Deloris Florine Stanton Forbes (1923-2013) was an American crime writer. She wrote more than 40 mysteries and many stories under the names Stanton Forbes, Tobias Wells, and DeLoris S. Forbes. She also wrote four books with Helen B. Rydell under the name Forbes Rydell, more gothic suspense than mystery.
Boston University holds some of her papers in its Howard Gotlieb Research Center including novel manuscripts in various stages of completion, personal memorabilia, and correspondence. The collection description offers a list of short story titles and essays, but not where or if they were published.
The only substantive article I found about her work was on Neglected Books, https://neglectedbooks.com/?p=8701, where author Brad Bigelow (https://bradbigelow.com/) waxed enthusiastically about her creative titles and not so much about the actual books.
Forbes lived in central Florida most of her life, where the Orlando Sentinel published an article about her when she was 80 years old and still publishing. https://www.orlandosentinel.com/2003/11/23/veteran-author-has-passion-for-writing/
Under the name Tobias Wells, Forbes published 16 books between 1966 and 1988 about Boston Detective Third Grade Knute Severson. In the early books at least, Severson is an inexperienced young cop partnered with an older officer who investigates and solves the case. Severson serves as narrator, watching a more thoughtful and perceptive colleague and learning from him as Severson develops his own cop instincts.
What Should You Know of Dying? (Doubleday Crime Club, 1967) is the second book in the series and the first in which Severson works with Detective First Grade Rance Benedict. What looked like a tragic accident—a child wandering away from home and ending up suffocated in an old refrigerator—did not add up to Benedict. It was the sort of thing that happened occasionally but Benedict was uneasy about the adults around the child, all of whom had cause to wish him gone.
This is an original if sad story and an early crime fiction novel that highlights just how easily foster children can get lost, mistreated, and overlooked in a system that is far from optimum. See the Jake Hines series (1997-2015) by Elizabeth Gunn and Runner by Tracy Clark (2021) for more on the subject. It’s also one of the early police procedurals that points out how much juggling of caseloads detectives have to do.
Concise and to the point, less than 200 pages, this book isn’t an outstanding work although it isn’t insignificant either. Severson’s immaturity is a little tiresome but the intelligent insightful Benedict and his wife in a wheelchair are interesting innovations in a field where handicapped characters are few and far between. Definitely worth consideration by anyone interested in mid-century police procedurals.