He was always known as Bill; his chrism name was William Hulbert Footner; he was amused when sometimes at a party someone in a hurry to be intimate would hail him Hulbert. Lots of things amused him; and he kept his wide grin under cover until there w... Read more

He was always known as Bill; his chrism name was William Hulbert Footner; he was amused when sometimes at a party someone in a hurry to be intimate would hail him Hulbert. Lots of things amused him; and he kept his wide grin under cover until there was someone he could split it with. (I always thought it characteristic how many times in his stories someone rubs his lips to conceal a grin.I think Bill was pleased by the many times I told him that no living writer had given me such a total of innocent opiate and refuge. One reason why his detective tales have always been for me the perfect laxative is that I usually read them when I should be doing something else. I used to pride myself on having the most complete collection of Footners anywhere; but then I got the bad habit of parcelling them round in different hiding places (so that wherever I might be, there'd be a Footner available for bedtime or the after-lunch siesta). So now I'm not sure which are missing on loan, or which are simply cached in one of my five earth-boxes. But only yesterday, turning through some old papers, I found a letter from Woodrow Wilson, early 1921, thanking me for sending him The Fugitive Sleuth. So that's what happened to it! I remember Mr. Wilson, after leaving the White House, telling me he couldn't find enough really readable detective stories. So I sent him my precious Fugitive Sleuth. I think (I'm relying only on memory) it was Bill's first detective yarn. I read it in MS, way back about 1916, when I was contact man for Bill at his publishers. He was the first author professionally assigned to me when I started work at Doubleday's, in 1913. We hadn't been doing too well with his early novels of the Canadian Northwest, and Bill wanted to develop a new vein. He wrote The Fugitive Sleuth (first a serial in one of the soft-paper magazines) as an experiment. I haven't read it since Woodrow Wilson got my copy, but I think it dealt with Bill's first detective, that delightful young enquiry agent B. Enderby, who had an office somewhere on 34th Street. Thirty-fourth Street was the great street of glamour in those days; right across from the Hotel Madagascar as Bill always pseudoed the old Waldorf. And a block away was the Vandermeer, which we would recognize as the Vanderbilt. Bill had studied their exits and their entrances, and many a lively chase took place through their lobbies and service stairways. There followed The Substitute Millionaire, which I still think a perfect plot for a movie; and many others. Less