“Had not you better write it down?”

Before getting too far from the literary salon of Sir John Riggs-Miller and Anna, Lady Miller, I want to note that the novelist Frances Burney (1752–1840, shown here) left a very lively portrait of visiting the couple’s home in Batheaston in her diary.

This visit happened on 8 June 1780. Burney had published her first novel, Evelina, two years before. It was a big success, and Hester Thrale had taken the young author under her wing, conducting her around London and out to Bath.

They visited the Riggs-Millers on a day without a poetry competition. The famous vase was off being cleaned, Burney was pleased to record. But there was eccentric conversation enough.

Along with other detail the novelist recorded a conversation with a young fan, whom she described as “Miss Miller, a most beautiful little girl of ten years old.” In fact, this girl was eleven or twelve, born to the Riggs-Millers in 1768. Alas, I haven’t found a record of her first name.

Burney wrote:

Miss W—— begged her to sing us a French song. She coquetted, but Mrs. Riggs came to us, and said if I wished it I did her grand-daughter great honour, and she insisted upon her obedience. The little girl laughed and complied, and we went into another room to hear her, followed by the Misses Caldwell. She sung in a pretty childish manner enough.

When we became more intimate, she said, “Ma’am, I have a great favour to request of you, if you please!”

I begged to know what it was, and assured her I would grant it; and, to be out of the way of these misses, I led her to the window.

“Ma’am,” said the little girl, “will you then be so good as to tell me where Evelina is now?”

I was a little surprised at the question, and told her I had not heard lately.

“Oh, ma’am, but I am sure you know!” cried she, “for you know you wrote it! and mamma was so good as to let me hear her read it; and pray, ma’am, do tell me where she is? and whether Miss Branghton and Miss Polly went to see her [SPOILER] when she was married to Lord Orville?”

I promised her I would inquire, and let her know. “And pray, ma’am, is Madame Duval with her now?”

And several other questions she asked me, with a childish simplicity that was very diverting. She took the whole for a true story, and was quite eager to know what was become of all the people. And when I said I would inquire, and tell her when we next met,

“Oh, but, ma’am,” she said, “had not you better write it down, because then there would be more of it, you know?”

Burney interpreted the little girl’s questions as indicating that she believed Evelina and all the other characters in the novel were real.

I think the child of a writer who hosted other writers understood how fiction works. She was prodding the young novelist to hurry up and write a sequel.

Burney produced her second novel in 1782, but Cecilia wasn’t a sequel to Evelina.

Four Decades of “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector”

I’ve been discussing the historical background behind Lillian de la Torre’s mystery short story, “The Great Seal of England.”

In 1943 De la Torre was in her forties and known around Colorado Springs as Lillian McCue, wife of a Colorado College professor. Then she sold that story to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine.

That launched De la Torre’s career as a writer. She was an Ellery Queen favorite for the next four decades. A couple of years after that first sale, she even visited Hollywood to consult on some movies. Eventually she served a year as president of the Mystery Writers of America.

With her “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” stories, Lillian De la Torre invented a new subgenre of whodunnits. Although Melville Davisson Post had written Uncle Abner mysteries set in the ante-bellum past starting in 1911, De le Torre innovated by basing her “detector” and the characters around him on actual historical figures, and crafting her plots around real events.

De la Torre’s first published book was a fictionalized analysis of what happened to Elizabeth Canning in 1753, called Elizabeth Is Missing. She wrote other books in this vein, such as The Heir of Douglas. Though these were originally published as fiction, De la Torre believed she had identified the correct solutions to those historical enigmas, and they’re now presented as “definitive accounts” of the underlying events. (Other authors would differ.)

For her stories about Dr. Johnson, De la Torre had the advantage of James Boswell’s extensive writings about the man. She produced an entertaining pastiche of Boswell’s voice, including not only his language and details but even dialogue structure.

To her credit, De la Torre also recognized the limitations of that narrative approach, as when Johnson’s other and closer biographer, Hester Thrale Piozzi, makes an appearance. “Boswell did not like Mrs. Thrale,” the author noted in an afterword; “he considered her his rival for ‘that great man.’” (Adam Gopnik wrote about Johnson and Thrale for the New Yorker.)

The stories jump around in time to take advantage of different events in George III’s realm. Some involve figures from the American Revolution, such as waxwork artist and spy Patience Wright and scientist and diplomat Benjamin Franklin. Mike Grost noted that De la Torre wrote about thefts as often as murders.

In some ways, De la Torre’s stories show the biases of her own time. Dr. Johnson had a servant and heir named Francis Barber (shown above), who had been freed from slavery in Jamaica. De la Torre brought Barber onto the scene in her first published story, but gave him no more life than a piece of furniture. Not until “The Blackamoor Unchain’d” (1974) did he become a full character, and then only for one tale. These days I’m sure authors would see much more potential in Barber’s own life.

There were four collections of De la Torre’s “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” stories, and the Mysterious Press has reissued them in digital form:

• Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector (1946)
• The Detections of Dr Sam Johnson (1960)
• The Return of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector (1985)
• The Exploits of Dr Sam Johnson, Detector (1987)

As of this writing, they’re on sale at a discounted price on the major ebook platforms.