Alabama Authors: C Terry Cline & Judith Richards

In 2017 I wrote a post on this blog about Babs and Borden Deal, an Alabama couple [until their divorce] who both wrote numerous novels and short stories. This post is about a similar writing duo. 

Judith Richards died on September 23 of last year; she was born in Illinois. Her husband C. Terry Cline, a Birmingham native, died May 2, 2013. Cline and Richards married in 1979, and in addition to their own writing became well-known in the Fairhope area for their willingness to help younger writers.

Cline wrote for radio and television and ran an advertising agency before publishing his first novel, Damon, in 1975. He published nine more by 1989. Three of those are "borderline" science fiction according to his entry in the Science Fiction Encyclopedia. Other novels are thrillers. His final work, The Return of Edgar Cayce, claimed to be communications from the early 20th century psychic. Cayce had an Alabama connection; he operated a photography studio in Selma from 1912 until 1923. An eleventh novel, The Cordoba Connection, was left unfinished at Cline's death and completed by his wife and published in 2016. You can read more about his novels on GoodReads. 

Richards published seven novels between 1978 and 2015. Her first novel Summer Lightning features a young boy growing up in a migrant labor camp during the Great Depression. The later novel Thelonious Rising tells the story of a young boy in the time of Hurricane Katrina. Her novel Summer Lightning was chosen for a 1978 volume of Reader's Digest Condensed Books. Read more about her work on GoodReads. Read more about her fascinating life in the obituary linked below. 

Both writers have stories included in the anthology edited by Sonny Brewer, Stories from the Blue Moon Cafe published in 2002. Cline's is "S.Trident" and Richards' is "How the Story Ends." The biographical note for Richards notes, "Summer Lightning, which is about her husband, author C. Terry Cline, Jr., has been published in seventeen languages..."

Unfortunately, neither author has an entry in Wikipedia or the Encyclopedia of Alabama. 

Source: An article about horror writers with Alabama connections at al.com

C. Terry Cline's books

Damon (1975)
Death Knell (1977)
Cross Current (1979)
Mind Reader (1981)
Missing Persons (1982)
The Attorney Conspiracy (1983)
Violated (1984)
Prey (1985)
Quarry (1987)
Reaper (1989)
The Return of Edgar Cayce (2011)
The Cordoba Conspiracy (2016)

Photo from her obituary at al.com

Judith Richards' books:

Summer Lightning (1978)

Triple Indemnity (1982)

Seminole Summer (1987)

After the Storm (1987)

Too Blue to Fly (1997)

Thelonious Rising (2014)

The Sounds of Silence (2015)

Sailing South American Skies by James Saxon Childers

Back in April I posted a piece on one of Hudson Strode's travel books, Now in Mexico. Strode taught English at the University of Alabama for many years before his death in 1976; many of the state's fiction writers passed through his classes. In addition to his travel books, Strode published a three volume biography of Jefferson Davis. 

In some ways James Saxon Childers [1899-1965] was similar to Strode. Childers was born in Birmingham and taught English at Birmingham-Southern College from 1925-1942. He also wrote some travel studies, such as the one I'm looking at in this post. While at Birmingham-Southern he published reviews and columns in local newspapers and several significant novels, including Hilltop in the Rain [1928], set at a small southern college. The significance of The Bookshop Mystery [1930] is noted at the end of this post. His 1936 work A Novel about a White Man and a Black Man in the Deep South was a daring portrait of endemic racism in the southern U.S. The 1942 spy novel Enemy Outpost was based on Childers' own military experiences. 

I have comments about this 1936 travel book below some of the images. As with the Strode book on Mexico, I haven't read this one and plan to let it go in the downsizing of my book collection.

You can find Childers 1933 Birmingham News-Age-Herald article on Parker High School here. One from the following year on the legendary Birmingham elephant Miss Fancy is here.

Photograph of Childers from the Encyclopedia of Alabama 

Childers in his study at Birmingham-Southern College in the late 1930's

Source: BhamWiki

My copy of the book is the 1936 first edition, but does not have the dust jacket, which you can see here. 

