Theodora Du Bois (1890-1986) was born Theodora Brenton Eliot McCormick in Brooklyn. She wrote poetry and plays from an early age and attended the Dartmouth Summer School for Drama in 1916. She co-authored Amateur and Educational Dramatics in 1917.
She married Delafield Du Bois in 1918 and continued writing short stories and plays. Her first published short story, “Thursday and the King and Queen,” was published in Women’s Home Companion in 1920 and she published short stories throughout the 1920s. Her first novel, The Devil’s Spoon, was published in 1930. Twenty of her detective stories were published between 1941 and 1954, and many were translated for international publication.
Du Bois encountered professional difficulties during the 1950s. Seeing Red (1954), the 19th book about Dr. Jeffrey and Anne McNeill, disparaged the House Un-American Activities Committee, active at the time. Both Du Bois and Doubleday were criticized heavily and Doubleday did not publish another McNeill mystery, although Du Bois continued writing. Her papers are archived at the City University of New York, and a detailed biography can be found on the site. Mike Grost wrote a lengthy essay about Du Bois here: http://mikegrost.com/tdubois.htm.
In her third book, Death Tears a Comic Strip (Houghton Mifflin, 1939), the McNeills are visiting friends on Staten Island, when Penelope Shephard, a neighbor, dashes in, pleading for medical assistance for her stepfather Bigelow Dowd. Jeff McNeill responds but Dowd dies unexpectedly after surgery for appendicitis. Dowd had not gotten along with his stepchildren Penelope and Arthur, and their mother was pulled between them so they were not devastated. McNeill was investigating Dowd’s cause of death when his equally unpleasant brother Lewis Dowd arrived. Soon after, Lewis Dowd was going through his brother’s papers when he was shot through the library window; neither of the stepchildren or the widow had an alibi.
The conflict within the Dowd home was well known and it is inevitable that suspicion fall on the Shepards. The McNeills are pulled into the investigation, first because of the medical questions surrounding Bigelow’s death and then because Anne McNeill inadvertently provides crucial information about the whereabouts of the family when Lewis Bigelow is shot.
Some of the medical information is questionable, but perhaps that is due to the intervening 80 years. Most of the forensics and the logic supporting the police conclusions are sound, if personalities are not considered. The Shepards had a great motive—Bigelow Dowd made their lives miserable—but they were collectively so ineffectual I couldn’t see how they could have carried out one murder, much less two. The servants seemed much more likely to me. In the end the actual perpetrator was a surprise, Du Bois did a great job of diverting reader attention.
This series must have been popular, since it has 19 books, but reprints are rare. This particular title is not mentioned in discussions of her best work, so perhaps it is not the one to start with, although availability always is a factor in my selection process. Possibly some of the series will be selected for re-issue by one of the mystery classics reprint houses. An author worth further investigation.