Polly Anne Colver Harris (1908-1991) is listed in the WorldCat author identification database variously as Polly Anne Colver Harris, Anne Colver, Polly Anne Colver Graff, Polly Anne Colver, and Colver Harris. According to the Gale Literature Resource Center, she wrote 18 children’s stories and biographies, some with her husband Stewart Graff, under the names Anne Colver and Polly Anne Graff, three volumes of historical fiction for adults under the name Anne Colver, and three mysteries for adults under the name Colver Harris.
Her second mystery Going to St. Ives (Macrae-Smith, 1936; Coachwhip, 2020) is based on the children’s rhyme, quoted here from The Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes (Oxford University Press, 1997):
As I was going to St. Ives, I met a man with seven wives, Each wife had seven sacks, Each sack had seven cats, Each cat had seven kits: Kits, cats, sacks, and wives, How many were there going to St. Ives?
In Colver Harris’s story St. Ives is the Cathedral of St. Ives in Baltimore. The traveler going to St. Ives was Miss Belinda Stebbins, head of the English department at exclusive Maplewood College for young women, who was seeking the church garden to allow her cat Emma out of her carrier after a long train ride that left both woman and cat exhausted. As she approached the cathedral, Miss Stebbins saw a young man run down the steps leading to the front door of the church and without pausing dash across the street, only to be struck by an auto and tossed to the pavement. The shock of the accident made Miss Stebbins feel faint and she sought entrance to the cathedral, where she could pass out in privacy.
When she recovered consciousness, Miss Stebbins realized that she was not alone in the nave. The man kneeling near the altar at first seemed to be in prayer but she quickly realized he was dead. The police entered the church just then; as she stepped forward to speak to them, she was struck from behind, rendering her senseless for the second time in a half hour.
She awakened in the hospital to learn the staff there think her name is Mrs. Morse and that she fell. Then a strange man visits her in the night to tell her to keep quiet about what happened in the cathedral. Thus begins a wild few days in which Miss Stebbins is considered a prime suspect in the murder of the man in the cathedral. Her story that she was at the cathedral to allow her cat out of her carrier did not ring true to the police, none of whom were animal lovers. A journalist’s unflattering photo of Miss Stebbins clutching Emma made the front pages of a number of newspapers with the caption “The Cat Lady.”
This is the second Detective Timothy Fowler mystery. He and Miss Stebbins team up to get to the bottom of the complicated story and to get her off the Baltimore police’s suspect list. An entertaining read until the final chapters, where the logic around the resolution of the murder is hard to follow.