Lillian de la Torre and “the ‘detector’ possibilities”

Lillian de la Torre Bueno (1902–1993) grew up in Manhattan reading mystery stories. After teaching in the New York schools for a few years, she earned master’s degrees from two Ivy League universities. At the age of thirty she appears to have put aside her own academic aspirations to marry a fellow graduate student, George McCue.

The McCues moved west to Colorado College, where George became a professor of English. Lillian took on the no-longer-current role of faculty wife. With no children to look after, she helped to found a local choir and joined an amateur theater company. Over time she taught some courses and helped other professors with their research—for example, she worked with Prof. Lewis Knapp on the life of Tobias Smollett, identifying some forged letters.

Around the time she turned forty, Lillian McCue embarked on a writing career that combined her interests in mystery stories and British history. She later told the scholar Douglas G. Greene that one early inspiration was John Dickson Carr’s book The Murder of Sir Edmund Godfrey (1931), a nonfiction account using the structure of Carr’s whodunnits. Another impetus was a conversation with one of her husband’s colleagues, Prof. Frank Krutzke, about “the ‘detector’ possibilities of Dr. Sam: Johnson.”

Lillian McCue had evidently noticed the parallel between the classic detective and sidekick/narrator model, as established by Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle, and The Life of Samuel Johnson, Ll.D. by James Boswell. Dr. Samuel Johnson was prodigiously smart, given to cutting remarks and paradoxical advice, and full of quirks, both physical and social. Boswell was an admirer, sometimes exasperated but always loyal, with an eye for detail and a strong prose style. (Boswell’s diaries also disclose enough of his own habits, such as womanizing, to make him more than a mere observer.)

McCue used portions of Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides to fashion a tale in Boswell’s voice about Johnson detecting and foiling an exotic Scottish murderer. In 1943 she made her first sale to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, using the nom de plume Lillian de la Torre. This was a more successful story about “Dr. Sam: Johnson, Detector,” titled “The Great Seal of England.” That story begins:

On the night of March 23, 1784, the Great Seal of England was stolen out of Lord Chancellor Thurlow’s house in Great Ormonde Street, and was never seen again.

And indeed that was an actual mystery of the eighteenth century.

TOMORROW: The fate of the great seal.