Frederick Irving Anderson

Frederick Irving Anderson (1877-1947) was an American journalist and short story writer, born in Illinois.

Biography.

He was a prolific contributor to The Saturday Evening Post and other magazines. Anderson began publishing fiction around 1910, before World War I and was still at it up to the time of his death in 1947.

He married Helen de Zouche and retired after she died in 1937 to Vermont. There are four book collections of his short stories. But much of his work has never been published in book form. His character the Infallible Godahl is a self-proclaimed master criminal whose Watson is the writer Oliver Armiston. Both Godahl and the female jewel thief Sophie Lang manage to outwit the New York detective Deputy Parr.

Frederick Irving Anderson has shown perhaps the greatest mastery of the American short detective story . . . in ingenuity, command of plot, and the carefully integrated backgrounds of his work. So wrote the great mystery critic and historian, Howard Haycraft, in 1941. Ellery Queen added that his style is rich in detail and double-rich in expression.

Many of his stories take place in New York City during the 1920s and the 1930s, and they feature the manhunter Deputy Parr and the; extinct author, Oliver Armiston, who stopped writing ingenious crime stories because criminals were copying his gimmicks.