The C.I.D. of Dexter Drake - w/ Dust Jacket!

by Elsa Barker

302 pages, Dexter Drake organizes a Criminal Investigation Department in connection with the Government Secret Service, the workings of which are chronicled by his assistant Howard

Hardcover

Published January 1, 1929

About the author

American author Elsa Barker was born in 1869, in Leicester, Vermont, to Albert G. and Louise Marie Barker. Her first jobs were as a shorthand reporter, a teacher, and a newspaper writer. In 1901, she was the associate editor of the Consolidated Encyclopedia Library. From 1904-1905, she worked as a lecturer for the New York Board of Education, and from 1909-1910, she served on the editorial staff of Hamptons magazine.

Throughout her life, Barker contributed poems, short stories, and articles to various magazines. Her twenty-year career as a novelist began in 1909 with The Son of Mary Bethel. Her first volume of poetry, The Frozen Grail and Other Poems (1910), followed soon after. In 1942, Barker won the Lola Ridge Award for her poem "The Iron Age." She also achieved success with three books of "automatic" writing: Letters from a Living Dead Man (1914), War Letters from the Living Dead Man (1915), and Last Letters From the Living Dead Man (1919). In this trilogy, Barker claimed to channel the words of a Los Angeles lawyer named David P. Hutch, who died in 1912. Other publications include a one-act labor play, The Scab, which was produced in New York and Boston in 1904-06, and Stories from the New Testament for Children (1911).

Barker lived most of her adult life in New York City. From 1910 to 1914, she lived in Paris and London; at some point during her residence, she apparently studied under Carl Jung. She also lived on the French Riviera from 1928-1930. When she died on August 31, 1954, she was one of the last surviving charter members of the Poetry Society of America.