Like my copy of Strode's book, this one is signed by the author. I have been unable to identify "Vincent Townsend". Journeys through Childers' papers at the Birmingham Public Library or the University of North Carolina might solve the mystery. That message from Childers is rather cryptic. 

By the time this book appeared in 1936, Childers had quite a track record of publications.

Yes, we have the "Great White Visitor coming out of the jungle photograph" as the frontispiece. Childers is not only wearing a white suit and hat and a tie, but has the coat buttoned. Did people really travel like that or was the outfit donned for the photo?

I'm such a book nerd I researched the printers, Quinn and Boden of Rahway, New Jersey. The company was apparently a large one; a 1922 book about it can be read here. 

More cryptic dedications

Childers devotes a chapter to a strike by Mexican prostitutes and another to the "hellish sport" of bull fighting. 

More chapters are devoted to Rio, the "most beautiful city on earth", a thousand mile odyssey up the Amazon, and tropical fish. His final chapter, excerpts below, discusses American ignorance about the other America. 

One day while fishing on a lake in Alabama, Childers up and decided to fly around the whole of South America and see much of it. His reason? He knew "virtually nothing about the people of South America today, [and] I decided that I would go find out about them."

As he ends the book, Childers notes some things he would do differently if he took the trip again. 

The author notes that Americans need to overcome their lack of knowledge and their misinformation about the nations of South America. On a golf course in Uruguay, a famous surgeon gives him sage advice that we in the United States still haven't taken. 

Childers' only mystery novel, published in 1930, has never been reprinted and sells on the rare book market for prices ranging from $200+ to $900+. The work is an early example of the bibliomystery, a genre which involves libraries, bookstores, archives, their employees and/or the rare book market, etc. 

An Alabama Author & A Polar Explorer

On March 5 the shipwreck of the Endurance was located more than 100 years after Captain Ernest Shackleton and his crew abandoned the vessel during their 1915 expedition to the Antarctic. In January of that year the ship became frozen in ice; the crew remained with the Endurance until November when it sank. That event began even more incredible efforts by the crew. A recent account is Alfred Lansing and Nathaniel Philbrick's 2015 book Endurance. Incredibly, all members of the crew survived the ordeal. 

A photograph of Captain Shackleton's cabin on the ship reveals a few shelves of books he took on the expedition to help him pass the downtime. This article reprints the inventory of that personal library. The books include an encyclopedia, various dictionaries, collections of poetry, accounts of other polar expeditions, and wait--what's that? Why, it's a novel by an author with Alabama connections!

Let's investigate.

Over the course of her writing career, Amelie Rives Troubetzkoy published more than 20 novels between 1888 and 1930. One of those was World's-End, published in 1914. A copy of that book, probably with the cover and title page as shown below, ended up on a shelf in Shackleton's cabin. Also below is a contemporary review. You can read the novel online at the Internet Archive. So who was Amelie Louise Rives, later to become Princess Troubetzkoy?

Rives was born August 23, 1863, in Richmond, Virginia. Her parents were Alfred and Sarah; Alfred was an engineer. Amelie was the oldest of three daughters. At some point in the 1870's Alfred accepted a position as chief superintendent & general manager of the Mobile and Ohio Railroad in Mobile. Amelie--and probably her sisters--continued the study of music and drawing under tutors and governesses. She also studied music under Miss Evy, who operated a private school in the city, and drawing at the Mobile Academy of Design.

The Rives family can be found in Mobile in the 1880 U.S. census. Patriarch Alfred L. Rives was fifty years old, a civil engineer and born in France around 1830. His wife Sarah was from Virginia. The children were Amelia, 16; Gertrude, 13; and Daisy, 5. Their home was 87 Government Street, near the current location of the Exploreum Science Center and a couple of blocks from Bienville Square.

