Name Isabel Ostrander Movies The Single Track | Role Writer | |
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Died April 26, 1924, Long Beach, California, United States Books The Crevice (Illustrate, The Clue in the Air: A Detective, Anything Once, The Fifth Ace, Unseen Hands | ||
Isabel Egenton Ostrander (1883–1924) was a prolific mystery writer of the early twentieth century who used, besides her own name, the pseudonyms Robert Orr Chipperfield, David Fox, and Douglas Grant. Christopher B. Booth is sometimes (falsely) credited as a pseudonym of hers. She was born in New York City to Thomas E Ostrander and Harriet Elizabeth Bradbrook. Her Ostrander pedigree goes back to seventeenth century Kingston, New York. In the 1920s, Ostrander was notable enough that Agatha Christie parodied her in her Tommy and Tuppence anthology, Partners in Crime (short story collection).
In the discussions of which writer invented the blind detective, Ostrander is one of the candidates.
The first book publication of her Damon Gaunt is a 1915 novel At One-Thirty, but there might be a misplaced earlier short story: periodical publication of many mystery short storyists is often lost or partial. For example, blind detective Thornley Colton appeared in some short stories in People's Ideal Fiction Magazine in early 1913, that weren't collected in book form until 1915, while Max Carrados by Ernest Bramah reached the periodicals in 1913, but anthologization in 1914. In no case is bibliography complete for periodicals, and any of the three might be the first, though Max Carrados was the first in book publication.
She was parodied by Agatha Christie in Partners in Crime, a Tommy and Tuppence mystery that parodies many of Christie's idols. We find Tommy and Tuppence modeling their detective skills after Ostrander's characters, McCarty and Riordan.