GREENE, Douglas G. 1944-

PERSONAL:

Born September 24, 1944, in Middletown, CT; son of George Louis and Margaret Elsie (Chindahl) Greene; married Sandra Virginia Stangland, August 13, 1966; children: Eric, Katherine. Ethnicity: "Caucasian." Education: University of Southern Florida, B.A., 1966; University of Chicago, M.A. 1967, Ph.D., 1972. Politics: Democrat. Religion: Episcopalian. Hobbies and other interests: Book collecting, walking.

ADDRESSES:

Home—627 New Hampshire Ave., Norfolk, VA 23508-2132. Office—Department of History, Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA 23529-0084. Agent—Phyllis Westberg, Harold Ober Associates, 425 Madison Ave., New York, NY 10017. E-mail—dgreene@odu.edu.

CAREER:

University of Montana, Missoula, instructor in history, 1970-71; Old Dominion University, Norfolk, VA, professor, 1971-83, director of Institute for Humanities, 1983-99, professor of history, 1999—. Crippen & Landru Books, publisher, 1994—.

MEMBER:

Mystery Writers of America.

WRITINGS:

(With Peter E. Hanff) Bibliographia Oziana: A Concise Bibliographical Checklist of the Oz Books by L. Frank Baum and His Successors, International Wizard of Oz Club (San Francisco, CA), 1976, revised edition, 1988.

(With Michael Patrick Hearn) W. W. Denslow, introduction by Patricia Denslow Eykyn, Clarke Historical Library (Mount Pleasant, MI), 1976.

John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, Otto Penzler (New York, NY), 1995.

EDITOR

(And author of introduction) Diaries of the Popish Plot: Being the Diaries of Israel Tonge, Sir Robert Southwell, John Joyne, Edmund Warcup, and Thomas Dangerfield; and including Titus Oates's "A True Narrative of the Horrid Plot" (1679), Scholars' Facsimiles and Reprints (Delmar, NY), 1977.

(Author of introduction) The Meditations of Lady Elizabeth Delaval: Written between 1662 and 1671, Surtees Society (Durham, England), 1978.

(And author of introduction) John Dickson Carr, The Door to Doom, and Other Detections, Harper (New York, NY), 1980.

(And author of introduction) John Dickson Carr, The Dead Sleep Lightly, Doubleday (New York, NY), 1983.

(With James E. Haff) Ruth Plumly Thompson, The Wizard of Way-Up and Other Wonders, International Wizard of Oz Club (San Francisco, CA), 1985.

(With Robert C. S. Adey) Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories, International Polygonics (New York, NY), 1987.

(And author of introduction) The Collected Short Fiction of Ngaio Marsh, International Polygonics (New York, NY), 1989, revised edition, 1991.

(And author of introduction) John Dickson Carr, Fell and Foul Play, International Polygonics (New York, NY), 1991.

(And author of introduction) John Dickson Carr, Merrivale, March, and Murder, International Polygonics (New York, NY), 1991.

(And author of introduction) Detection by Gaslight: Fourteen Victorian Detective Stories, Dover (Mineola, NY), 1997.

(And author of introduction) Classic Mystery Stories, Dover Publications (Mineola, NY), 1999.

(And author of introduction) L. T. Meade and Robert Eustace, The Detections of Miss Cusack, Battered Silicon Dispatch Box (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1998.

(And author of introduction) R. Austin Freeman, The Dead Hand and Other Uncollected Stories, Battered Silicon Dispatch Box (Toronto, Ontario, Canada), 1999.

(And author of section prefaces) John Dickson Carr, Grand Guignol (in Japanese), [Tokyo, Japan], 1999.

SIDELIGHTS:

Historian and educator Douglas G. Greene has established himself as an authority on mystery writer John Dickson Carr, a master of the sub-genre known as the "locked room" or impossible mystery. Greene has been instrumental in gaining a popular readership for Carr. He has edited and written introductions for several of Carr's books, and produced the first biography of Carr.

Greene graduated from the University of South Florida in 1966 and attended the University of Chicago, where he received his Ph.D. His doctoral thesis was on England's first Earl of Anglesey. Subsequent scholarly works focused on editions of seventeenth-century British historical texts.

In 1980 Greene began his successful involvement with mystery fiction when he issued the first of his critically respected editions of John Dickson Carr, The Door to Doom, followed in 1983 by The Dead Sleep Lightly.

Greene's next edition, in collaboration with Robert C. S. Adey, was the mystery anthology Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories. This volume, which includes twenty-seven literary crime stories, received strong praise from Edward D. Hoch in Armchair Detective for its admirable scope. In 1991 he published two more Carr editions, Fell and Foul Play and Merrivale, March, and Murder.

In 1994 Greene launched Crippen & Landru Publishers, an imprint devoted to short crime stories. In its first ten years, the company published nearly fifty titles. Its first project was "Speak of the Devil," a radio serial by Carr that had been broadcast in 1941 but had not been published. The next year Greene's extensive research on Carr culminated in his well-received biography John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles. This biography, the first on its subject, was warmly welcomed by Carr fans and aficionados of detective fiction. For the book, Greene had the cooperation of Carr's widow and access to the author's private papers. He also conducted interviews with Carr's children and many of the author's acquaintances, and incorporated readings of all of Carr's published work. Reviewers for Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, and Choice all commended the biography's comprehensive research and critical analysis. "Truly a definitive work," remarked J. R. Cox in Choice.

Greene once told CA: "My work over the past few years has dealt with the Golden Age of Detective Fiction, when mystery novels and short stories were an elegant entertainment; when fictional corpses were found in the library, stabbed with an oriental dagger and surrounded by a myriad of cryptic clues; when aristocratic amateur sleuths always showed up the dullards at Scotland Yard; when all the clues were given to the reader at the same time the detective discovered them; when the detective story was, in John Dickson Carr's famous phrase, 'The Grandest Game in the World.'"

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Armchair Detective, summer, 1988, Edward D. Hoch, review of Death Locked In: An Anthology of Locked Room Stories, pp. 326, 328; spring, 1991, p. 208; winter, 1992, p. 35; spring, 1995, p. 135; fall, 1995, pp. 382, 444.

Booklist, December 15, 1987, p. 676; March 1, 1995, p. 1174.

Choice, October, 1995, J. R. Cox, review of John Dickson Carr: The Man Who Explained Miracles, p. 292.

Kirkus Reviews, February 1, 1995, pp. 129-130.

Library Journal, February 15, 1995, review of John Dickson Carr, p. 156.

New York Times Book Review, October 9, 1988, p. 36.

Publishers Weekly, January 30, 1995, review of John Dickson Carr, p. 96.

Washington Post Book World, March 26, 1995, p. 7.

Wilson Library Bulletin, December, 1980, p. 294.