Amelia's first publication, the romantic short story "A Brother to Dragons" appeared in the Atlantic Monthly in 1886. Two years later her first novel The Quick or the Dead? created a scandal with its daring--immoral!--content as it quickly sold 300,000 copies. The book featured a new widow attracted to her late husband's cousin. Rives career was off to an impressive start; she published many novels, poems, and plays until 1930 and her final novel, Firedamp. Poetry publication continued into the 1940s. She died June 15, 1945. 

In June 1888 Rives married her first husband, a wealthy New Yorker named John Armstrong Chaloner, who led a fascinating life himself. The marriage was tumultuous and by 1895 the couple divorced. The following year she wed a Russian prince, Pierre Troubetzkoy, an established portrait painter. The two were introduced to each other in England by Oscar Wilde. That union lasted until his death in 1936. The couple lived in her ancestral home Castle Hill in Virginia. You can see the prince's 1904 photograph of his wife here. 

Despite her many publications and fame during her lifetime, Rives has fallen into obscurity since her death. Little has been written about her life or critical evaluation of her work. All of which is a shame. She mixed with some of the best known authors of the day, ranging from Thomas Hardy, Henry James, Ellen Glasgow and Mark Twain. Author James Branch Cabell was a cousin. She was an enthusiastic supporter of women's suffrage. Her work was parodied, surely a sign of her acclaim. Newspapers published anecdotes about her. 

Some reviews were positive, but many not. Her novels were long, stuffed with characters and events and included racial stereotypes of the day. Her heroines and heroes felt intensely, but spoke in the overheated dialog characteristic of so much literature at that time. Yet modern topics crept into them. In her 1915 novel Shadows of Flames a wife discovers the hiding place of her morphine-addicted husband--in his cigarettes. 

See Leila Christenbury's essay linked below for many more details of Rives' life and work. A search of the Library of Congress' Chronicling America newspaper database for 1880-1945 will turn up numerous articles about Rives published in her lifetime. 

Further Reading

Louis Auchincloss, A Writer's Capital Houghton Mifflin, 1979. [Includes a chapter on Rives]

Leila Christenbury, "Amélie Louise Rives Chanler Troubetzkoy 1863–1945," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2021 

Welford Dunaway Taylor.  Amelie Rives (Princess Troubetzkoy Twayne, 1973 [info on Rives' time in Mobile is on p. 21]

Amelie Rives [1863-1945]

Source: The Bookman via Wikimedia Commons

This photo of Shackleton's cabin was taken in early March 1915 by Australian photographer Frank Hurley. 

Source: BBC.com

These two illustrations in World's End were reproduced from paintings by Alonzo Myron Kimball; one is seen on the cover of Collier's below.

Source: Wikipedia

Prior to book publication the novel was serialized in Collier's November 29, 1913-April 11, 1914

Source: FictionMags Index

Findlay Weaver, editor of the Canadian publication Maclean's, discussed the book in the October 1, 1914, issue: 

To get back to the particular book to be considered this month, “World’s End” gets its name from the estate in Virginia where the greater part of the action of the story takes place. The novel can scarcely evade the charge of sentimentalism, yet it has an appealing quality which will endear it to the lovers of romance.

The principal characters of the tale are Phoebe Nelson, a heroine who blooms with all the charm of the South, her cousin Richard Bryce and his uncle Owen Randolph.

Richard is a fascinating young man, an abnormally clever artist with untold faith in himself as such and as a poet as well. But he has a twisted view of life, which, in the influence exerted on the girl with her rich and romantic nature, all but wrecks her prospects of true happiness and would have done so but for quiet strength in body, mind, and emotion of Richard’s uncle, Owen Randolph, who, stirred to the depth of his compassion and love for her, employs the force of his big character to reconstruct her life. Through deeply pathetic circumstances, by Owen’s assistance, she finally wins to triumphant happiness and the telling is lightened along the way by a charming humor and fine descriptive pasages making “World’s End” a most realistic place indeed, with warmly pictured characters, including funny and lovable negro servants.

