One of the themes of the blog this year has been bringing attention to writers who have faded into obscurity and whose work has been forgotten. No other writer fits this description more than Carolynn Catherine O’Shea. Even many of the most knowledgeable pulp scholars know little about her. When I asked Mark Finn for information while researching this article, he told me he had never heard of her. That was when I knew I had my work cut out for me.

Lynn, as she preferred to be called, knew (and in some cases worked with) many of the major writers of the pulp era, and was an accomplished author herself. This was before she became a screenwriter in Hollywood. Blacklisted in the early 1950s, she turned to writng crime novels under a variety of male psuedonyms. Later in her life, she took bit parts in movies and television shows before withdrawing completely.

Unfortunately, hard facts about her life and writing are scarce and are mixed with a great deal of conjecture. I’ll try to separate the reality from the myths in this post. I’ll start with the facts I’ve been able to verify and then deal with the conjecture. I’ll list all my sources at the end of the post.

The Facts (Such as They Are)

Carolynn Catherine O’Shea was the fourth of six children, all girls. There is some disagreement about when she was born. Some sources say 1900. A few others say 1902.  I’m going to go with 1900 because it better fits the timeline of other facts that can be verified.

Her father was a first generation Irish immigrant. Not much is known about her mother other than she was reputed to have Romany blood. This is consistent with what little we know about the family during the Great Depression.

Her parents had a small farm in western Missouri. Her father, being Irish, grew potatoes, some of which he sold at the local farmers market. The rest he let ferment. Needless to say, this got him in trouble during Prohibition, and he ended up in  Leavenworth.  He died there of heart failure. Lynn helped her mother run the farm. Her older sisters were married by this time. One of those marriages may have involved a shotgun. Lynn was widowed when her first husband  died in the influenza epicdemic of 1919.

It was druing this period that Lynn began reading widely in the pulps. She may have submitted a few stories to Weird Tales and possibly Black Mask, but life on a potato farm didn’t leave her time and energy for literary pursuits. Any writing she did during those years has long since been lost.

The O’shea ladies struggled along for a few  years and managed to keep their heads above water until the stock market crash of 1929. That was when their local bank failed. Before it failed, though, it foreclosed on the O’Shea farm. They were deeply in debt. Before the bank could take possession of  the farm, it failed. Lynn, her mother, and her two sisters managed to hang on a little while longer. What the bank didn’t take from them, the Dust Bowl did.

By 1932, they were on the road. They joined the great migration John Steinbeck wrote about in The Grapes of Wrath. Lynn’s mother, Matilda, however, was no Ma Joad. She took a position with a small circus as a fortune teller, calling  herself Madame Petrova. Lynn and her sisters sold tickets and worked the concession stand. Circus life was precarious at best, but they might have been able to survive until times imporoved if the youngest sister hadn’t seduced one of the clowns.

By this time Lynn had begun to place a few stories in some of the better paying pulps, usually under make psuedonyms because the patriarchy was still in control of publishing in those days. She was bringing in enough money to support her mother. Her younger sisters left about this time. One may have stayed with the clown. We don’t know. The other simply vanished from the record.

Matilda’s fortune telling days were just about over, anyway. In early 1935 she was diagnosed with lung cancer. She had smoked since her early teens, and the habit finally caught up with her.

After cremating her mother and spreading her ashes in the Red River, Lynn lived is a series of boarding houses. It’s been established that she lived in Paris and Clarkesville, both in Texas, and possibly Bonham, also in Texas. She never stayed in one place long. She once told a Hollywood reporter that a single woman earning her living by writing for “those kinds of magazines” wasn’t welcome in respectable rooming houses. The landladies, and they were always landladies, neverr landlords, suspected her of being a woman of ill repute. She was almost arrested on prostitution charges in Hugo, Oklahoma when her landlady saw her out on a date.

So Lynn set her sights on Hollywood. Accounts of how she broke into the business conflict, but she was soon writing for the major studios. She worked there, doing rewrites on studio scripts and writing original scripts for rasio shows such as The Innner Sanctum and Lights Out. She also continued to write for the pulps and continued her correspondences with well-known writers.

She was blacklisted in Hollywood when she refused to give up names of her friends who might be communists. We know she wrote crime novels under a variety of pen names. Her last script (under a psuedonym) was an unproduced Twilight Zone episode, “My Dear, My Dead”, about a young woman who falls in love with a young man she meets in the park one night who turns out to be a zombie. Supposedly, this episode was in preproduction when the studio heads canceled it. I have been unable to confirm that this episode contributed to the cancelation of The Twilight Zone.

