5 million views and the Hugh Wheeler/Richard Webb (Patrick Quentin) Critical Biography

As the Passing Tramp blog achieved fifteen years of existence late last november, its views also starting shooting upward.  In December there were around 140,000 views, in January 146,000, in February 135,000, in March 267,000 and in April 213,000 (month not quite over).  A few days ago, the lifetime blog views surpassed five million.  If the current views rate holds I will be adding 2-3 million views every year.

I have committed a quarter-century of my life now to chronicling vintage crime fiction history so this development, at least, is gratifying.  There have been a lot of disappointments as well, however.  One such disappointment is not having gotten my joint critical bio of Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb published.  I didn't go the academic route this time but rather commercial and I found that publishing non-fiction commercially is a tough row to hoe.  Agents were duly impressed, if not amazed, with the depth and breadth of the research, but felt the book needed more of a "narrative history" approach.  Non-fiction that reads just like fiction, as it were.  I've always been told I'm a good scholarly writer, though I did make an effort to write more commercially this time around.  

What's frustrating to me is I know this is an important book.  Vintage mystery fans will love all the detail on Rickie and Hugh's crime fiction, but this book also is an important contribution to twentieth-century LGBTQ history.  So what to do?  Perhaps I will self-publish.  The book is completed, standing at 582 manuscript pages and about 181,000 words (about 173,000 main text, plus 8000 in appendices).  It represents a massive amount of research into social history as well as the lives of these two men, adding enormously to what we know about them.  I provide the table of contents and first three paragraphs of the introduction below.

On the blog I have written a lot over the years about Hugh Wheeler and Richard Webb, but for those who don't know they are best known for their mid-century Patrick Quentin mysteries (first written collaboratively, then later by Hugh alone), but they also wrote fine mysteries as Q. Patrick and Jonathan Stagge.  Hugh went on to write film screenplays and the book for Sweeney Todd and other broadway musicals.  Here's a prior general post on their writing and one rather more personal on the authors themselves. 

I've been disappointed over the years with various larger mystery publishers who have relied on my spadework, which has been extremely substantial for over fifteen years (I've dug up a lot of graves over the years), without acknowledging it, as well as additional boorish behavior like that by the egregious OP, but I did hope the queer press might come to bat for this book, a history of one of the more significant gay couples of the twentieth century. It's hard to document such couples before the Stonewall Riots, when most of them lived closted lives.  

Anyway, we shall see what happens, but I realize I have to get this book out somehow,  I've been trying off and on for a couple of years now.  Ironically it's probably the best of my many books.  I would like to have made some money on it, but if that's not to be I'll just self-publish to get the story out there in some form.  But anyway, here's a little hint of it:

Introduction (3-7)

Part I

Rickie and Hugh: Men Alone (1902-1932), Men Together (1933-1951), Men Apart (1952-     1987) (8-220)

Part II

Rickie and Hugh’s Crime Writing: Q. Patrick, Jonathan Stagge, Patrick Quentin, Short      Fiction (221-432)       

Part III

Stranger Things: Queer Matter in Rickie and Hugh’s Crime Writing (433-544)

Conclusion: Puzzles for Posterity (545-546)

Appendix A: Works by Richard Wilson Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler (547-558)

Appendix B: Philadelphia Freedom: Rickie and Hugh’s Gay Circle in Philadelphia

(559-566)

Appendix C: The Patrick Quentin Fan and Friend List (567-576)

Appendix D: Richard Wilson Webb Juvenilia (577-582)

Introduction 

            Over the last decade of researching LGBTQ+ history for this book I have come to feel like a sleuth in a detective novel, for so often I have found myself dealing with suppressions, evasions and outright lies, all of them designed to hide deeds done in darkness from exposure to light.  Sometimes it seems as if Ross Macdonald’s private eye Lew Archer, who in novel after novel is beleaguered by the deceptions crafted by generations of close-mouthed, dysfunctional, upper-class California families, had an easier time of it.  With the perseverance of an Archer, I was able in 2018 to trace the whereabouts of the ninety-one-year-old nephew of Richard “Rickie” Wilson Webb (1901-1966), one of the two subjects of this joint critical biography.  Webb’s nephew, to whom I had hopefully reached out from halfway around the world through the miracle of modern electronic communication, gave me for my pains a polite but coldly cursory two-sentence reply: Thank you for your enquiry about my uncle.  I am not in a position to help you.  So shut a final door, fifty-two years after Rickie Webb’s death, on probably the last living portal into his elusive family history.  Even in the internet age, family secrets can be carried to the grave and the love that dare not speak its name thereby finally fail to give tongue. 

            Thus it is that Rickie Webb and Hugh Callingham Wheeler (1912-1987), an Anglo-American same sex couple of two decades standing who wrote some of the finest crime fiction from the mid-twentieth century, could remain, until the last few years, publicly unacknowledged as precisely that: a same sex couple.  To the mystery readers of 2010, Rickie and Hugh had remained exactly what they were to the mystery readers of 1950: two men, best buds perhaps, who happened to have written their mysteries together.  The truth was implicit to anyone who could but read between the lines, yet precisely because the truth lay between the lines it could still be determinedly overlooked by those who refused to see it.  In this way same-sex relationships throughout the course of history have been allowed effectively to vanish from the annals of history. 

            The full personal histories of other, more famous men than Rickie Webb and Hugh Wheeler were long successfully concealed as well.  Over two decades ago, 1998 was a banner year for truth in this regard, with the publication of Keith Hale’s Friends and Apostles: The Correspondence of Rupert Brooke and James Strachey, 1905-1914 and Alan Bishop’s and Mark Bostridge’s Letters from a Lost Generation: First World War Letters of Vera Brittain and Four Friends, wherein we learned respectively of Great War poet Rupert Brooke’s bisexuality and the homosexuality of author Vera Brittain’s brother, Edward, the exposure of which to his commanding officers likely led tragically to the soldier’s decision to sacrifice his life on the field of battle at Asiago, Italy on the fatal morning of June 15, 1918 rather than endure public disgrace.  Fortunately, telltale primary material about these men survived, allowing determined scholar-detectives eventually to elicit the truth in the face of decades-long obfuscations.  Geoffrey Keynes, brother of bisexual economist John Maynard Keynes and trustee of Rupert Brooke’s literary estate, had vowed that James Strachey’s illuminating correspondence with Brooke would be published only “over my dead body,” and so indeed had it transpired.  Similarly, 2002 saw the publication of Dominic Hibberd’s Wilfred Owen: A New Biography, which exploded the myth of the gay Great War poet’s saintly asexuality, perpetrated over the years by many individuals.  In doing so they followed the lead of Owen’s brother Harold, who had selectively edited, effaced and even destroyed Owen’s letters, Hibberd notes, partly out of “a desperate anxiety to suppress anything that might assist rumors that Wilfred had been gay.”  Wilfred was no “homo-sexualist,” avowed Harold, who emphatically disdained homosexuality.