JULIAN HAWTHORNE (1846–1934), the only son of Nathaniel Hawthorne, followed in his father’s footsteps and decided to become a writer—very much against his family’s wishes, as he had been educated at Harvard to be a civil engineer and previously had expressed interest in philosophy and had shown great artistic skill with his ability to draw. What he lacked in genius he compensated for with perspicacity, producing a vast number of novels and short stories, many uncollected from their magazine appearances. Much of his writing was in the mystery, horror, and supernatural genres.
His first story, “Love & Counter Love; or, Masquerading,” was immediately accepted by Harper’s Weekly, which paid the then generous sum of fifty dollars for it, and he quickly sold more stories to Scribner’s, Lippincott’s, and other leading magazines. He was one of the first American mystery writers to use a series detective, Inspector Byrnes, who serves as the protagonist in several novels, including A Tragic Mystery (1887), An American Penman (1887), Another’s Crime (1888), and The Great Bank Robbery (1888). Working as a journalist, he covered the Indian famine for Cosmopolitan magazine in 1897 and the Spanish-American War for the New York Journal in 1898. Having lost his money in a farming venture in Jamaica, he entered a contest, reputedly writing A Fool of Nature in eighteen days under a pseudonym (it was published under his own name in 1896), for which he won a ten-thousand-dollar prize. He was later caught in a silver-mine stock fraud and served a year in prison.
“Greaves’ Disappearance” was first published in Six Cent Sam’s (St. Paul, Minnesota, Price-McGill, 1893).