Carolyn Wells (1870–1942) was an American writer, poet, and critic. Despite being deaf from early childhood, Wells wrote more than 170 books of crime fiction, parodies, and humorous verse. She penned sixty-one titles about a detective named Fleming Stone and created the American series of “year’s best mystery stories” in 1931. Among her titles is The Technique of the Mystery Story: Complete Practical Study of the Theory and Structure of the Form with Examples from the Best Mystery Writers, first published in 1913, which includes numerous examples from the Sherlock Holmes canon. Wells was a devotee of the Master. She befriended Harry Thurston Peck and Arthur Bartlett Maurice, respectively the senior and junior editors of the influential Bookman magazine in the early twentieth century, and the three friends celebrated their love of all things Sherlockian in numerous essays, reviews, and poems in early issues of the Bookman.* However, the following first appeared in the Century Magazine for May 1915 with illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele, who regularly illustrated the American publications of the Holmes stories beginning in 1903.

 

^* See S.E. Dahlinger and Leslie S. Klinger, eds., Sherlock Holmes and the Bookman: An Anthology of Literary Treasures (1895–1933) (Indianapolis: Wessex Press, 2010).