Richard had peculiar views as to religion and marriage. He considered them “inartistic.” The universe was to him a vast studio. At twenty-six his enthusiasms gave him keener delight than they did to those about him. He did not restrict his attention to painting, for besides that he was, at the time of the opening of the story, engaged in writing a one-act opera in accordance with the Chinese laws of music which he maintained constituted the only real tonic-scale; and was also writing a volume of poems, the latest of his poems being “The Daughter of Ypocras.” Expounding this poem, he said: “Ypocras was a lovely girl who had been changed into a dragon and doomed to retain this fearful shape until some lover, knowing her plight, should be bold enough to kiss her on the mouth. The lover comes and, being often mirrored in the beautiful eyes which are all that remain to her of her woman’s form, is drawn gradually into doting on the rare sinuosities of her dragon-shape, and the play of the light along her scales of gold and violet. So that when at last his kiss transforms her again to woman, his artist heart breaks at the loss of his exquisite dragon, and he sinks dying at the feet of the sweetly normal maiden who has taken her place.” Richard further explained that he had endeavored in the poem to reveal some of the dark yet radiant magic lurking in the mysterious perversities of femininity, as opposed to the common-place attraction of what he called “the daylight charm of the uncomplex woman.”

Such twisted views were characteristic of Richard. For instance, when he came suddenly upon Phoebe in her garden, helpet crow “Jimmy Toots” was perched on her shoulder and as she caught sight of Richard she tried with both hands to tear “Jimmy Toots” from his perch but Richard, seeing “a picture of a young woman in an April garden with a bird of ill-omen on her shoulder,” urged her not to take it down.

“You with that crow are like a poem by Baudelaire” and forthwith “Jimmy Toots” became “M. Baudelaire” to Richard. How could one of his intensely artistic nature possibly employ such an inelegant term as “Jimmy Toots.”

Richard paints her picture in the garden with “M. Baudelaire,” calling the painting “Pandore et le Genie du Coffre.” In the painting he exaggerated a likeness he saw in her to a Botticelli, so that the head seemed a little small for the long nymphean limbs. “But the translation of Jimmy Crow into a bird of sombre presage was wholly a masterpiece.

Far more than any serpent he seemed fitted to whisper of honeyed sins in the ear of this virginal Eve-Pandore.

When Phoebe was permitted to see the painting her first words were, “Are my . . . am I quite as ... as long as that?” Her father, while admitting that the treatment was certainly original, considered that his living Phoebe was far prettier than Richard’s “Pandore.”

The reader can well imagine the effect of an attractive yet wholly self-centred young man in his influence upon the young woman who saw in him the ideal for whom she waited and will realize something of the possibilities which this situation opens to the author in working out the story and it is like getting into God’s clear sunshine when the influence of Owen Randolph eventually gains precedence.

The sinking of the Endurance 1 November 1915

Source: Wikipedia

Alabama Author: Gladys Baker

I recently wrote a blog post on a poet with Alabama connections, Sara Henderson Hay. In the course of researching Hay, I discovered her relationship in the 1930's with another state author, Gladys Baker. 

Here's what I wrote in that blog post about Baker: "In 1935 while at Scribner's Hay was able to tour Europe as secretary to Gladys Baker, a syndicated newspaper columnist. Baker had moved to the Magic City in 1926 to begin working for the Birmingham News. Small world, isn't it? I've yet to discover how the two women met, but on the tour they met with Pope Pius XI, Mussolini, Ataturk and other notables."

Unfortunately, I still haven't discovered how Hay and Baker met. Let's investigate.

Baker was born around 1900 in Jacksonville, Florida. Despite a fair amount of searching, I have yet to find an exact date. Her parents were Arthur Herbert [1869-1926] and Johnnie Niblo Baker [1873-1936]. They were married on December 23, 1890, in Glenn, Georgia. 

Before her death on December 18, 1957, Baker had published countless  newspaper articles in papers around the world and two books. Her first book, I Had to Know, was published in 1951 and chronicles her life up to that point and her conversion to Catholicism and from a Southerner to a "Damyankee" in Vermont. She retired from newspaper writing in 1942. 

She landed her first newspaper job at the Jacksonville Journal while in her late teens. According to the 1919 Jacksonville City Directory the family lived at 1849 Riverside Avenue, and her father worked as a clerk at the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company.

