Erica Obey makes her EQMM debut with “The Problem of the Vanishing Sopranos,” in our current issue (January/February 2024). The story is a centerpiece of our annual Sherlockian tribute, for it features series character Mary Watson, a librarian who has coded an AI program named Doyle to write mysteries. The adventures of Mary Watson and Doyle take place in the Hudson Valley, which is also the setting for some of Erica’s novels, including the well-received The Curse of the Braddock Brides. In this post, the Fordham University professor gives us a look at how readily the historic stately homes of the Hudson Valley can be made to serve as settings for mysteries. —Janet Hutchings

From Henry Hudson’s lost men playing at ninepins with the Catskill gnomes to the Pine Bush UFO sightings, the Hudson Valley has long had a reputation for being a place where the bounds between realities are thinner. The Headless Horseman rides long after Halloween. White ladies roam the cliff tops, while black submarines plow the great river beneath.

The curtain between past and present is always twitching against the specter of yesteryear. Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny still dust off their ancient costumes to make their appearances at fire department pancake breakfasts. The churches still run craft fairs and penny socials. What’s a penny social, you might ask? It is a kind of silent auction, where you buy quantities of raffle tickets, rather than bidding on items directly, and bid by placing your tickets in bowls for the items you are interested in. The more tickets you place in a bowl, the more likely you are to win.

The most eloquent witnesses of the Hudson Valley’s past are the buildings that still dot the landscape, from the churches that have been repurposed as everything from yoga studios to the home of a radio station to the Odd Fellows’ Hall in Bearsville, outside of Woodstock. Further north, in Cairo, one can still view the giraffe house in the remains of the Catskill Game Farm.  Then there’s the neo-Victorian Doll House on Route 28, which has spawned the dreams of a thousand toy collectors (as well as several unfounded rumors of a strip club). Further down the road, the ersatz totem poles of the Brunel Sculpture Park peek over the trees. Most of the great Borscht Belt resorts, such as the Nevele and Grossinger’s, are just shuttered remains, but a few have found new life as casinos. All of them bear witness to the years when the Catskills provided a respite from New York City for both day trippers taking steamboats up the Hudson and the millionaires who summered in the grand mountain hotels.

The first time I ever hiked in the Catskills, I went up Overlook Mountain and discovered the imposing ruins of the (final) Overlook Hotel. I was immediately hooked on the Catskills—as are so many other hikers. The Overlook Hotel has one of the most checkered histories of all the Catskill grand hotels. It could boast of welcoming President Ulysses S. Grant, but it was never particularly successful and burned to the ground at least twice. When its last proprietors finally gave up hope of making a profit on it, it was leased to the Unity Club, which eventually helped to create the Communist Party of America, putting Woodstock on J. Edgar Hoover’s radar long before the beatniks showed up.

The legend of the Overlook Hotel was also burnished by two books of folklore: The first is the beautifully produced The Land of Rip van Winkle, by the redoubtable Mrs. A.E.P. Searing, who intended it to attract visitors to the hotel, which her husband then owned. The second is a privately published (and very scarce) The Traditions of the Overlook Mountain, edited by Dexter Hawkins, a lawyer and champion of free and independent public education. It is thus ironic that this collection, penned by idle guests on a rainy evening, features such tone-deaf “traditions” as a rock that served as a sacrificial altar and a beautiful Native American oracle who delivered her prophecies from a yellow birch that grew above a cave. You can still see both the rock and the birch if you hike up there today. You can also see more than a few rattlesnakes, so keep an eye out.

The stately homes that line the opposite bank of the river echo the grand hotels on only a slightly lesser scale. But even far more modest buildings have a tale to tell, bearing testament to the lives lived within their walls long after the people have gone. Enclaves such as the town of Jewett and the glassmakers’ houses that gave Glasco Turnpike its name remind us of the industries that thrived alongside the tourism that has always been the Catskills’ life blood. Gingerbread Victorians, hand-hewn log cabins, and the arts and crafts cottages in Byrdcliffe, the historic artists’ colony where I live, all echo with the untold stories that are catnip to any mystery writer. After all, as Jo Walton has said, “The gothic is at heart a romance between a girl and a house.”

Like any mystery lover, I cut my teeth on Agatha Christie. But even before Mrs. Christie came Victoria Holt, Mary Stewart, and Phyllis A. Whitney, complete with their heroines in flimsy dresses fleeing the looming present of . . . A House.  From Ann Radcliffe’s Castle Udolpho to Wuthering Heights, Northanger Abbey and Manderley, the house is often one of the most vivid characters in a Gothic novel.

I write mysteries rather than Gothics, primarily because I agree with Whitney’s laughing assertion that she would never marry one of her brooding, complicated heroes. But it’s no coincidence that Whitney was also an MWA Grandmaster. Mysteries have a lot in common with Gothics – especially houses and the stories they guard. The hand-drawn map of the various exits, staircases, and guest bedrooms is a staple of any Golden Age country house whodunnit. And the list of Christie’s fictional houses alone is almost as long as that in Gothic novels: Styles, End House, the Vicarage, Chimneys and Crooked House, not to mention her own Greenway, which has in turn become the setting of several recent mysteries. Phyllis Richardson has put it aptly: “If du Maurier re-invigorated the Gothic house[…,] Agatha Christie turned it into something of a three-dimensional game-board in which to[…]act out the varied plots of her [stories].” And those stories are as important as the houses themselves. As Tsvetan Todorov argues, the Golden Age mystery novel is first and foremost a story about reading and writing stories, in which the reader and detective join wits against the writer and murderer to unravel the story of the murder itself.  

For those who would prefer to think in less abstruse terms (and really, who wouldn’t?), let just say it’s no surprise that when I moved to the Hudson Valley, my first and enduring love was the buildings that provide a tangible link to the stories of a vanished past. Resorts, tourist traps, stately homes, and abandoned Grange Halls: what they all have in common is that they beckon you, saying “Something happened here. Aren’t you dying to find out what it was?”

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Works Cited

Hawkins, Dexter, The Traditions of Overlook Mountain, Herald Power Press Print, 1873

Richardson, Phyllis. “The ‘Three-Dimensional Game-Board’ of Agatha Christie’s Country Houses.” CrimeReads.com. 11 May 2021

Searing, Mrs. A.E.P., The Land of Rip van Winkle. Putnam, 1884

Todorov, Tsvetan. “The Typology of Detective Fiction,” The Poetics of Prose. Cornell UP, 1977

Walton, Jo. “A Girl and a House: The Gothic Novel,” Tor.com. 24 Sept 2009