Hitchcock's Baker's Dozen -- Third Time's a Charm -- Garbo

 

This week, we return to a 1960s reprint of a late 40s collection of mystery stories, from which we've twice selected stories to feature. 

Mary Deasy's contribution to this volume, "Long Shadow on the Lawn" (the title comes from an Emily Dickinson poem), is short enough to fall under the modern "flash fiction" category. The tale was chosen for the 1945 edition of the O.Henry short story award winners.  You can read it online for free at this site.

 I wasn't familiar with Mary Deasy or her work, so I did some rudimentary online research and discovered that Deasy, who was accomplished and prolific, was hard to gather information about. "Anonymous was a woman," right?

The easiest thing to find out was that Deasy used the pen name Clare Darcy to write Regency romances like this one:

I did a little more Googling and came across a blogger who'd put up a post about doing research going the other way, that is she's a fan of Clare Darcy's books who went looking for Mary Deasy. Building on this, I added "Cincinnati" to my original search terms and was able to find this listing for Mary Deasy  on the Ohio site for the Library of Congress' Center for the Book site. It turns out that Deasy sold stories to top-tier magazines, and her work was included not only in the Baker's Dozen Hitchcock volume, but also in two different O. Henry Prize Winners collections and a a couple of annual gatherings of The Best American Short Stories, where she kept company with writers of the stature of Eudora Welty and Truman Capote. A librarian at my local branch has tracked down these 1940s anthologies for me and I'm excited to know that the excellent MaineCat statewide network of libraries is busily arranging for me to read more of Mary Deasy's prize-winning stories.

She also wrote a number of novels. Ella Gunning (dust jacket is at the top of this post), in digital form, can be borrowed from the Open Library portion of Internet Archive.

 

 

 

If you go here, you can find and borrow Deasy's novel Devil's Bridge from the Open Library site. 

Mary Deasy started out writing more mainstream fiction, as well as mystery and suspense stories, under her own name, then took up the pen name Clare Darcy to do the Regency romances, each titled after a female main character: Georgina, Pamela, Lydia, and so on.  Around the time she was writing the romance series, she contributed an article to the magazine The Writer, using her own name. This was published in February, 1972. I suspect that Deasy had been asked how she'd managed to turn out so many good books, and her answer was to make not just lists, but purposeful lists:

Though Deasy was an alum of an Ohio university, her papers are archived at Boston University. I'm so glad that many of the boxed items have been scanned so they are available to researchers and interested readers online. 

The only photo of Mary Deasy I've found so far is a cute one. When she was young, Mary made the news in her home town of Cincinnati when a story she submitted took a cash prize from the children's magazine St. Nicholas.

Note:  The cover for the paperback reprint of the Hitchcock collection has been bothering me, and it has nothing to do with the movie director's disembodied head tumbling out of a muffin pan. No, the issue is with the art director, who didn't know what "a baker's dozen" means. It's a dozen plus one, not minus one. In medieval Europe, food sellers were fined for selling scant, giving less measure than advertised. Since the officials were sometimes corrupt, finding standard loaves of bread to be too small in order to collect bribes, bakers protected themselves by adopting a "buy twelve, get one free" policy