christie fans, ever loyal to the queen, will tell you otherwise.  Only Ngaio Marsh kept up a pretty uniform standard with her crime fiction until her death in 1982.  

Though it was evident in the Sixties that the crime queens could not go on forever, the happy news in that decade was that there were new crime queens--ladies in waiting, as it were--in the offing.  All of these women wrote detective novels in the classic vein,with puzzles, precise writing and series sleuths.  First off was Patricia Moyes (1923-2000), whose Inspector Henry Tibbett series was introduced with Dead Men Don't Ski in 1959 and ran until 1993.  

PD James (1920-2014) and Ruth Rendell (1930 to 2015), the most lastingly famous of the second generation of British Crime Queens of what might be termed the Silver Age of detective fiction (around 1960 to 2000), debuted their Adam Dalgliesh and Reginald Wexford mysteries series in 1962 and 1964 respectively.  These critically lauded series respectively ran until 2008 and 2013, to much acclaim. 

II.

Sara Woods portrait, 1961
the next year Collins would
coronate her as a new British
Queen of Crime

The series mysteries of Silver Age Crime Queens Moyes, James and Rendell remain in print today, years after their deaths.  Surprisingly, however, the work of another praised, prolific, second generation British crime queen, a close contemporary of the criminous female trio discussed above, has been out of print for over thirty-five years.  This is Anglo-Canadian writer Sara Woods (1916-1985).  

Sara Woods' forty-eight Antony Maitland detective novels appeared over a quarter century between 1962 and 1987.  (The last three were posthumously published.)  That is an average of almost two books a year for twenty-five years.  Not long after moving to Canada in 1958 with her electrical engineer husband of a dozen years, Woods, a native Yorkshirewoman, began writing the first of her Antony Maitland novels, Bloody Instructions.  

Over the next couple of years, probably 1960-61 she followed Instructions with Malice Domestic, The Third Encounter (The Taste of Fears) and Error of the Moon.  Finally satisfied with her work, in 1961 Woods, then forty-five years old, packaged a quartet of murderous manuscripts into a deadly detective fiction parcel and posted them to prestigious English publisher Collins' Crime Club mystery imprint, the impressive stable of which included both Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh. 

Collins accepted all four of Woods' manuscripts with alacrity, sending the nascent author a cablegram with the happy news, which Woods received while sitting at breakfast with her husband early one morning.  By this time she was writing a fifth Antony Maitland adventure, Trusted like the Fox, which before the end of the year she finished and sent to Collins, who promptly accepted it with the same enthusiasm as they had her previous four works.  

Sara Woods
this fantastically industrious
Yorkshirewoman at heart
moved to Canada in 1958 
with her husband when she was  
42 and launched a prominent
crime writing career

"We've got a bonanza out there in Nova Scotia," declared Crime Club editor George Hardinge (Lord Hardinge of Penshurst) of Woods, who was seemingly a one-woman crime fiction factory.  Despite its near 200 year association with the British Empire and Commonwealth, Canada for whatever reason had not proven a fertile native ground for mystery writers, with some very notable exceptions like Margaret Millar and Ross Macdonald, a criminous writing couple who had moved to the States before commencing their crime fiction careers.  

Collins confided to newspapers that already they were thinking of their new Canadian transplant acquisition "in terms of those formidable female giants of the field, Agatha Christie and Ngaio Marsh."

George Hardinge warmly invited Woods to pay their offices a visit in London, where Collins could discuss with her their plans for her enticing future and introduce her to the United Kingdom's mystery reading public.  On her return to her native country in February 1962, Collins feted Woods, warmly welcoming her, as the Guardian reported, "to their cosy (and very talkative) circle."  

Collins published the first of Woods' books, Bloody Instructions, in June 1962, thus preceding into print P. D. James (over at Faber & Faber) with her own first detective novel, Cover her Face, by six months.  "[W]ith pride and enthusiasm" Collins heralded their new find as an injection of new, rich blood into the somewhat decayed corpus of classic crime fiction:

The Crime Club confidently introduces a new writer of whom we believe a lot will be heard....Sara Woods is the pseudonym of a writer who has never had a book of any kind published before.  We believe that Bloody Instructions introduces an outstanding new writer of detective fiction.  

When Bloody Instructions appeared in England in June, Francis Iles, aka Anthony Berkeley, the self-professed Golden Age founder of that holy sanctum of classic mystery, the Detection Club, was filled with criminal delight, writing: 

The Crime Club is to be congratulated on its discovery of Miss Sara Woods.  Her first novel, Bloody Instructions, is a most accomplished piece of work: a genuine detective story along classical lines brought up to date, with very human characters, and told with a kind of amused detachment which is most engaging.  Altogether, warmly recommended.  

