In 1942, Lillian McCue was forty years old and stuck in the role of faculty wife. Her husband George was a professor of English at Colorado College, and the couple had no children. McCue herself had two master’s degrees, from Columbia and Harvard, plus years of New York City teaching experience, but Colorado schools had told her that they had no jobs for a married woman amidst the widespread unemployment of the Great Depression. In an oral history recorded with McCue in 1988, her description of the late 1930s focused largely on faculty gossip and amateur theater.1
On a visit back to New York in 1945, McCue learned that a writer she had admired years earlier was producing nothing and begging his friends for money. When she lamented that he had “showed so much promise,” her brother replied that, until recently, her legacy might have been described in much the same way.2
Years later, McCue would say of herself: “I was practically born a detective-story fan and hardly remember a time when I was not addicted.”3 This deep knowledge of the genre led to a realization that changed the course of her life. While chatting with Prof. Frank Krutzke, one of her husband’s colleagues, she noted that James Boswell’s 1791 biography of Dr. Samuel Johnson portrayed the same dynamic that Edgar Allan Poe and Arthur Conan Doyle had established in their genre-defining mystery stories. Dr. Johnson was the eccentric genius, full of tics, prejudices, and razor-sharp observations. Boswell was the admiring, sometimes exasperated sidekick and narrator.
McCue had been writing poems and other pieces since girlhood, so she decided to try writing a short story in Boswell’s voice about Dr. Johnson solving a mystery, integrating passages from Boswell’s Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides.4 The result—“The Second Sight of Dr. Sam: Johnson”—was a bit fabulous. McCue then wove a case for Dr. Johnson around an actual crime from London in 1786, the theft of the royal seal from the attorney general’s home. Using the pen name Lillian de la Torre, an abbreviation of her full name, she submitted this tale to Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, where it was published in the November 1943 issue under the title “The Great Seal of England.”
Lillian McCue thus invented a new sub-genre of detective fiction—the historical whodunit—and embarked on a new career. She wasn’t the first author to set mystery stories in the past; beginning in 1911, Melville Davisson Post had written almost two dozen tales about Uncle Abner, a justice-seeking sage in rural western Virginia before the U.S. Civil War. But McCue was the first writer to build classic mystery plots around actual historical people and events. Today this is a popular category within the genre. Authors have made detectives out of Alexander the Great, Elizabeth I, Theodore Roosevelt, and young Agatha Christie, as well as creating fictional sleuths to interact with historical figures.
McCue’s own term for her work was “histo-detector.” She went about “the solving of hitherto unexplained mysteries of bygone times” in two ways.5 In such books as Elizabeth Is Missing (1945) and The Heir of Douglas (1952), McCue retold controversies of past centuries, using novelistic techniques to recreate scenes from legal testimony and other sources. She presented what she believed were the best explanations of what had really happened. (The current publisher of those books continues to market them as “definitive.”)
McCue’s most popular mysteries, however, were her “Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector” short stories, which she presented as fiction “embroidered upon the fabric of history.”6 For these tales, McCue found inspiration in events of Dr. Johnson’s Britain, but she changed historical details as needed to produce entertaining whodunits. In some cases, she took intriguing people from other periods, such as forger William Henry Ireland and the Tichborne claimant, and created fictional versions of them for Johnson to investigate. In these four volumes, McCue took care to tell readers how she had contradicted the historical record.
Lillian McCue found lasting success as a writer.7 Four times, she won the Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine award for best story of the year. She visited Hollywood to consult on projects, and her play Goodbye, Miss Lizzie Borden was adapted into an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. In 1979 McCue’s writing colleagues honored her with a term as president of the Mystery Writers of America. McCue continued to come up with cases for Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, into the 1980s—a forty-year career that started after age forty.
- Oral history of Lillian Bueno de la Torre McCue [sic—her actual name was Lillian de la Torre Bueno McCue], collected by Judith R. Finley, 9 May 1988, transcript, p. 6. Transcript available at: https://digitalccbeta.coloradocollege.edu/pid/coccc:29255/datastream/OBJ. Recordings and related material available at: https://digitalccbeta.coloradocollege.edu/pid/coccc:3072
- Oral history, p. 8.
- Bruce Lambert, “Lillian de la Torre Is Dead at 91; Wrote Mysteries Based on History,” New York Times, 20 Sept 1993, section B, p. 9.
- Lambert.
- Lambert.
- “Notes on Historical Background,” Dr. Sam Johnson, Detector, first edition (New York: A. A. Knopf, 1946); current digital edition (New York: Mysterious Press, 2018).
- For a full list of McCue’s writing, see the finding aid for the Lillian de la Torre Papers, Ms 0346, Colorado College, Manuscript Collections.