Lynn did have a small comeback in the 1960s, but as an actress, not a writer. She had bit parts in shows such as 77 Sunset Strip, Big Valley, F Troop, and My Mother, the Car. Lynn was a master of accents, sort of a proto-Meryll Streep, and she could mimic her mother’s Romany accent perfectly.

Sometime in the early 1970s, not later than January 1972, when her bungalow was found empty, she dropped out of sight. No one is for sure what happened to her. A popular rumor in Hollywood at the time was that she had gone into Death Valley and succumbed to the heat. This was the era when celebrities were doing hallucinogenic drugs in the desert, a la Jim Morrison. So it’s not out of the realm of possibility.

Conjecture (The Interesting Stuff)

Aside from a few stories published with her byline, no one is for sure just what stories Carolynn Catherine O’Shea wrote or for what pulps. Bibliographers have been arguing about it for years. The situation is complicated because on at least one occasion, she wrote under a house name that several writers shared, including Henry Kuttner. This was in 1938.

We do know the following stories are hers.

“The Widow Downstairs”, a horror story published in the May 1939 issue of Terror Tales. It was inspired by Lynn’s borading house in Paris. She later stated the events, which involved necrophilia, were  based on a true story.

The final issue of Five Detective Aces saw her private eye Schmidt Flanagan make his print debut. He had  already appeared on radio in Flanagan’s Follies, which was canceled after five episodes. The title made it sound more like a situation comedy than a hardboiled detective show, which was probably the reason it didn’t last. Flanagan would return in the late fifties and early sixties in three paperback originals that were only published in England.

May 1938 Weird Tales saw the poem “The Skeleton Inside Me”.

Lynn drew on her mother’s Romany heritage and working as a fortune teller in a circus in at least three stories: “Crystal Ball of Death” (Dime Mystery, March 1938), “The Tarot Says You Die at Midnight” (Gypsy Stories, October 1939), and “The Lines in Your Palm Read Death” (Fortune Teller Tales, June 1940). Those last two pulps didn’t last long, and a complete run of Fortune Teller Tales doesn’t appear to exist. If they had survived even another year or two, perhaps we would have a much larger body of work by Carolynn Catherine O’Shea under her won name.

I’ll provide a complete list of known Carolynn Catherine O’Shea’s known publications at the end of this post. It’s already long, and I want to discuss her correspondence.

Lynn was a very private person, and while she wrote a number of letters, she usually requested that they be returned. No one is sure why this is the case. Consequently, we don’t have much of her correspondence. It was either destroyed by her heirs or in a few cases, sold when she desperately needed money.

One of her correspondents was H. P. Lovecraft. All of those letters have been lost. She also wrote to Henry S. Whitehead, Seabury Quinn, and Carroll John Daly. Possibly Hugh B. Cave and Earl Stanley Gardner.

But the correspondent of the greatest interest to me was Robert E, Howard. Lynn carried on an active correspondence with Howard from 1933 until Howard’s death in 1936. Supposedly, Howard told Lynn that his relationship with Novalyne had been broken off. When Lynn heard this, she reached out to Howard, supposedly wanting to take Novalyne’s place in his life. It seems she had had a crush on Bob for several years.

I hadn’t heard any of this before I came across it in Justin Case’s memoir A Pulp Writer in Hollywood, so I checked with John Bullard, editor of the Howard letters. He confirmed that the letters not only were real, but they still exist. At least they are believed to exist. Lynn sold them to a fan in 1957 when funds were scarce. They are in the hands of a private collector. John declined to give his (or her) name. Paul Herman, who recovered Howard’s writing table last year, is trying to get access to them. If he is successful, John said he will be editing an additional volume of Howard letters, focusing solely on Howard’s correspondence with Carolynn Catherine O’Shea. There are that many.

As for the other runors surrounding Lynn, I can find no evidence that she ever had an affair with Humphrey Bogart or Raymond Chandler. She did work with Chandler on a movie that was never made. What documentation that still exists suggests they never even worked together in person. She would write the first draft and he would polish. The actor intended for the lead role was invovled in a scandal (something about a producer’s wife and no clothes, or maybe it was his daughter), and the project was killed.

The rumors that when she disappeared, Lynn had run off to join a nudist colony are certainly not true. She was a very modest woman who never wore anything that could be considered risque.

So tonight, if you’re so inclinced, raise a glass to the memory of Carolynn Catherine O’Shea, born today, April Fool’s Day, 2024.

Sources:

All information in this post I pulled out of my butt.