It was as if another new crime queen had been ceremoniously crowned by a past master.  By this time the industrious Woods was completing a sixth Antony Maitland detective novel, This Little Measure.  (You may have already deduced that the lady had a great fondness for Shakespearean titles.)  

The author used this likeness on her book jackets
for years.  It became until recently the only known
image of a rather reclusive mystery writer.  
Recently I discovered two other likenesses,
shown above

In the United States prominent editor Joan Kahn at Harper & Row accepted three of the first five Woods novels for publication in her "novels of suspense" series.  Woods made a hit in the States as well, though unsurprisingly she proved especially prone to appeal to Anglophile American readers, with her precise prose and pristine puzzle plots, populated by a genteel cast of series characters, complete with an imperious butler.  

Wrote a Yank reviewer of Instructions: "Nicely styled, and enlivened with deft touches of restrained, upper-class British humor, this is a mystery tale likely to please sophisticated who-dunnit fans rather than those who favor rough-and-tumble yarns." Observed another: "The characters are real and humorous and oh, so British.  Even the murder is committed over a cup of tea."

To these enchanted American reviewers, Woods' books seemed almost a throwback to prewar days across the pond, when no killer subs patrolled like sharks beneath the waves and the multi-talented Golden Age Crime Queens had first crafted the gloried English detective novel of manners, in which Lord Peter and his suave company of ingenious sleuthhounds had gaily captured all manner of not quite clever enough crooks in posh art deco cityscapes and quaint Tudor villages.  

III.

Sara Woods' genteel series detective--attorney Antony Maitland, whom some reviewers dubbed the Perry Mason of English mystery--was based on none other than one her own elder brothers, also named Antony, a promising young lawyer who had been tragically killed as an RAF pilot in the Second World War, his plane having been shot down in Egypt in 1941, when he was only 33.  

It was as if Woods envisioned with Antony Maitland what her beloved brother Antony Woods Hutton might have become had he survived the war.  She had been employed in his London office as a legal secretary until the commencement of the war, when she prudently left the beleaguered and blitzed City to work as a bank clerk in Shrewsbury.  

After the war Woods wed electrical engineer Anthony George Bowen-Judd in 1946 and for the next dozen years the couple rusticated, owning and operating a series of farms in Woods' native Yorkshire.  In 1958 the couple abandoned rural English life, moving to the city of Halifax, the provincial capital of Nova Scotia, where her husband, whose parents had lived in Canada, resumed engineering work and she became registrar of St. Mary's University.  After she achieved success as a mystery writer, Woods left this position to devote herself fulltime to writing.

Despite the initial fanfare of publicity Collins gave her, Woods in the long run proved a rather publicity-shy individual; and very little today is known about her, her books having been out of print for nearly four decades.  (How fast time passes!)  However, in the forthcoming Dean Street Press editions of her books, readers will find a good deal of new information about her from me.  

Dell pb eds. from the early Seventies

For one thing, Woods' birth year has long been given erroneously as 1922, making her two years younger than PD James, when in fact she was born in 1916, making her in fact four years older than James, and four years younger than Silver Age crime writing stalwarts Julian Symons and Michael Gilbert. Thus she was not, like PD James was, in her fortieth year when her first detective novel was published but was, rather, 46.  

Woods died in 1985 at age sixty-nine and was laid to rest at Niagara-on-the-Lake in the cemetery of St. Vincent de Paul Roman Catholic Church, the oldest surviving Catholic Church still in use in the province of Ontario.  Being such a prolific writer, she left three completed Antony Maitland mysteries behind her, which were duly published in hardcover editions in the UK and US in 1986 and 1987, while at the same time the American paperback publisher reissued over a dozen of her Maitland novels in attractive softcover editions with cover art by much-in-demand illustrator Dave Calver, whose droll depictions of sundry murder victims combined Eighties pop sensibility with an appreciation of the formal conventions of classic English crime fiction.  (I'll have more on Calver on the blog soon.)  

Avon pbs reprinted shortly after Sara Woods' death

Around this time, mystery fiction authority Jacques Barzun declared of Sara Woods (with a backhanded slap at PD James' much-publicized desire to transform the detective story into more of a serious mainstream novel):

If critics really put their minds on what they say, they would call Mrs. Woods, and not some other lady, the new Agatha Christie.  For here is a writer playing virtuoso variations on a  formula without stepping outside a medium range of familiar and respectable existence--no nonsense about turning the tale into symbolism or psychology or 'a true novel'."  

After her death Barzun added sadly: "[T]he pleasure she has given will be much missed."

Then, unaccountably, the publishing world forgot Woods in one of mystery fiction's strangest vanishing acts. Not all mystery fans have forgotten her, however, and hopefully new ones will enjoy her work, beginning with her first five Antony Maitland novels, which will be published later this year by Dean Street Press.