WILLIAM HULBERT FOOTNER (1879–1944) was born in Hamilton, Ontario. He went to school in New York City and began his journalism career there, then moved back to Canada to take a newspaper job in Alberta. He had brief careers as an actor, playwright, and screenwriter. His early fiction reflects his locale as he set his mystery-adventure novels in northwest Canada. He returned to the United States and wrote mainly detective stories, primarily about two utterly disparate characters. Amos Lee Mappin, a wealthy author and criminologist who functions as an amateur detective, resembles the Mr. Pickwick of Charles Dickens. He is the protagonist in ten novels, though he seldom actually solves the mysteries, leaving “the dirty work” to his friends. Footner used his friend Christopher Morley as a major character in the first Mappin book, The Mystery of the Folded Paper (1930). Morley reciprocated by writing a warm tribute to Footner’s posthumously published Orchids to Murder (1945).
Quite different from Mappin is the breathtakingly gorgeous Madame Rosika Storey, who describes herself as “a practical psychologist—specializing in the feminine.” She made her debut in The Under Dogs (1925) and appears in eight additional books, mostly short collections such as Madame Story (1926), The Velvet Hand: New Madame Storey Mysteries (1928), and The Almost Perfect Murder: More Madame Storey Mysteries (1933).
“The Ashcomb Poor Case” was first published in Madame Storey (New York, Doran, 1926).