Her next job was at the Birmingham News Age-Herald, "where that great editor Charles A. Fell created a job for me--special New York correspondent." Her contract called for a full-page interview with a celebrity or newsmaker for the Sunday edition.

In her autobiography she tells us she soon moved to NYC and had her pieces appearing not only in the Birmingham paper but also publications in Dallas, Charlotte, Atlanta and Jacksonville. Before long she had national syndication. Baker met H.L. Mencken, who introduced her to fine dining at the 21 Club, downstairs where celebrities ate. "Our table was the mecca of the literati," she declared. Unfortunately, she does not name a single one of them. By this time Mencken had met, but not yet married Sara Haardt, an author and native of Montgomery, Alabama. 

Baker often fails to offer names and dates. For instance, she discusses her childhood and parents, but does not give us their names! We learn them from the New York Times notice of her marriage to automotive executive Howard Coffin on June 2 1937: the late Mr. and Mrs. A. Herbert Baker of Jacksonville, Florida. The parents names also appear in Baker's "Alabama Authors" entry linked in the second paragraph.  Strangely, Baker is not named in Coffin's Wikipedia entry; at any rate the marriage did not last long. He died later that year. Oh, and he's not mentioned in her book, either. She also didn't bother to name her four siblings. 

She wrote two syndicated serial fiction stories, "Sallie's Temptations" and "Mr. and Mrs. Sallie" The first installment of "Sallie's Temptations" can be found in the Carbon County [Montana] News on January 8, 1925. Syndication to various newspapers had begun the previous year. Like so many such serials, neither was ever published in book form.

Baker had four husbands: William H. Oates, William H. Kellig, Jr., Howard E. Coffin and Roy Leonard Patrick.

Her first book, dedicated to her fourth husband, is mainly a record of two things: all the celebrities she interviewed during her newspaper career and her search for spiritual fulfillment that ends in Catholicism. One chapter also chronicles her battles with a mysterious illness in 1946. All well and good, but for my purposes very disappointing. There is little mention of her time in Birmingham or even the years she spent in Jacksonville. There is no mention at all of Sara Henderson Hay. 

I have not read her novel, Our Hearts Are Restless, published in 1955. You can find her first book at the Internet Archive. 

So my search for information about Hay in New York in the 1930's was fruitless. I did learn more about Baker, but she did not seem to be much interested in giving many details of her life before her conversion. Her connection with Alabama is also pretty slight. Another thing I found frustrating was the lack of information I found in census and other records about her parents and siblings. 

That "Alabama Authors" entry on Baker gives as sources "files" at the Birmingham Public Library and the Alabama Department of Archives and History. Research at those two places might produced more details. I was also unable to view her obituary in the New York Times; it's behind their paywall. 

Oh, well, you never know where these journeys down a rabbit hole will end up....

Published by Appleton-Century-Crofts, 1951

Baker may have been famous in her day, but she's forgotten now. 

G.P. Putnam's Sons, 1955

Source:

Files at Birmingham Public Library; Alabama Department of Archives and History; and from New York Times, December 18, 1957.

Publication(s):

I Had to Know. New York; Appleton Century, 1951.

Our Hearts Are Restless. New York; Putnam, 1955.

Alabama Author: Gwen Bristow

Several states can claim Gwen Bristow including South Carolina, Louisiana, Connecticut, Mississippi, California and Alabama. Let's investigate.

She was born in Marion, South Carolina, on September 16, 1903. Her writing efforts seem to have begun with her reporting of junior high school events to a local newspaper. Since her father Louis Jordan Bristow was a Baptist minister, she began college at Anderson Bible College in that South Carolina town. After a year she transferred to Judson College, a very strict Baptist women's college in Marion, Alabama. Despite her dislike of the rules,, Bristow continued her artistic development. She directed and played men's roles in two plays, and in 1923 was voted "Most Original" by her junior class peers. 

