Charles Vincent Emerson Starrett was born above his grandfather's bookshop in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.  His father moved the family to Chicago in 1889 where Starrett attended John Marshall High School.  Starrett landed a job as a cub reporter with the Chicago Inter-Ocean in 1905.  When that paper folded two years later he began working for the Chicago Daily News as a crime reporter, a feature writer, and finally a war correspondent in Mexico from 1914 to 1915.  Starrett turned to writing mystery and supernatural fiction for pulp magazines during the 1920s and 1930s.  In 1920, he wrote a Sherlock Holmes pastiche entitled The Adventure of the Unique "Hamlet".   Starrett on at least one occasion said that the press-run was 100 copies, but on others claimed 200; a study of surviving copies by Randall Stock documents 110.  This story involved the detective investigating a missing 1602 inscribed edition of Shakespeare's play Hamlet.   Starrett's most famous work, The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes, was published in 1933. Starrett was one of the founders of The Hounds of the Baskerville (sic), a Chicago chapter of The Baker Street Irregulars.  Starrett's horror/fantasy stories were written primarily for the pulp magazine Weird Tales, and are collected in The Quick and the Dead, (Arkham House, 1965).   His story "Penelope," published in the May 1923 issue of Weird Tales, was also featured in the anthology The Moon Terror (1927) anonymously edited by Farnsworth Wright, and published by the magazine.  Starrett's other writing included poetry, collected in Autolycus in Limbo, (Dutton, 1943), detective novels, such as Murder on 'B' Deck, (Doubleday, 1929, and others).   He had also created his own detective character, Chicago sleuth Jimmie Lavender, whose adventures usually first appeared in the pulp magazine Short Stories.  The name Jimmy Lavender (sic) was that of an actual pitcher for the Chicago Cubs; Starrett wrote to ask the ball player for permission to use his name for a gentleman detective, which the pitcher granted.  The stories are collected in The Case Book of Jimmie Lavender (Gold Label, 1944).  Starrett was a major enthusiast of Welsh writer Arthur Machen and was instrumental in bringing Machen's work to an American audience for the first time.   His influential weekly column "Books Alive" ran in the Chicago Tribune for 25 years.  He also wrote Best Loved Books of the 20th Century, a collection of 52 essays discussing popular works, published in 1955.   Among his film adaptions his 1934 story "Recipe for Murder", first published in Redbook magazine in one installment, was filmed as The Great Hotel Murder by Fox in 1935.  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vincent_Starrett 

Starrett quote:  “When we are collecting books, we are collecting happiness.” 

Wiktionary Word of the Day for December 29:
overmorrow advective
(archaic) On the day after tomorrow. overmorrow noun  (archaic or obsolete)  The day after tomorrow. (obsolete, rare)  Of or relating to the day after tomorrow.    just-so story noun  A story which supposedly explains the beginning or early development of a current state of affairs; a myth, a pourquoi story. (literature)  A story, especially one for children, featuring animals as characters. (social sciences, especially anthropology, philosophy, chiefly derogatory)  An untestable explanation for something, such as a form of behaviour, a biological trait, or a cultural practice.  The English writer Rudyard Kipling, whose series of short stories called Just So Stories (published in book form in 1902) gave rise to the term, was born on December 30, 1865.  https://librariansmuse.blogspot.com  Issue 2891  December 30, 2024