Upon graduating the following year, Bristow began working odd jobs so she could study journalism at Columbia University in New York City. She only spent a year in the Big Apple, however. Bristow worked a summer job at the New Orleans Times-Picayune and when the paper offered her a permanent post; she took it. At first she lived with her parents on the grounds of Southern Baptist Hospital, where her father had become Superintendent. 

Bristow spent much of the 1920's covering a range of events for the newspaper, including crimes and the great flood of 1927. She also wrote obituaries of prominent people and interviewed actors visiting the city. She also wrote poetry during this period and in 1926 published a small collection, The Alien and Other Poems. 

While covering a murder trial Bristow met fellow journalist Bruce Manning, and they eloped on January 14, 1929, to avoid objections from her Baptist family to Manning's Catholicism. They moved into an apartment on 627 Ursuline Street in the French Quarter. 

The couple soon collaborated on a novel, The Invisible Host, published by the Mystery League in 1930. From 1930 until 1933 the League published 30 hardcover mysteries that were inexpensive but featured striking Art Deco covers. The early titles--The Invisible Host was sixth in the series--sold for a quarter. I presume that because of the Great Depression the publisher folded after issuing only one title in 1933. 

The plot of the book will be familiar to anyone who's read Agatha Christie's And Then There Were None or seen any of the film versions. Eight people known to each other receive anonymous invitations to attend dinner at a New Orleans penthouse. As the unseen host informs them over radio, the place is booby-trapped, and they will all die before morning. Complications ensue. 

The Invisible Host was soon adapted into a Broadway play called The Ninth Guest by prolific playwright Owen Davis. A 1934 film adaptation used the same title as the play. Christie is presumed not to have read or seen these materials before writing her famous novel, which was published in November 1939.

For the next two years Bristow and Manning continued writing together and produced three more books: The Gutenberg Murders (1931), The Mardi Gras Murders (1932) and Two and Two Make Twenty-Two (1932). After these four collaborations their writing careers diverged when they moved to Hollywood in 1934.

Manning published one novel, Party Wire, in 1935, and then began working as a screenwriter, director and producer until 1957. He died in 1965. Bristow also wrote some novels on her own, couldn't find a publisher and destroyed the manuscripts. Then she began writing the first of what became three popular Louisiana plantation novels: Deep Summer (1937), The Handsome Road (1938), and This Side of Glory (1940). These works follow two families over several generations. 

Bristow published several more novels before her death in 1980. She also published two memoirs, Gwen Bristow, A Self-Portrait (1941) and From Pigtails to Wedding Bells (1977). I wonder if she covers any of her time at Judson in either of those books. 

Source: Wikipedia

Book jacket for the 1930 first edition as reproduced at Facsimile Dust Jackets LLC

Author Gwen Bristow, author of "Celia Garth." Shown here with Melvin Shortess at her book signing. This photo was probably taken at the Shortess Book Store in New Orleans in 1955. Melvin H. (1909-1975) & Helen T. (1910-1979) Shortess were proprietors of the Shortess Book Store.

Source: Louisiana Digital Library

This novel was first published in 1959. That probably means the caption above has "1955" in error. 

This novel, which appeared in 1937, was the first volume of Bristow's Plantation Trilogy. This paperback edition was published in 1947. 

This 1950 novel was a bestseller, and a film version, with screenplay by Bruce Manning, was released in 1954.

Source: Fantastic Fiction

Some Further Reading, etc. 

Bristow, Gwen. Papers. South Caroliniana Library, University of South Carolina, Columbia.

Dean, Lauren. “Gwen Bristow: Best Selling Author 1903-1980,” New Orleans Historical, accessed July 31, 2020, https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/558

Lowry, Julia B. “Carolina’s Gwen Bristow Finds She’s Obliged to Write!” Columbia State Magazine, November 5, 1950, pp. 6–7.

MacNebb, Betty L. “Gwen Bristow: Carolina’s Best Seller.” South Carolina Magazine 12 (July 1949): 8, 10.

Theriot, Billie J. “Gwen Bristow: A Biography with Criticism of Her Plantation Trilogy.” Ph.D. diss., Louisiana State University, 1994.